Engineering stories for community impact: Lessons from a mission-driven filmmaker, Greg Hemmings

Storytelling is often celebrated for its ability to inspire, but can it also be designed to produce measurable change? In this 20th episode of Consider This Next, Kacie Luaders speaks with filmmaker and entrepreneur Greg Hemmings, founder of Hemmings House, a certified B Corp production company based in New Brunswick, Canada.

Over the past two decades, Hemmings has experimented with an approach that treats documentary filmmaking not simply as a tool for raising awareness, but as a mechanism for importing and adapting successful ideas. Through projects focused on STEM education and youth music access, he describes how documenting effective models elsewhere and sharing those stories with local stakeholders helped catalyze new programs that have reached thousands of young people across Eastern Canada.

The conversation explores how entrepreneurs can balance financial sustainability with social impact, the role of external accountability structures such as B Corp certification, and how storytellers and scientists can work together to translate complex ideas for broader audiences. Along the way, Hemmings reflects on the challenges of measuring impact, navigating political and economic uncertainty, and creating what he calls “Oreo cookie center” stories—stories designed to build common ground rather than deepen division.

For civic science practitioners, the episode offers a practical question: if storytelling can help communities replicate solutions that already work elsewhere, what models are worth documenting, translating, and adapting for our own contexts?

The transcript below has been edited for punctuation, formatting, and accuracy.

---

Kacie Luaders: Welcome to Consider This Next, an audio program from the Civic Science Media Lab. I’m your host, Kacie Luaders. This show is for civic science entrepreneurs, the researchers, communicators, artists, and organizers finding new ways to connect scientific knowledge with community action. Each episode, we’ll talk with practitioners who are rethinking how science gets shared, who it reaches, and what it can accomplish. This season, we’re taking the show in a new direction. We’re exploring what it means to be a civic science entrepreneur, people who are building something new at the intersection of science communication and public engagement. These are founders, creators, and innovators who aren’t waiting for institutions to change. They’re creating their own platforms, companies, and projects to move science out of traditional channels and into the spaces where people actually live. My guest today is Greg Hemmings, founder of Hemmings House Pictures, a certified B Corp film production company based in New Brunswick, Canada. Greg has spent two decades building a company around a deceptively simple idea: that storytelling can be engineered for impact, not just inspiration. We talk about how he’s used documentary film to actually move the needle on STEM education and youth music access, and what that replication model might look like for civic science practitioners everywhere. Greg, thank you so much for joining us today on Consider This Next. I would love if you could tell the folks listening a little bit more about yourself and what it is that you do.

Greg Hemmings: Thank you so much for the invite. First of all, I’m a filmmaker, but it’s interesting when I say what I am as an identity. I’m a filmmaker. What I am is I’m just a person that’s trying to spread a little love in the world passionately through telling good stories that hopefully make the world a little bit of a better place. And I do that by being a business owner. I’m an entrepreneur. I own a film production company called Hemmings House, and we incorporated 20 years ago. We’ve been doing this for 20 years, and for 15 of those years, we’ve been a B Corp, really trying to live out our values through our business, and, of course, our business being sharing stories through film that is making the world a better place. So that’s who I am, and we do a whole bunch of different things, from documentaries to feature films to TV series to commercials, working with other great companies to help them share their stories to the world.

Kacie Luaders: This particular season we are focusing on talking to entrepreneurs in the civic science space. You’ve built a successful documentary film company. What made you realize that Hemmings House needed to exist?

Greg Hemmings: I went to film school. I graduated from film school in 1999, and this is back when we actually shot and edited with real film. This is way back. And so I got to learn in the old system. When I graduated, I joined the film union, worked on large productions, but I didn’t realize after three years of being educated in film to figure out how to make movie magic happen, I didn’t realize how toxic the culture was on movie sets. For me to be in my young 20s after training to get into this industry and to witness real bullying for the first time, it was such a trip. I wasn’t taking it that spiritually awful. However, I was like, I’m a creative person, a creative soul. This is beating the creativity out of me. And I quit after about three years of putting up with that crap. When I quit, I thought I was done for good, and then realizing that, wait a minute, I’m not going to quit, I’m going to recreate the film industry the way I want to see it. And to do that, I’m going to have to actually create a company that has a heart, a company that cares about people and builds a safe place and a creative space. And since 2006, that’s what we’ve been doing here.

Kacie Luaders: When it comes to the type of work that you all choose to work on, the type of work that you choose to produce, how do you balance the entrepreneur side, the cash flow, with producing work that serves the public good? How do you balance those two things?

Greg Hemmings: Such a great question, and so many entrepreneurs have probably gone through a similar journey, where in the first five years of this company I was holding the salaries of 14 or 15 people. And because I always want to do good, I paid everybody very well, like above living wage. But when you’re carrying a salary load like that, you got to take whatever work you possibly can to keep money flowing. And I did find myself from time to time doing projects that were not necessarily completely opposite of our values, our collective values, but certainly not in line. And we had a community backlash against our loving little company. A community, I’m talking like not a ton of people, but enough people that I cared about their opinion that I was like, “Oh geez.” People saying, “Greg, what are you doing this for? That’s not what you’re about.” It was at that time when I stumbled upon certified B Corps, and I was like, what is this? And I realized that there’s a global certification of companies that certify that they’re good for the planet, they’re good for people, and they’re running a profitable company. I was like, if I became certified, maybe I’d have a little bit more guts to say no to certain work, because now I’ve got a little bit of a, what’s the word, like a beacon to work towards and a community surrounding me of other certified B Corps. And ever since then we’ve maybe once or twice had to consider a project, but we always said no. It was really cool because it was a full team effort, considering all things. So becoming a certified B Corp, and now for many years we’ve been a 1% for the Planet member as well, a certification that’s neat because you’ve got the accountability of a community. They’re keeping it real, man. It’s a bold move to do that, and I had to do it to protect myself from myself or from the forces of capitalism that force us to take whatever work we possibly can to make the money to pay our people.

Kacie Luaders: At the Civic Science Media Lab, we are all about civic science communication and finding ways that aren’t necessarily inside of the classroom to share stories about civic science and how it impacts communities. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the work that you’ve done that has been in the educational space, in the STEM or STEAM space? Maybe give us a little highlight reel of some of those projects.

Greg Hemmings: Well, we’ve dipped our toes over many years into that space, but one project in particular is an incredible project of impact that we did. And there’s a story about how we got here to make this project, because we did another project before it as a social experiment. We wanted to see how we could use film to actually accelerate a movement of change, so the actual process of making the film was as impactful, probably more impactful than the film itself, and that’s how we designed it.

But I’ll explain. In the province of New Brunswick, where I’m from, we would be very similar to most provinces and states in the fact that early education, grade one through five, let’s say, not everybody is learning STEAM. Not every grade one or two kid is learning robotics or coding, and certainly there’s a massive gender gap. Oftentimes it’s boys that find their way into those interests. There’s no reason for that, but that has traditionally been the way. But the end result is in the tech industry, traditionally it’s been a majority males working in it because girls, certainly in the ’80s and ’90s, and probably into the 2000s, were not really socially encouraged to get into more STEAM-related activities. Not STEAM in total, because arts is in there too, but a lot of that science and tech.

And so we wanted to find out where in the world are they doing a great job, and we found the best place in the world. This would have been, I don’t know, 12, 13, maybe 15 years ago. We made this film. It’s called Code Kids, and it’s on our YouTube, so Code Kids, check it out. It’s not going to win any cinematic awards, but I got to tell you, the impact was incredible.

So we went to Estonia, and there’s a number of really interesting reasons why Estonia is one of the best places in the world for tech and innovation in early age education, and so is Finland. We were able to go to both areas and film their ecosystems, their entrepreneurial ecosystems and their early education systems. And what we saw was amazing. We saw little girls and little boys equally in grades one, two, three, four, five making robots out of Lego and coding. Right from the get-go, it was gender parity. And that’s how simple it is to get more girls into tech. Encourage them at a young age. Don’t give them the myth that tech is not for girls, tech is only for boys. That’s all a myth.

So Estonia and Finland did a very good job. We put a very small little film together, maybe five minutes long. We brought that little film together back to our province, and then we started shopping it around to our politicians, our policymakers, our business owners, our entrepreneurs, our educators. We were like, if this can happen in Estonia and Finland, why can’t it happen here?

What we learned over there is a collective action where you do have, for example, Skype was a startup in Estonia, so there’s a great tech startup community there. You really need the private sector on board, the private sector being the ones who really want to have amazing, diverse workplaces in the future. So they want boys and girls from all backgrounds learning this stuff and getting excited about this stuff.

They had this organization, I’m forgetting the name of it, but the organization would go and if a school or a student or even a teacher was like, “Listen, we don’t have a Lego robotics kit at our school, nor do we have a budget for it,” this nonprofit would come in, buy the gear, bring it in, teach them how to use it. So it’s not like every school got it. It had to come upon request, which I think is really good because a lot of times schools get these assets and they’re just not used because they don’t have buy-in.

So we replicated that program here as a result of a larger documentary we made. We followed us implementing the program for a year in this province, and now today tens of thousands of students and teachers in our side of Eastern Canada have been exposed to this type of education because of a nonprofit called Brilliant Labs. You have to check that out. Brilliant Labs, incredible organization. It’s very scalable and mimicable in different jurisdictions around the world. And that all came to be because of an idea of documenting something that’s working somewhere else, importing it here, inspiring others through the power of storytelling to drive action.

Kacie Luaders: As artists and creatives, it can be difficult to measure the impact of our work. I think we all hope when we put something out there we’re going to have an impact, we’re going to do something that’s going to change a life. But this sounds like you have tangible, measurable metrics to say this was the result of our creative project. How with your other work, or even future work that you’re planning, do you in that planning process have outcomes in mind? Do the outcomes just depend on what naturally happens once work is put out? Does it just happen that way? How do you think about measuring the impact of your work?

Greg Hemmings: To be honest with you, some of our projects are meant to be put out there as a marketing tool. It might be a TV ad, for example, or a social media ad, or maybe it’s a branded documentary about a company’s approach to their thing. And in those cases, I have to just trust that the people who are buying that video, they’ve got their metrics that they want to figure out and how they market the video and all that sort of thing. So that’s all good. It’s not really on us because we’re not a marketing company. We’re a film storytelling company that is a very powerful marketing tool.

However, we do a ton of original content, and with all of our original content films, we’re always looking at what is the social or environmental impact that we want the story to make.

The story that we did before Code Kids was called Systema, and that is also on our Hemmings World YouTube channel. Systema, identical story of what I just told you, but this time we went to Caracas, Venezuela, where they’ve got the world’s best social program getting kids every single day after school for free learning classical music at the highest level. It was invented like 35 years ago by Dr. Jose Abreu. He just brought the kids in from the barrios, from all the poor neighborhoods. So it’s more than music. It was a social program getting kids to understand self-worth, teamwork, all this sort of thing.

We brought back a five-minute video because if you’re in the New Brunswick Youth Orchestra in this province back then, there’s a good chance you’re coming from a high-income family. Because if you’re coming from a low-income family, there’s a good chance at five years old you’re not learning the cello, you’re not getting instruction. It’s not a rule, but there’s a good chance. So the New Brunswick Youth Orchestra typically would bring in kids that were very well trained at 10 or 12 or 13 years old. So the leadership was like, “We need to change that. How do we do that?” And they found Venezuela being the best place to bring an accessible program.

Today, almost 20 years later, again thousands of children have been impacted through this program. So it’s an identical thing. I saw something at the beginning, a recipe of impact, but that can only work in that type of approach. Not all of our projects are like that, but I’ve always wanted to replicate that type of approach environmentally.

We just launched a really cool documentary on CBC in Canada about icebergs. It’s the science, the birth, the life, and the death of an iceberg. The undertone story is a climate change story, and of course we’ve got scientists in there talking about what is the impact of us having more icebergs because the ice caps in Greenland are melting quicker. But what’s really cool science that’s happening underneath an iceberg is fresh water melting in. It’s actually an incubator of life, of microorganisms. So it’s all these impacts, not necessarily negative, but changes that are happening to our oceans that have an impact for us.

So we want people, the impact of that is, we want that conversation to continue. We’re not directly measuring that impact because our customer client is the broadcaster, CBC, but we know for them that they’re tracking ratings and how many people are watching this, how many people are talking about it. There are all these different ways that we measure success, but we always have a lens of what’s the impact this is going to make, and hopefully we can track some sort of impact.

Kacie Luaders: So one of the interesting parts of this particular gig for me is that I do not come from a formal science background. I like having conversations with people, whether those folks are scientists themselves, whether, like yourself, you’re an artist who is in the world of science and science communication. And I would like to know, how do you engage with the scientific community as a storyteller, as a filmmaker? There has to be some sort of language barrier, I’m assuming, when it comes to certain things. How can other, not even artists proper, but perhaps people who are not trained in science, find their way into being able to speak the language, so to speak?

Greg Hemmings: Yeah, it’s been a really interesting and fun journey for me because one of the quick answers is, every year I go to this amazing television producers conference called the World Congress of Science and Factual Producers. This past year it was in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Previous times I’ve gone, it was in Seattle. It changes and goes around the world. It’s a really cool place where communicators like myself, storytellers, are there in the same rooms as a lot of scientists.

Scientists have a challenge. They have a very difficult time, and it’s not because they’re not skilled, but by the nature of the training and how science is set up, you have to be very careful about what you say is fact and what is not. So I find scientists very nervous to speak emotionally, very nervous to speak hopefully, or the opposite. It’s not that they don’t know how to do it, they just won’t do it. A lot of them won’t.

Great science communicators, I find, aren’t scientists. They’re communicators that have figured out the language of science. But for me, as a storyteller, I need to be careful not to cross the lines and speak untruths either, and be just very careful. So it’s a dance. It’s a really interesting dance.

I’m working with some scientists right now, and it’s really interesting because on my personal YouTube channel I’m doing this quasi-scientific experiment in my little documentary series. In an episode I’ve not launched yet, I’m on stage at a conference, at a neuroscience conference, and I’m on stage with two legit neuroscientists. The purpose of this panel is for me to talk about my subjective experiences doing these different neurological methodologies for trying to heal the creative malaise I was going through.

I did things like meditation, sound meditation, music, and flow states, all stuff that most empirical scientists would call fluffy or whatever, but I’m exploring it anyway. So it was really cool to be on the stage and asking them, as hardcore data scientists, what do you think is actually going on in my brain when these things happen? Because I’m feeling better, whether it’s placebo or not.

Having these deep conversations between storytellers, artists, and scientists is just one of the things that I feel really blessed to be able to have. These honest conversations. I’m not pretending I’m a scientist. I’m not pretending I know it all. But I want to let the scientists out there know that there are people like us out there, you included, Kacie, who are decent communicators who can actually help, in partnership, create great science communication.

Sadly, nobody’s going to read the 30-page white paper, unfortunately. How do we translate it to podcasts? How do we translate it to film, to blogs, things that are digestible by the greater mass of people? How do we get those truths out there in a way that fights against the strange movement to really silence science?

Kacie Luaders: You’ve mentioned some of the wonderful things that can come about from the work that you do and the impact that you can have. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the challenges, perhaps when it comes to either the current sociopolitical climate, when it comes to just being able to find the resources to make this type of work that sometimes may be commercially viable and sometimes may be more impact-driven? Talk to us a little bit about the challenges and perhaps how, even mindset-wise, you overcome them.

Greg Hemmings: There’s a few answers to that question. One of them is straight-up business. A lot of our work that we do in the U.S. is with American for-profit companies and some nonprofits as well through my B Corp network. A lot of those companies have been severely impacted because of the cutting of USAID, because of so many other social programs that have been destroyed, because of the chainsaw massacre that happened with Elon Musk coming in and doing whatever the heck it was that he thought he was doing.

I fully appreciate the need for efficiencies. I get it. But the impacts that have happened in your country, of course, trickle over to my business here in Canada. The tariffs are a huge issue for us to think about. How do we work with companies that are now struggling because of these international issues? Everybody’s tightening their belts.

And me, I’m a marketer. I make films to help brands and companies share their stories as well. A lot of people are hurting right now. A lot of businesses are not doing well, and so that’s a struggle. That’s a challenge.

On the flip side, we are blessed to have two different types of work in our business. One is for service, which is what I’m talking about right here, producing really great content for good companies. That’s where people pay us to help tell their story.

The other side is original content, where we come up with ideas, we pitch them to broadcasters, and oftentimes when one vertical is strong, the other one’s weak, and vice versa. Thankfully, right now, the original content side seems to be on an upswing, whereas the marketing side is down.

The current landscape, let me put it this way. I’m inspired to use my company as a force for good. And if positive storytelling can help shift the way someone looks at something in a kind way, we’re not about throwing rocks. There are a lot of great storytellers and documentary makers like Michael Moore. Amazing rock thrower, and I love his work. I love it. It’s great. I’m a consumer of it. I promote it. It’s fine.

Those aren’t the types of storytelling tools I want to use. I picture it as the frosting in an Oreo cookie. I want people on the center right and the center left to come in and say, “Oh yeah, we do agree on these same things.” I don’t want to alienate people, but I really want people to consider what it is that we’re really caring about.

Whatever the heck is going on spiritually and geopolitically right now, it’s awful. It’s all division. If we can use storytelling and science to gently bring people back together and start realizing what real facts are, and if I can play a small role in that through the process of how we make our films, then I feel that’s a good use of our time.

Kacie Luaders: That’s a great way to wrap up. Thank you so much for sharing your perspective with us today. If folks want to check out more of your work or learn more about Hemmings House, how can they do that?

Greg Hemmings: Okay, a few different ways. One way is our website, hemmingshouse.com. That’s our company that does a lot of commercial work. Our original content company is hemmingsfilms.com. So two separate companies, different websites, different teams, but a similar vibe.

Check those out. You can find us on all the socials. I’m mostly active on LinkedIn and on YouTube these days. Personally, you can find me at Greg Hemmings Official, and our company YouTube channel is Hemmings World. Find us on Instagram, Facebook, just look up Hemmings House or Greg Hemmings and you’ll find us out there.

And I’d love to talk. If anybody ever has any science communication challenges, we’re here.

Kacie Luaders: Now that we’ve heard from Greg, consider this next. Greg described using film not just to document change, but to import it, finding what works somewhere else, bringing it home, and building the infrastructure to make it stick.

What’s the equivalent move in your work? What model exists somewhere that you could document, translate, and replicate for your own community?

He also talked about becoming a certified B Corp as a structural tool for being able to say no, a way to hold himself accountable to his values when financial pressure made it tempting to drift. What external accountability structures exist in your field that could serve a similar function for your organization?

Greg is a non-scientist who has built deep credibility working alongside scientists by being honest about what he doesn’t know. Where in your own work are you trying to speak a language you haven’t learned yet? And who could you partner with to help you?

And finally, Greg talked about designing for the Oreo cookie center, storytelling that doesn’t throw rocks but still moves people in the current climate. How are you thinking about who your work needs to reach, not just who already agrees with you?

Before we sign off, I’d like to offer a big thank you to you, our listeners, for tuning in and engaging with these crucial topics. If you found value in this podcast, please don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review. Your support helps us continue to bring you insightful conversations like this.

Until next time, keep nurturing your curiosity and stay connected to the science all around you. This is Kacie Luaders signing off for Consider This Next, an audio program from the Civic Science Media Lab.