[cr-india] Greetings from Drishti and Video Volunteers

drishti drishtiad1 at gmail.com
Mon Mar 19 08:58:08 CET 2007 

Greetings from Drishti
Dear friends,

Here is a note on the progress of our Community Video Units, and some other
news, written by Jessica, the founder of Drishti’s partner organization,
Video Volunteers.   I’d love to discuss with any of you whether we can do
the same community media work in partnership with you.

In harmony,

Stalin K., co-founder and Director, Drishti Media, Arts and Human Rights
www.drishtimedia.org






Dear Friends

Our Community Video Units have now reached 60,000 people in more 270
community screenings, since the first screening in September. It’s been an
incredibly beautiful process to watch the Community Producers blossom, and
to engage in such a creative activity with them—it’s almost hard to believe
that none of these Community Video Units even existed a year ago.

Now that we have begun achieving regular Video Magazine production and
village screenings, we are seeing that this is a viable model to create
‘community owned media.’ I wanted to take a moment to share some of our
learnings with our friends, in three areas that are key to our mission.

Articulating Change
The concept of voice was what inspired me to start Video Volunteers—ever
since David Hoffman, the Founder of Internews, told me on the phone one day
about the World Bank’s “Voices of the Poor” study in which 60,000 “poorest
of the poor” reported access to a voice as their number one priority—above
even food, shelter, and education. But ‘voice’ is a vague, over-used and
unquantifiable concept—whether on VV’s homepage or in a cell phone
commercial. So what does it mean to us? It means the ability to
articulate—to prevail in a debate, to express complex ideas and emotions,
and to paint verbal pictures that convey one’s own unique identity.

Imagine your own life if you were not empowered to articulate—if you couldn’
t express why you vote for one political party, resolve a conflict with your
spouse, convince your boss of your good idea for your organization, or even
argue your way onto an overbooked airplane. Our voice is as critical to life
as our food, shelter and education--yet in so many developing countries, the
poor lack the communications skills and the platforms to share and
problem-solve in a creative manner. They aren’t empowered to explain why the
road is being built in the wrong place; or to complain to a teacher who
doesn’t come on time, or to share their aspirations and dreams within their
families, especially if they are women. Developing these abilities to
articulate requires a significant time and financial investment, and an
awareness that true articulation is altogether different from just ‘having a
voice,’ and expressing one’s emotions—because it can only happen through an
investment in that person’s intellectual ability. This is why, in the
Community Video Unit (CVU) model, a trainer is placed in each NGO for one
full year.  Our goal is to transform our Producers into journalists,
leaders, activists, and communicators, with the camera simply as the vehicle
for this incredibly intensive leadership development.

Our partner organization, Drishti Media, Arts and Human Rights, is one of
the world’s experts in providing this kind of empowerment training. Stalin
K, Drishti’s Director (and the India Director of Video Volunteers), has just
been made the Convener of the Community Radio Forum-India. The Forum is a
network of organizations that has just won a historic legislative victory
enabling communities to own and operate their own small FM radio stations
for the first time ever. In all his community media endeavors, Stalin
intends to develop models to use media to empower people to articulate on
all issues, not just the single issue that community is being organized
around.

I’ve been to so many rallies where 100s of rural people are given a chance
to confront government officials. When the organizer says, ‘who would like
to come to the mic?’ there is dead silence, until finally the organizer can
coax up one dependable old man to tell how the NGO has changed his life.
That community may have been successfully organized around one issue, say
water—but if they don’t have the platforms to come together again, you will
NOT see them organize on another issue; you will not see communities taking
the lead in their own development there on an on-going basis.

Our whole motivation is focused around how we can create permanent community
platforms where people come together, share and debate, and create
solutions—a kind of Athenian forum for villages and slums. The CVUs create
those platforms, and the innovative aspects of it—that it is for, of, and by
a geographically tight community—are all designed to create a ‘buzz,’ a
virtuous circle of discussion, leadership and people taking action. The
communities see the Community Producers on a recurring basis, they respond
to their probing questions when they are out shooting “vox pop” segments,
they see their neighbors on screen and laugh at themselves, and they stay
for discussions and debates and go home with new ideas in their heads, and
new things to talk about.

The Producers at the Samvad (‘Dialogue’) Community Video Unit, in
partnership with the local NGO Saath, talk about how Rickshaw drivers in
their neighborhoods recognize them and thank them; they have kids follow
them in the streets singing their theme song, and little girls come up
Rehana, one of the women producers, saying, ‘you’re my favorite in the
movie!’ Like any media people, they’ve got their fan clubs—it just so
happens that these movies are seen on projectors in public spaces, not TV,
and the ‘stars’ are role models young girls can actually aspire to be.

These are the ‘early indicators’ of ‘community owned media’, and in the
coming year we will develop programs to create the ultimate test of
community ownership—whether communities will pay to receive media. One of
the other Community Video Units, Aapna Ma Lakma (meaning ‘In our Land)” is
an all-Dalit CVU in partnership with the NGO Navsarjan. They have set a
monthly target that one more of their 25 villages should agree to cover the
transportation costs of bringing the video magazine to their village, so
that within two years communities are covering the entire local distribution
cost!

Our emphasis on creating an environment to foster local ownership, where
communities are willing to make sacrifices to keep the Community Video Unit
going, is what separates our earlier approach of isolated ‘projects’ from
our recently-developed vision of creating a global ‘media industry’ at the
base of the pyramid.  It is our goal that the CVUs will be able to cover a
significant part of their operating costs within a few years.  Many things
are necessary for this, but I’ll talk about two that we are actively
pursuing in 2007: involving the mainstream media, and an active and
expanding network.

Mainstream Media and Community Media
The Indian media has gone from one state-owned television station, to 100s
of independent channels in just over a decade—and now, community radio. But
what impact does this have on the poor?

All the Community Video Units spent their first few weeks surveying the
community on the issues they would like to see in the media: health
information, employment opportunities, local culture
 this is what they want
to see, but never do. We give the Community Producers an exercise in which
they add up the column inches in newspapers, and airtime minutes on the
news, given to the issues affecting the poor. In every case, the attention
to these critical issues is minute or non-existent. Stalin knows reporters
whose beats have shifted from agriculture, to fashion, in the last five
years, or from ‘labor,’ to lifestyle—all the beats to promote the idea of a
“Shining India” of outsourcing films and new billionaires. But the media,
and the government, have now woken up to the fact that this isn’t the
reality: the previous central government was thrown out by distressed rural
voters, and the media is also realizing rural viewers are a market they need
to listen to. A journalist from one of the major 24 hour news stations came
to visit us last week—they would like our Community Video Units to provide
them content for their ‘citizen’s journalism’ programs. They launched it six
months ago, but have never once gotten a story from a rural area.

There’s a great business model here to get the mainstream media—and through
them, the middle classes—to engage with issues of poverty and rights
violations: the plethora of media channels, both nationally,
internationally, and on the web, have no way of getting content from rural
areas. We are already one of the bigger media production companies in India
using the ‘VideoJournalism’ model of low-cost production. We intend to grow
the network to over 100 Community Producers in the next year. For the
stations, we will merely be a source of ‘cheap content,’ but that’s fine
with us, because it still helps us do what we want to do—increase the
visibility and representation of the most marginalized and unheard voices
and communities in the mainstream media.

Growing a Social Media Network
Before I sign off, I’d like to share one of our key learnings from the last
year. if our community media initiatives are to be financially sustainable,
and are to impact the mainstream media, we must achieve scale, and make
long-term commitments to the communities where we work. Around the world,
community media is usually undertaken as part of an NGO’s marketing effort,
in which community members undergo a few days or weeks of training, and
produce a lovely video for that NGO at the end. Few of these are expected to
continue after the project period, or to generate income—but it is our goal,
at Video Volunteers and at Drishti, to demonstrate that much more is
possible. The investments that organizations make in outside filmmakers or
in single video products, can be investments in the communities
themselves—investments in the creation of permanent platforms that catalyze
community-led development. That’s what we have set out to create with the
Community Video Units, and what we feel is possible in all community media
initiatives in our new digital age.

As many of you know, we have started our efforts to expand the Network to
more NGOs in India later this year.  The response so far has been
tremendous, and we’ve had expressions of interest from over 60 NGOs! This is
a good indicator that a Social Media Network of Community Producers from
around the world, supported by a network of NGOs, is indeed possible. None
of this would have been possible without our NGO partners Laya, Navsarjan,
Saath, Yuvshakti, Akshara and Yuva, and the future won’t be possible without
more like them.

If you are an individual, or an NGO, interested in empowering local
communities to articulate and in investing in this emergent social media
network, I hope we will hear from you soon.  And please have a look at some
of the videos!  They are posted here:  http://tinyurl.com/y4luam as well as
here: http://tinyurl.com/yyk9lk

With warm regards

Jessica Mayberry
Founding Director
Video Volunteers
www.videovolunteers.org





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