Positive Stubbornness

What if telling positive stories — at a moment when negativity sells — is its own act of resistance?

Renay sits down with Larry Confino — independent documentary director, producer, and the filmmaker behind 50 States of Sustainability, currently airing nationally on PBS in its second season — for a conversation about what it takes to spend twenty-plus years pointing a camera at people who don't make headlines.

Larry has been an independent filmmaker for over twenty-five years. He has made feature documentaries about a lost Sephardic Jewish community in Greece and a legendary East Village nightclub. He has done client work for HBO, PBS, Disney, and Canon. But the project that drives him now is one he built from scratch during the pandemic: a documentary series traveling state by state, sitting with engineers, miners, tribal leaders, farmers, and CEOs working on some piece of the climate puzzle from where they stand. He calls it a personal search for optimism. He has filmed in more than twenty states.

This conversation is not about climate solutions. It is about what a storyteller does when the attention economy is built to reward what scares us — and how Larry made the deliberate, costly choice to tell stories that don't sell. He calls the inner capacity he keeps finding in the people he interviews "positive stubbornness" — the willingness to keep going at a problem too big for any one person to solve, because the alternative is to give up.

They cover the West Virginia coal miners Larry refuses to villainize, and what it costs to hold reverence for hard-working people while telling a renewable-energy story. The Chippewa engineer in northern Minnesota who is replacing energy poverty with energy sovereignty by building solar on Red Lake Nation. The deep geothermal technology that could cut global emissions by twenty-five percent if its engineers can perfect it. And why Larry believes the people doing this work are not driven by obligation but by something stranger and more durable — the intellectual challenge of refusing to give up.

Larry's measure of this work isn't audience size. It is the woman who watched a clip at a community screening, walked up to him, and told him she was changing jobs. This is a conversation about narrative as a tool, collaboration over extraction, and what hope looks like when you treat it as a discipline.

MEET THE SPEAKERS

Larry Confino

Larry Confino is an independent producer and director with more than 25 years of experience creating documentary content. He is the creator of 50 States of Sustainability, a PBS series that explores climate solutions and innovation happening in communities across the United States. His work focuses on storytelling that highlights practical, forward-looking ideas and the people driving them.

J. Renay Loper

Renay is a Clinical Faculty in Organizational Leadership for the Bard MBA in Sustainability, where she focuses on justice-centered transformation in the workplace. Previously, she was the Vice President of Program Innovation at PYXERA Global where she served on the Executive Leadership Team, led five country offices, drove the development of new business and programs, co-led the organization's work on inclusive circular cities, and advised corporate clients on their social impact strategies. Renay also led the organization’s ARC (Antiracist Collective) initiatives, which included internal and external efforts toward dismantling unjust systems. To this end, Renay created Rhetoric to Action, a series of conversations to bridge sectors toward collective action around social and racial justice.

Prior to PYXERA Global, Renay led the grassroots exchange and education grant portfolio at the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, and has served in a variety of leadership roles in higher education, nonprofit, and business prior to that. Renay is an avid speaker and facilitator, has authored and edited numerous publications, including a resource journal, Student Affairs Professionals Cultivating Campus Climates Inclusive of International Students (Jossey Bass). Renay serves on the board of directors of nonprofits including Community Change, Harpswell Foundation, and Girl Rising.