2019 Social Impact Annual Report: Chocolate Milk: The Documentary

Chocolate Milk is a graybayne film/media production, directed and produced by Elizabeth Gray Bayne. The project began in 2014 as a digital storytelling project in which the personal breastfeeding stories of African American mothers were collected and hosted on a YouTube channel called Chocolate Milk: The Documentary Series. Over the course of three seasons, the series became a tool for health centers and physicians' offices across the United States. After working closely with community stakeholders to better understand the racial breastfeeding disparities affecting black mothers in the U.S., the team set about producing Chocolate Milk: The Documentary, a 90-minute film with a primary target audience of African American women ages 18 through 34 and a secondary audience of family members, health providers and the general public. An early cut of the film, which follows three African American women, a new mother, a homebirth midwife and WIC lactation expert, was previewed in 200 communities nationwide during National Breastfeeding Month and Black Breastfeeding Week in August 2019.These community screenings demonstrated the effectiveness of Chocolate Milk: The Documentary in increasing community support for black breastfeeding mothers by galvanizing organizations, the public, and policymakers. In this report, the results of an audience survey and the overall findings from the national social impact campaign for the film will be presented, demonstrating the value of narrative in raising awareness and community support for breastfeeding.