Peace by Peace

Austin Monthly
Apr. 2009
By JOHN T. DAVIS

Turk Pipkin's new film showcases solutions to the world's biggest dilemmas.

Sept. 11, 2001, changed a lot of things. But to hear Turk Pipkin tell it, the change that profoundly affected his life began prior to 9/11. Pipkin, the tall, affable Austinite who, among an assortment of vocations, has a mini career as a character actor, was in New York to film a small role in The Sopranos. While in the city, he took his young daughter, Katie, to the top of the World Trade Center, where they made a point to introduce themselves to WTC employees, many of whom hailed from other countries.

“The very first thing Katie asked me when the Twin Towers fell was, ‘What happened to all those people?’” Pipkin tells me on a recent rainy day. That was his call to action.

Eight years later, Pipkin and his wife, Christy, run the Nobelity Project, a homegrown education and action nonprofit that seeks to connect people around the world to address some of the planet’s most vexing problems, including global warming, nuclear proliferation, global health, economic disparity and other overarching threats.

For their 2006 film, Nobelity, Pipkin traveled the world to interview Nobel laureates on the challenges and promises that the future holds, not only for his and Christy’s two daughters but also for children worldwide. Their new film, One Peace at a Time, explores how people in developed and undeveloped societies are rising to meet those very challenges.

The movie, which will premiere on April 14 at the Paramount Theatre, took Pipkin to 20 countries over the course of two years. The premiere will be preceded by a five-week exhibit of photographs from the project at the Austin Museum of Art as well as fundraising parties at the museum and at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse.

With Pipkin’s ties to the music, film and literary worlds, he has the voice to get the word out about the project and build the support needed to sustain its work. Willie and Annie Nelson, filmmakers Richard Linklater and Elizabeth Avellán and philanthropists Nav Sooch, Eddie Safady and Donna and Philip Berber are all on the host committee for the April premiere.

The Jan. 27 Nobelity Artists and Filmmakers Dinner at the Four Seasons looked more like a Hollywood red-carpet bash than an Austin fundraiser. Owen and Andrew Wilson, Harry Anderson, Mike Judge, Lance Armstrong, Dixie Chick Martie Maguire and a long list of TV, music and literary stars mixed and mingled and discussed the film and the issues it addresses.

“Turk is a man on a mission,” says Linklater. “He’s traveling around the world, often as a one-man film crew, making these beautiful and inspiring movies. I also admire that you come out of the films with bits of wisdom and pragmatic thinking that inform you specifically on how to be a part of the solution. What Turk is doing couldn’t be more timely and important.”

The premise of One Peace at a Time, Pipkin explains to me while editing footage at the 501 Post video facility, “is whether we can provide basic rights that every kid is entitled to—clean water, education, nutrition, health care, opportunity, a peaceful and sustainable environment. So I went looking for examples of what works in particular places. Like if it’s water, then go where the problem is acute, like Ethiopia, where there are 70 million people that don’t have clean water.”

There, Pipkin chronicled the work of A Glimmer of Hope, an Austin-based group that helps provide just that. “They don’t send a crew to dig a well, but they will bring a hydrologist in and show the people where there is water underground and pay for a pump,” Pipkin explains. “By the time the townspeople dig the hole, it will be a water system that will last for decades because they’re really invested in it.

“The changes are just fundamental across the board,” he adds. “With clean water, you can eliminate all sorts of diarrhea and cholera. No sooner do you have a well then you have to have a school. And if you have a school already, you have to have a larger school to accommodate the girls who before now have been hauling water for hours every day. Then you have to have more teachers, so you need more teacher colleges.

“Charity in the form of bottled water and free food is not going to solve the problem,” says Pipkin. “A well, a school and training on how to do a better job of growing food will solve a lot of problems.”

Nobelity seeks to put people together to think about problems in different ways—“changing people’s mind-sets,” as Pipkin puts it—and to work collectively. “Hey,” he posits, “if you don’t have $3,500 to sponsor a well, send us $35 and we’ll find 99 other people with $35.”

The partnership with The Nobelity Project was a win/win situation, says Glimmer of Hope CEO Brian Cooper. “Turk has portrayed what we do very, very well,” he explains. “Our objective is to increase awareness of the suffering of our brothers and sisters on the other side of the world and, in general, get more people involved.”

Kiva, another group featured in the film, functions as a sort of alternative bank through which people around the world can make microloans (subject to repayment) to entrepreneurs in the developing world—for instance, a refugee in Azerbaijan who wants to expand his small clothing retail business.
“In the movie, I went to Kenya and talked to the woman in a Nairobi slum that I loaned money to, to ask her how it was going, how is business now that you’ve expanded your store,” Pipkin says. “It’s the easiest story in the world to tell: ‘I loaned this woman on the other side of the world $25, and 10 other people loaned her $25, and it literally changed her life.’

“Plus, Kiva has a repayment rate of about 99 percent. I’d like to see anybody who got 99 percent of their money back on Wall Street last year. Poor people, as it turns out, are a really good investment.”

And, Pipkin continues, “It’s an addictive behavior. The stuff I see that works happens because people say, ‘I want to be a part of that.’”
The acts of conceiving and filming Nobelity and creating The Nobelity Project irrevocably altered the Pipkins’ lives. It thrust them into the global community that Pipkin and his daughter glimpsed that day atop the World Trade Center. It led them to a tangible sense of connectedness and shared responsibility.

“Pretty much every day of my life, somebody I’ve never met before comes up to me and says Nobelity changed their life,” Pipkin marvels. “But it wasn’t Nobelity; they were just waiting for someone to step up and say, you know, you don’t have to do things the way you always have—you can go out and find something that would be more meaningful to you.

“Almost everyone I know feels like there is something missing in their lives on some level,” he continues. “And that’s not a bad feeling; it’s part of what makes life interesting.

“But the solutions to the world’s problems are us. When we sense something is missing in our lives, it turns out to be the same thing that people in the developing world, without clean water or schools or access to health care, are missing: It turns out the thing they need is the same thing we need, which is each other. Which is a really nice coincidence.”

I turn off my tape recorder, and Pipkin goes back to his editing bay. You never finish a movie, but at some point you have to stop working on it, as they say. I leave 501 Post and turn left on Sixth Street, under the interstate. Huddled out of the rain under the highway, in a tangle of soggy blankets, is a small gaggle of homeless men, some in wheelchairs. What we need, I think, is each other.