Hollywood Stars Find an Audience For Social Causes

By Nora Boustany
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 10, 2007

Hollywood actress Drew Barrymore traipsed purposefully up the Capitol steps last month in a simple black dress, red-soled black pumps and russet mane, not for a film shoot but to lobby for child feeding programs in Africa as a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. World Food Program.

Barrymore, 32, then took her extracurricular celebrity campaign to the airwaves at CNN with anchor Wolf Blitzer. She described children in Kenya telling her all they needed was one meal a day, pencils and paper. "It is life-altering, and it has humbled me to the core," she confided in a slow undertone.

"It struck a chord with me," said Michael Adams, 57, a guidance counselor at J. Albert Adams Academy, a middle school in Annapolis. He went online to research the World Food Program and called its Washington office to pledge $100.

"When I feel something is authentic, I respond," he said. "I could see the passion in her expression. Next, I am planning school-based lessons on world hunger and altruism and maybe a fundraiser."

Within a week, $10 donations snowballed into $25,000, according to Jennifer Parmelee, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program.

Barrymore is just one of many in a growing army of entertainment figures joining humanitarian crusades. Actors Meg Ryan and Salma Hayek and musician Sheryl Crow are among those who are using their star power to turn the spotlight on neglected global issues and to raise badly needed cash even at a time of donor fatigue.

Though celebrities have long attached their names to various causes -- the late Audrey Hepburn represented UNICEF, and Brigitte Bardot advocates for animal rights -- the links between Hollywood and philanthropy are stronger than ever. Stars now generate hundreds of millions of dollars in donations, sensitize the public and engage people attracted by popular culture with the serious foreign policy issues of the day.

"Almost every star has his or her cause," said Alan J. Abramson, director of the nonprofit sector and philanthropy program at the Aspen Institute, a research and advocacy organization. "Celebrities and their humanitarian work can sometimes show the way, especially overseas."

"Celebrities are like corporations," he added. "They make money, do good and get their names out."

Film star Lucy Liu appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" on March 1, 2006, right after visiting earthquake victims in Pakistan on behalf of UNICEF. Traffic on the agency's Web site, http://unicefusa.org/, rose by 91 percent that day. "Compared to an average weekday, we received a 300 percent increase in calls and 240 percent more donations. All in all, we raised nearly $500,000," said Marissa Buckanoff, public relations director of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF.

There is more, much more. When George Clooney appeared on Winfrey's show in April 2006 after visiting Africa with his father, contributions to UNICEF rose 20 percent.

And when Angelina Jolie, a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, sat down for a two-hour interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper on June 20 last year, donations spiked by more than half a million dollars, Elisabeth Nolet said by telephone from UNHCR's Geneva office.

Parmelee, of the World Food Program, said the growing involvement of celebrities has also helped fuel a new activism on college campuses, suggesting that interest in causes is more of a trend than a passing fad. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, she said, many young people wanted to get involved in overseas concerns, but that feeling abated because of widespread opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Now, she said, the campaign on campuses to stop atrocities in the Darfur region of western Sudan has allowed students to focus on an overseas cause that is seen as purely humanitarian and not tied to the Iraq war.

While commending celebrity activism, Payam Akhavan, a scholar on genocide at McGill University, said, "The fact that it takes movie stars to make people care about pressing human rights struggles reflects a self-absorbed culture where compassion and empathy is awakened through glamour rather than human conscience and duty."

Another UNICEF ambassador, actress Mia Farrow, said she became so engrossed in the plight of Sudanese refugees in Darfur and Chad that her lectures, lobbying and television appearances on behalf of the refugees have eclipsed everything else.

"With each woman I met, I made a commitment of the heart, in so many villages," she said in an interview from her home in Connecticut. "Chewing leaves, sucking swamp water, hundreds of thousands living in the bush for months on end, dazed, grief-stricken, teeth rotting out of their heads," she said, describing in dramatic detail the scenes she witnessed among the displaced Sudanese. "Tell them: We will be slaughtered. We need help," she said one refugee woman pleaded.

Farrow moved her savings from Fidelity Investments and championed an online petition, leading the company to curtail investments in the firm PetroChina, because a large percentage of Sudan's oil revenue from sales to China were funding the Janjaweed militia committing atrocities in Darfur.

"Hotel Rwanda" star Don Cheadle and Africa expert John Prendergast were at first rebuffed by publishers when they tried to sell their book, "Not on Our Watch," about the genocide in Darfur and beyond. Prendergast recalled two major publishing houses rejecting the manuscript as "unmarketable."

Hyperion Books took on the project, and the slim paperback hit bookstores May 1. It was No. 6 on the New York Times bestseller list two weeks in a row and made it to No. 2 on the Washington Post list.

The book is in its third printing, said Christine Ragasa, Hyperion's publicity director for the book, which rose to 39th place on Amazon's Movers & Shakers list in its second week. Cheadle's celebrity drew thousands to events on the authors' book tour across the United States.

"Take Don out of that equation and who knows? He is there with his fan base, and it gives us instant recognition," said Prendergast, who has written about half a dozen books, including one, "Crisis Response: Humanitarian Band-AIDS in Sudan and Somalia," that ranked 41 millionth on Amazon last year.

When People magazine reported that a journal written by Jolie during a 2005 Africa tour was on the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum Web site, the institution's server crashed.

"It received more hits than it could initially handle," said Andy Hollinger, director of media relations.

Jolie has donated more than $3 million to UNHCR since she became a goodwill ambassador in 2001 and $3 million more to charities this year. Jolie and partner Brad Pitt have a California-based foundation to assess grants.

Arduous field trips have helped Jolie carve out a new and more positive public image. Instead of her previous tabloid profile as Hollywood's bad girl, wearing a vial of her ex-husband's blood around her neck, she is now more routinely photographed in drab clothing traveling to difficult spots to survey refugee camps.

Rock star Bono of U2 has gained the attention of world leaders with his pioneering cause: rooting out poverty with debt relief and trade and raising money to fight AIDS on a global scale. "More than anyone else, Jolie and Bono embody the new generation of entertainers who moved into this realm of social actions," Prendergast said. "They are the high-profile trailblazers."

Pitt, Clooney and other actors from the new film "Ocean's 13" used an opening-night Hollywood gala as a fundraising event for Darfur refugees. Clooney and Pitt, along with Cheadle, Matt Damon and producer Jerry Weintraub, have launched the Not on Our Watch Foundation to raise money and draw attention to Darfur.

For many actors, succeeding in Hollywood is no longer enough, and many said they are looking to move beyond the fiction of the screen to the real world.

Barrymore, for example, attended a May 10 reception on the Hill carrying a red cup, the measure of a single helping of porridge she handed out to schoolchildren in Kebira, Kenya.

"I am an American, and I am proud to be doing international work," Barrymore told journalists on the Hill. "It's become the priority of my life." She added, "We all need heroes in our lives and examples that you can change the world."