Marin County, which is often ranked as one of the wealthiest counties in the country, has the widest gap between rich and poor and one of the greatest racial inequities in the State of California. At Community Action Marin, Marin County’s largest social services agency, we make it possible for people to achieve well-being by providing the education, mental health, and vital services they need to help them achieve self-sufficiency.

The residents of Marin we work with are sometimes considered part of the “invisible Marin.” Historically marginalized people in our county whose voices are too often unheard and unseen, and whose stories are not generally known about. These are our neighbors, struggling with poverty who may be an older adult, or a young family who are service workers, landscapers, or grocery clerks. It was our goal, in collaboration with Citizen Film, to create a film series where we can lift up and make visible these voices and stories in our community.

With Community Voices, we will help bring awareness to the inequities that exist in our communities, the ongoing work to help eradicate the systems that keep these inequities in place, and what is possible going forward together as a community. With Citizen Film’s help, we are documenting the power of the work happening across our agency, including special highlights on our work around Food Justice which we’ve already completed. Together, we are creating vibrant short video stories that bring the diversity and inequity in the communities we serve in Marin County to life.

You can see our Food Justice video here on our website. During the next few weeks, we will be releasing additional videos that you’ll both want to see and share with friends. We encourage you to tell your friends to sign up for our email list so they can see and hear more community voices soon.

Citizen Film, founded in 2002, is a Bay Area documentary film non-profit guided by the belief that well-crafted documentary stories can provide audiences with a powerful means for engaging with culture and community. They believe in forging highly collaborative partnerships to tell stories that matter and we are thrilled to have them as a partner, telling ours.