Fired Up: Meet Full Frame’s Green Team

Several years ago, Debra West received an email from Full Frame, appealing for volunteers for its upcoming annual film festival. West had attended the festival many times, but always as an audience member—never as a volunteer.

“This could be fun,” she remembered thinking. She signed up to work with the Green Team, which is the group of volunteers who help keep the festival’s carbon footprint small. Green Team members assist wherever there is food and beverage, diverting compostable and recyclable materials from the landfill.

In the past few years, Full Frame has focused on reducing waste at the source through thoughtful purchasing and planning. By more closely matching food, beverage, and supply purchases to actual festival needs, fewer materials go unused or uneaten. Still, in 2024 and 2025, the Green Team diverted about 3,000 pounds of compostable material from the trash—about the weight of a Toyota Corolla.

From her first day working on the Green Team, West knew she had found her perfect fit. “I used to work in the waste recovery and recycling industry, and it just aligned with my environmental values to help people compost and recycle,” said West. “But part of why I have stayed with the Green Team is I love the people on it. They’re so cool and like-minded and fun to hang around with.”

One of the perks of volunteering in any position at Full Frame is receiving a festival pass that comes with five film tickets. In 2025, West and a few of her Green Team friends went together to see Kim A. Snyder’s film THE LIBRARIANS, which documents the nationwide fight against book bans. The film earned a standing ovation at Full Frame and recently won an Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking.

“We were really, really moved by that story and by the courage of those librarians who are standing up against oppression and the suppression of ideas,” said West.

The friends were so fired up, in fact, that they started a Banned Book Club to expand the important conversation around free speech and censorship. At their first meeting, they discussed George Orwell’s 1984. The next month, it was Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Since then, the group has grown to more than a dozen members and continues to convene every month.

“A question that we always ask ourselves is, ‘Why is this book banned?’” said Green Team co-leader Darlene Fiscus, who attended the screening and co-founded the book club. “And then we talk about the action we can take right now to feel more hopeful. One of our members proposed sharing banned books in neighborhood library nooks in different communities, so that’s what we’ve started doing.”

Their guerrilla book shares are just one example of how powerful documentary films can spark meaningful action in the real world.

“People on the Green Team get involved because we love documentary films and we love the festival, and we also love our community and we love the environment,” said Fiscus. “It’s really a reflection of our values, and as a result, we meet like-minded people that we have become friends with. So, I’d say if those values resonate with you, join the Green Team.”