Appleseed’s annual Good Apple Awards is less than one week away and Appleseed is excited to highlight our final honoree.
The Milo Mumgaard Emerging Leader Award, named after Nebraska Appleseed’s founding executive director, recognizes young, emerging leaders who have a vision for the best of what Nebraska can be and, through initiative, hard work, and dedication, are pushing to make their vision a reality.
This year, Appleseed is proud to present the award to Rachel Jacobson, executive director of Film Streams.
Rachel Jacobson is the Founder and Director of Film Streams, a nonprofit organization devoted to enhancing the cultural environment of Omaha through the presentation and discussion of film as an art form.
In 1996, Milo envisioned a need for an organization to take on big, systemic issues like poverty, immigration, and health care access. With few other organizations in Nebraska doing systemic legal work, Milo founded Appleseed starting off as a small, one-person nonprofit law firm in his basement that later grew to become an organization comprised of twenty lawyers, community organizers, policy specialists and social workers working for systemic change. Much like Milo’s vision, we see analogies between the creation of Appleseed and the creation of Film Streams – identifying an underserved need in the community, creating a vision, and building something that’s blossomed to become an important part of the community.
In 2005, Rachel moved back to her hometown of Omaha after five years of living and working for arts and media organizations in New York City to start Film Streams, the culmination of a lifelong dream. Since moving home, she has managed Film Streams’ Capital Campaign, resulting in over $1.7 Million for build-out and start-up costs of the Ruth Sokolof Theater, the organization’s two-screen cinema located within the Saddle Creek Records development in downtown Omaha. She has cultivated relationships with dozens of area nonprofit organizations, developed Film Streams’ board of advisers and board of directors, and overseen the design, build out, and launch of the Ruth Sokolof Theater, which has seen well over 200,000 visitors since opening on July 27, 2007.
Today, she manages the organization’s strategic direction, finances, development program, and programming. She serves on the Advisory Board of Opera Omaha, the City of Omaha Urban Design Review Board, the Board of Trustees of the Business Ethics Alliance, and on the board of Omaha Girls Rock. She has also served twice on the Film Television and Media Panel for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Appleseed is proud to recognize Rachel Jacobson not only for her work founding Film Streams but also for promoting its Community Development Program to bring people together to engage in much needed dialog on important issues and to cultivate a stronger, more vibrant and engaged community. Rachel and Film Streams have collaborated with dozens of community organizations and nonprofits for events such as Cinemateca, a biennial celebration of Latino, Latin American and Spanish film, and post-screening forum discussions for films such as 9500 Liberty, When We Stop Counting, A Time for Burning and many, many more.
For all of Rachel’s work in the community Appleseed is proud to recognize her with the 2012 Milo Mumgaard Emerging Leader Award.
Visit FilmStreams.org for the impressive list of events and community organizations who have joined with Film Streams over the past five years. Read The Reader’s review of Film Stream’s first five years.
Click here to purchase tickets for the 2012 Good Apple Awards.