Lights! Camera! Action!

In 2001, Brooklyn Friends School and its students were featured with Alanis Morissette and other celebrities in a public service announcement for Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The video runs five minutes, and it consists of six PSAs which range in length from 60 to 10 seconds. To learn more about Teaching Tolerance, A Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, please visit tolerance.org.

The PSAs are great, both for their timeless message and for revisiting one moment at BFS.

2001 Tolerance.org PSAs featuring BFS and its Students from Brooklyn Friends School on Vimeo.


Interesting to note that only four days before the film shoot, Alanis Morissette was honored for her contributions to promoting tolerance through the arts when she received the Global Tolerance Award, given by the Friends of the United Nations at a ceremony in New York City on December 11, 2001.

The 2001 BFS press release [revised, 2013]:
Lights! Camera! Action!
More than 50 BFS students became actors with BFS as the set on Saturday, December 15, for a national campaign about Tolerance, a Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Alabama created with Thompson Becker International, a Boston-based public relations and marketing firm. Director Eric Juhola led a 27-member film crew to create the PSAs. Alanis Morissette is an integral part of the PSAs, as are the celebrities Terry Kinney, Joshua Jackson, Clea Duvall, Delilah Cotto and Peter Sarsgaard, some of whom appeared in The Laramie Project, which tells the story of the hate-crime murder of Matthew Shepard. This national campaign has been distributed to 2,000 radio stations, 400 television stations across the nation, and will be distributed on the internet through a joint agreement with Yahoo.com.