History

The seeds of the TDB Family Foundation were planted in 2010. Our founder, Terri Bullock, and our Executive Director, Will Stoller-Lee, were part of a team of people who brought the Windrider Film Forum to the Bay Area. Windrider was launched in 2005 as an immersive educational experience at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, UT. Each year our Windrider Bay Area team would curate a program with independent films from Sundance and other festivals from around the country and create a unique community film experience to connect our local audience to these inspiring stories and the filmmakers and subjects of these films.

Windrider Bay Area was designed to facilitate thoughtful conversation, awaken compassion, and inspire change. Over the years, we saw how storytelling and the arts had the ability to open people up to explore some of the most challenging issues facing us as a society and inspire them to look for ways to respond. We often connected our audience with organizations and nonprofits who were providing resources and solutions to some of the challenges highlighted in these films. On a personal level, these films revealed our shared humanity, inspired individuals to be more empathetic and compassionate to one another, and offered each of us a “lens of hope”.

WRBA – Independent Films. Compelling Conversations. Unexpected Journeys.

In 2020, at a time when our personal and societal relationships were even more fractured than normal, our founder decided to conduct her own personal social experiment. Frustrated by this divisiveness and polarization, Terri Bullock realized she was surrounded by individuals who had the ability to provide a healing alternative to the problem. She selected 50 friends and acquaintances from all over the country (even a few from other countries) and sent each of them a generous check and enlisted them to be “Kindness Ambassadors”.

These 50 individuals were a mix of ages, backgrounds, interests, and abilities. All of them were given a simple mandate to be their “best selves” and seek ways to inspire more kindness in the world. There were no restrictions given on the ways to do this and no burdensome reporting requirements. Some Kindness Ambassadors decided to extend kindness to individuals, others chose to support local nonprofits, many focused on their own community, others tackled projects in other countries. The lessons learned from this initiative led us to create a new family foundation designed to continue this work in a more intentional and structured way.

In January 2023, we launched the TDB Family Foundation, a new foundation with a focus on kindness and a lens of hope. TDBFF is the convergence of 15 years of programming social impact films for Windrider Bay Area and the outgrowth of a two-year long social experiment to see if kindness could have a positive impact on the divisiveness in our culture and the enormous societal challenges we were facing.