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“It was also on us to show African American titles, Latino titles, gay and lesbian titles. Now ... we don’t have to cover those bases so much.” it just seemed like a good idea, and I had the opportunity,” Weiss says.

The festival returns to its original home, the DMA, Sept. 27-30, for its 25th year.

Video projectors have come a long way since 1987. Back then they were enormous, heavy and unreliable. “If you turned off the projector, it took two hours to get it going again,” Weiss says. “So if you turned it off, the show was over.”

The difference between a video festival and a film festival are fuzzy now, but in the ’80s, it was more distinct. Sundance Film Festival, for example, would not show video, only pieces shot on film. Now major feature films sometimes are shot entirely on video. But the festival always has striven to show what you might not see anywhere else.

“It was also on us to show African American titles, Latino titles, gay and lesbian titles, women’s titles,” Weiss says. “Now all those groups have their own film festivals, and we don’t have to cover those bases as much.”

The festival programmers always take advantage of cutting edge technology. The first year, for example, they decided to create the program book using desktop publishing.

“It was painful,” Weiss says. “It was horrible. But it paved the way for others to do it.”

The festival also was an early user of CD ROMs for its festival guide. Organizers developed an online form to register for the festival long before that became the norm. This year, they are offering the program via an iBook and eBook, with videos of programmers and directors talking about the videos.

“The New York Underground Film Festival, and some others, those are kind of similar to what we do now,” Weiss says. “It’s all in the way that we look at the medium, how technology impacts us and how we do our business.”

This year, the festival is offering programming on what Weiss considers “the largest canvas in Dallas,” the Omni Ho-

SEPTEMBER 21-23, 2012

tel. “When I saw [the hotel’s lights] I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if an artist were doing that?’ ” he says. The artists hadn’t been chosen as of press time, but the festival will take over the Omni lights on the Wednesday night before the festival, Sept. 26, and KXT will run a soundtrack to go with it.

Neighborhood resident Dee Mitchell, a contemporary art collector and curator, programs what’s called “The Program.” That’s a biannual presentation of video art that is part of the festival. This year’s Program includes two films from Robert Frank, a photographer and filmmaker known for his book The Americans. His avant-garde film

“Pull My Daisy,” from 1959, is narrated by Jack Kerouac. His film “Conversations in Vermont,” from 1969, “is very hard to explain,” Mitchell says. But the evening will center on beat poetry and avant-garde filmmaking in the midcentury.

Mitchell also is programming a block of horror films, which he hopes to incorporate every year.

“We’ll have everything from splatterpunk animation to very sophisticated feature-quality films,” he says. “For people who like horror films, it will be fun.”

The festival has a history of showing the quirky and offbeat. TV commercials critiqued as art, reality shows from Australia, anything new and different. Plus, the work of local video artists.

“There are all kinds of people who do video art in Dallas,” Weiss says. “There are people who get shown around the world who make videos here.”

The festival has its success stories. The creators of “Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius” got their start at the festival with their very popular animated series, “Nanna and Lil Puss Puss.”

“They’re basically, like, fart jokes with this old lady and a cat, and they’re really, really funny,” Weiss says.

Filmmaker David Lowery, who directed “Glorified High,” the first video from Sarah Jaffe’s new album, and recently announced he’s making a movie with Rooney Mara, showed his early films at the festival. One year, Lowery shot the festival’s intro reel.

Every film festival shows an intro before each film to say something about the festival, and usually it’s an afterthought, Weiss says. But the Dallas Video Festival has always taken the intro reel very seriously.

“I obsess about it,” he says.

One year, he offered the intro reel honors to a high school student, who was given the privilege of directing a high-dollar film crew for the first time.

Nothing is really an afterthought for Weiss and the video fest. They love the details, and bringing meaningful work to audiences is what inspires them.

“We all spend too much time in front of screens. We’re obsessed with digital images,” Weiss says. “The problem is we settle for mediocrity. Video has a way to make our lives better.”

That’s why the video fest tagline is “Better living through video,” he says.

“Video can be inspiring, and it is clearly the medium of our generation. My hope is you come and get excited about the possibilities,” Weiss says. “Then you go home Monday, and you sit down at your computer, and you don’t settle. You realize there is work out there that can make your life better.”

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But this Peninsula neighborhood resident is not shelling out money from any ivory tower. Nelson’s experience running a youth center in downtown Los Angeles, plus a 13-year stint as a public policy researcher for the Rand Corporation, give her an invaluable perspective on how to best serve the nonprofits the foundation supports. In her role at the Communities Foundation, she has employed those insights to develop smarter spending.

Nelson and her staff developed the foundation’s Data Driven DecisionMaking, or D3 Institute. The institute serves nonprofits that benefit the work- ing poor, such as the White Rock Center of Hope.

“I understand the pressure put on these agencies,” Nelson says. “Sometimes, even if there is good data out there, they don’t always have the time and resources to understand what it means for them.”

When Nelson started working to bridge the gap between public policy data and the actual day-to-day of nonprofit agencies, she quickly realized she needed more information.

“All of the data on working poor was 10 years old,” she says. “So we didn’t really even know what we should be funding.” ration for Enterprise Development to study the working poor in Dallas.

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The study found that 39 percent of people in Dallas live in asset poverty, meaning if they lost their main source of income, they could not support a household for three months at the federal poverty level. Put another way, it’s a family of three with less than $4,632 in the bank. The national average for asset poverty is 27 percent. Almost 20 percent of people in our city live below the federal poverty level, which is about twice the national average.

“It’s a startling revelation that twofifths of Dallas households are one crisis away from serious financial trouble or even homelessness,” the foundation’s president and CEO Brent Christopher says.

The data showed the foundation that there is a serious need to support the working poor in Dallas, and it has made that a focus area for giving.

The study also found that about 20 percent of Dallas residents who hold a bachelor’s degree would not have the means to support themselves for three months if they lost their jobs. And asset poverty does not just affect low-wage earners. About one third of those earning $45,000-$70,000 in Dallas could not weather a job loss without falling into poverty. More than a third of Dallas residents do not have health insurance. And almost 70 percent have subprime credit scores.

Instead of unleashing that data on nonprofit agencies, Nelson wanted to ask the people who run nonprofits serv- ing the working poor what their agencies’ needs are.

“They are the ones who know what the challenges are for the working poor,” Nelson says. “I would rather have them help us decide what to fund.”

The D3 Institute, a pilot program that is just getting underway, is designed based on what the nonprofits said they wanted and needed and what they are trying to achieve, plus the data to guide them.

“We want to make sure that information is translatable,” Nelson says. “What does it mean, and how can I use this information strategically?”

The institute provides each nonprofit with a data coach who helps them interpret the numbers. They meet about twice a month, and the foundation provides workshops for the nonprofits every one or two months for one year. Along with better understanding and focus, the workshops create a space for the agencies to communicate and collaborate, Nelson says.

“If you get them together, trends emerge in their needs,” she says.

The D3 Institute took its first class of nonprofits last month, and Nelson and the foundation will tweak it as they go, dropping aspects that are not useful and adding things that might help.

The Communities Foundation of Texas is the largest grant maker in Texas by dollar amount. The foundation gave $79 million in 2011. And Nelson wants to make every dollar of those millions count.

FIND MORE information at cftexas.org.

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214.506.3535 wayne@waynegarcia.com

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