15 Jan Into the maelstrom

We’re looking ahead in this new year and we just finished an in person meeting with our amazing Skylight Board of Directors. As we spent a day together huddled around a table in our loft in New York City, we asked each of them to reflect on the challenges they anticipated 2025 would bring- for the world and for Skylight.

Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj

The year 2025 arrived with fire, wind, ice and rain, bringing us a profound message that reminds us that these are fundamental elements of life and death. Therefore, seeing the right balance to maintain harmony will be one of our main challenges this year. And yet, we must remember that for harmony to be sustainable, it must transcend individuality and be collective; it must seek the common good and happiness and maintain counterweights in the exercise of power.

Irma Alicia Velázquez, an author, poet, journalist, and professor is a member of  the  K’iche’ people of Guatemala.

Ken Grossinger 

What is to be done when the levers of power – from the White House to Congress to the Supreme Court are all aligned against you? First, remember we also have power. The power to disrupt their work, to throw sand in the gears. The second is to embrace the power of film in political mobilization. Take Skylight’s latest production BORDERLAND | The Line Within, that exposes how state and corporate interests profit from government deportation policies. Borderland draws the curtain back. Skylight’s impact campaigns with BORDERLAND offer cultural and political activists a new organizing handle with which to hold the state to account. Building on an upsurge of new alliances among organizers and artists, it will fuel our fight for justice.

Ken Grossinger has been a leader in movements for social and economic justice for 35 years. He is the Executive Producer of BORDERLAND | The Line Within and the author of Art Works: How Organizers and Artists are Creating a Better World Together (The New Press, 2023).

A whirlwind of new ideas, films, and projects

Wendy Levy 

As we move into 2025, I’ve been thinking about how Skylight, along with so many nonprofit media and human rights organizations, can be seen as stewards of the status quo, rather than the disruptors many of us hope to be. What inspires me every day about Skylight’s work is the relentless and unwavering commitment to justice within the context of powerful storytelling and the championing of communities as a creative and moral foundation. BORDERLAND | The Line Within is a film made for this moment, and the SolidariLabs program is the practice of true collaboration and community building. It’s easy to feel small in the face of dire political, ethical and environmental forces that seem so much bigger than us, and the work of Skylight holds out hope and collective creativity to confront these challenges. We need this work right now. The Skylight producers, editors, archivists, mentors, activists and allies are supporting communities that cannot and will not be erased. 

Wendy Levy is the Chair of Skylight’s Board of Directors. As the Executive Director of The Alliance for Media Arts + Culture, she is focused on facilitating collaboration, innovation, strategic growth and social impact for the media arts field.

Jennifer Trone

I’ve never been much invested in the new year. January 1st doesn’t necessarily feel like a beginning to me, and this January, with the countdown to a second Trump Administration, feels like anything but a fresh start. Dread is too energetic a word to describe it. The election and endless soul searching over what it means sometimes feels like the longest hangover of my life, making it hard to think clearly about how to meet the challenges that lie ahead, only some of which we can predict. I do know this: While there will be fights to come, including a near-constant fight for the truth and to protect the most vulnerable among us, the struggle must not define us. We have just the “one wild and precious life,” to quote the poet Mary Oliver. We must spend more time building than resisting, more time creating than critiquing, more time in search of inspiration than disputing the lies that confirm our worst fears. I am privileged to play a small role supporting the inspiring builders and creators who power Skylight.

 Jennifer Trone, a founding Skylight Board Member, is an independent consultant working with social change organizations. 

Eduardo González

2025 is a year of resilience and creativity for Skylight, for survivors, and for humankind. It is a year of resilience because of the challenge posed by the ascent of authoritarianism around the world, and its inevitable companions, greed and violence. But it is a year of creativity, because we will find ways to articulate effective responses changing the narrative and strengthening communities. More than ever, we must and we will mobilize stories, and organize the spaces where they thrive and change attitudes.

Eduardo González is a leading human rights activist, with a focus on truth, memory and reparations. He serves as the UN Independent Expert on the situation of human rights in Mali and previously served in a leadership role on the Peruvian Truth Commission. 

Paco de Onís and the Skylight Board discussing our plans for 2025

Jay SchwartzCoffey

For me, 2025 will bring continued focus on long term issues, specifically around poverty and the impacts of climate change. Strategies are shifting from prevention to mitigation which brings hosts of issues and solutions. At the same time, there is an immense and immediate need for dialogue and solutioning to the immigration debate going on in the US. Mass deportations would create a humanitarian and economic crisis. The socioeconomic factors that have created the current situation can not be solved by expelling millions of innocent and hard-working immigrants. Nor can the US economy withstand such a gargantuan expense.  

Jay SchwartzCoffey is a longtime supporter of human rights in Latin America. He is the Vice President of Finance at Earthjustice, the US environmental law organization.  

Sue Gunawardena-Vaughn

Challenges for 2025 The challenges that we face as we enter 2025 are monumental – We are witnessing in real time a devastating global climate crisis, most recently evinced in the devastating fires in California. Despite saying “never again,” over and over again, we witnessed a genocide unfold on our phones while international human rights law was largely rendered hollow in the wake of such carnage and horror. Authoritarianism continues to rise across the world unchecked, and we in the US who long arrogantly spoke of our “exceptional” commitment to democracy, have front row seats to rising fascism in our own country with the advent of the second Trump regime. Institutions that were designed to serve as the guardrails to protect human rights and democracy have repeatedly failed us. 

As a Brown immigrant woman, I am also keenly aware that immigrant and other marginalized communities are the first to be demonized on the short road to fascism. The most expedient tool in the authoritarian handbook is to fracture people-powered movements and to decimate solidarity. In these challenging times, my hope for 2025 is that we show up for each other. That we take care of each other. That we forge solidarity with each other. That we understand that my freedom is inextricably tied to your freedom.That at the end of the day, we stand on the side of love and create the Beloved Community. 

Those of us who are longtime human rights activists have been doing this for years. Skylight has been doing this for years. We know the authoritarian playbook all too well. In this moment of resistance, we will need to redouble our efforts. And I have no doubt that we are up to the challenge. I wish you all a 2025 filled with love, rage, and resistance!

Sue Gunawardena-Vaughn is a longtime human rights activist who has held leadership roles at Amnesty International USA, Freedom House, Open Society Foundations (OSF), and MADRE.

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Thanks to Skylight team member Vaclav Masek who, among other talents, translates our newsletters into Spanish. He is among the thousands of residents of Los Angeles evacuated due to the wildfires there.