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 is co-founder of Groundswell Educational Films and co-Executive Producer of The Robben Island Singers Project. She is also principle of Amdur Spitz & Associates, Inc., a national agency providing issue-oriented marketing communications, public relations, program planning, and video production services to museums, universities, foundations, and other nonprofit, government and business clients since 1992. She has utilized her keen marketing, non-profit management and entrepreneurial skills to design and develop new non-profit organizations or programs and to develop award-winning, integrated communications campaigns. Jennifer brings her experience and expertise in communicating issues related to education, the arts, the environment, housing, and community development to Groundswell’s public education projects.