About Groundswell Educational Films

Groundswell has developed a social change model that combines documentary films with media, live events, advocacy, and persistence, to leverage real change. The Return of Navajo Boy film and advocacy project is a good example. Organized around a Navajo grandmother’s wish for environmental justice, it has helped leverage federal legislation to achieve tangible results in the Navajo Nation: compensation for Navajo uranium miners, a 5-year plan to clean up radiation from abandoned uranium mines on the reservation, and now a $7.5 million allocation in 2011 removed the radioactive waste from the Navajo grandmother’s own backyard.

We’re excited to bring this social activism model to the good food world!

Jeff Spitz

Jeff Spitz is an Emmy Award winner who creates original documentaries for broadcast on PBS and cable. His credits as a writer/producer/director include: The Return of Navajo Boy, a one-hour documentary that reunited a Navajo family, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and has screened and won awards at film festivals internationally; From the Bottom Up, a one-hour, national PBS public affairs report on community activism; The Roosevelt Experiment, a half-hour documentary for ABC-TV telling the story of an integrated college in a segregated city; and America’s Libraries Change Lives, celebrating the immigrant experience in America’s public libraries, narrated by Whoopi Goldberg. A California native and graduate of UCLA, Spitz teaches documentary filmmaking at Columbia College Chicago.

Jennifer Amdur Spitz

Jennifer Amdur Spitz, Co-Producer of Food Patriots, is a businesswoman whose entrepreneurial spirit and social conscience frequently intersect. She founded Amdur Spitz & Associates (ASA) in 1992, a strategic communications and public relations firm that supports makers of change who are doing something that will better their communities or even the world at large. Clients are primarily innovative tech companies, large nonprofits or coalitions, and socially responsible businesses. From research to implementation, ASA works with clients to create brands and communication campaigns that change hearts and minds in the fields of education, environment, urban planning, food, health promotion, and arts and culture and more.

Groundswell

In 2000, Jennifer and Jeff co-founded Groundswell Educational Films, NFP. Through Groundswell they make artistic documentary films about social issues and create public engagement campaigns that cross cultures and stimulate transformative conversation. Food Patriots, released 2/2014, is their latest film and for the first time the filmmakers turned the camera on themselves. Food Patriots is available for screenings for community organizations, faith groups, schools, college campuses, and business settings.