There is an increased tendency of creative industries to attach charity sponsorship or social issues spokesmanship to their brands. What about the story-tellers’ arts? They are no exception.
After all, we are a species that thrives on narratives, according to the management team behind Brio Multimedia, a social enterprise that produces youth entertain and uses proceeds to support scholarships and ‘rewilding’ organizations. If you ask them, it’s a good fit. Humans are a noisy, gossiping, fibbing, complaining, idolizing, yakking species. There is nothing new about this notion. The Brio team point out that for years social scientists have suggested that story-telling–indeed communication in general–is the equivalent of our ancestor primates grooming each other for comfort, affection, good health and hygiene.
Brio Multimedia’s goal is to share stories with young readers, they say. But not just any stories. Brio folks will tell you that stories are entertainment–and so much more. Their arguments for what they do and why are drawn from what many would consider a reference list of classic studies on literature and entertainment for young audiences.
They will tell you, for example, that in his book, Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim, a child psychologist and Holocaust survivor, wrote in 1975 that fantasy and fairy tales, for example, have traditionally provided a safe introduction for children to help them overcome some of the challenges they will face in life.
Ask them if Bettelheim’s thesis is still relevant, and they will admit that things have changed since the early days of fairy tales, in large part due to changes in technology. There is nothing new about that discovery either: Marshall McLuhan argued in The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962, that the medium is to an increasing degree part of the message. And technology has had a great impact on young minds and how young people see the world. In The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman makes a case for how electronic media like television and the internet are ‘disappearing’ the protected state of childhood, by constantly presenting children with adult concepts and experiences.
If Postman is right, is fantasy, delivered through today’s films and games, creating a less safe testing ground for the young? Is youth entertainment today less a source of inspiration and more often a source of anxiety and fear for young audiences? Many experts suggest emotional and physical illnesses are associated with media-driven distress. If this is the case, can we do anything about it?
The Brio Multimedia team thinks the answer is to change the narratives offered to young people while continuing to offer products that entertain and stimulate. They seek out and publish stories, films, videos and games in part for ‘fun’, but always with hopeful, uplifting messages.
Like any commercial entity, Brio Multimedia has to make money to pay staff to make and sell products, but as a family company, at least 25% of all profits from sales of Brio Multimedia’s products are used to fund specific projects helping young people follow their dreams to create–or to help change the world. Indeed, the brand slogan is: Fun4Good.
For nearly a decade, profits from the sale of Brio products have supported scholarships for young people who want to contribute to cultural tolerance and the availability of education to all. The six scholarships already offered were part of a fund established to honor Kenneth Allen Marcure, an educator who left his native Montana in 1972 to follow his vision of using education to break down cultural barriers. The scholarships supported internships by young people who wished to teach in India, Japan, China, and economically disadvantaged regions of the USA.
Marcure was a model for those scholarship winners. With the help of a Rotary Scholarship, he travelled to Kyoto, Japan, at age 22. There he completed a Master’s degree and stayed on to teach high school and university students. He continued to educate Japanese students for 35 years, until six months before his death from ALS (also known as Motor Neurone Disease and Lou Gehrig’s Disease) in 2012.
In 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic restricted international travel by scholarship candidates, Brio Multimedia’s Advisory Board agreed to a change in focus. Until global travel was safe for young applicants, profits would instead be directed to support environmental projects to rebuild wildlife habitats, create sanctuaries, and protect biodiversity by replanting areas destroyed by floods and bush fires.
Middle-grade and YA novelist, Judith Lydia Mercure, has chosen Brio Multimedia as her publishing partner for her book, The Great Brassmonkey Bay Jewel Robbery. “The types of entertainment products the company produces and its history of sharing profits to support youth education and environmental projects were compelling arguments for me to partner with Brio Multimedia,” Judith says. “We had the choice of working with a UK-based publisher, but I decided that the flexibility Brio offered to develop and manage entertainment project spin-offs and to offer discounted regional prices that would be affordable in different world markets was a business model that appealed to me.”
For more information about Brio Multimedia, see:
For more information about Judith and her books and entertainment projects, please see: http://www.judithlydiamercure.com
The Artful Gluffster 