Arts & Culture

2315 Durant Ave,Berkeley CA 94704

11 November, 2021

Description

David Fenton What do Yoko Ono, Meryl Streep, Mario Batali, Barbara Walters, Allen Ginsberg, Abby Hoffman, and Nelson Mandela have in common ? They all have worked with David Fenton. David will discuss some of these connections and more at our Arts & Culture program on Wednesday, November 3, at 7 p.m. He will share highlights of his fascinating personal history — including his stint as a teenage photojournalist documenting the turbulent years of anti-Vietnam protests — and explain what led to his successful career using public relations to achieve social change. Dozens of David’s dramatic black and white photos, along with commentary, appear in his book Shots: An American Photographer’s Journal 1967-1972. Tom Hayden wrote the forward. (A few copies will be available for sale at the event.) Other early entries on David’s resume include working for Rolling Stone magazine and co-produced the No Nukes concerts in New York City, featuring the likes of Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, and James Taylor. In 1982, when public relations campaigns for nonprofit organizations were virtually non-existant, David founded Fenton Communications to publicize the environment, public health, and human rights. Among his firm’s best-known projects are promoting MoveOn.org, increasing demand for organic food, representing Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, saving swordfish from extinction with a coalition of top chefs, and working with Al Gore and the United Nations on climate change. PR Week named David “one of the 100 most influential P.R. people,” and the National Journal dubbed him “the Robin Hood of public relations.” He has co-founded three nonprofit organizations: Environmental Media Services, which coordinated communications activities for environmental groups; New Economy Communications, which works on human rights issues; and Death Penalty Information Center, which publicizes mistaken sentencing and racial bias in death penalty cases. These days, however, David’s top priority is preserving a livable planet. “If we don’t act quickly to solve climate change, we won’t get to solve the other issues that we care about,” David told students studying public relations at the University of Florida. He continues to try to correct what he believes to be a “failure of communications” about global warming, a term he actually prefers to climate change. Similarly, he thinks people relate to the word pollution more readily than to carbon emissions. We expect that David also will have something to say about the messaging missteps that have occurred during the pandemic. Please join us to hear this communications pro! Email: [email protected]