After five years of doing community media in India, we've come to understand what Video Volunteers is good at. We're great at training -- the people we work with keep doing this for a long time after they're trained. And we're great at getting impact in the villages. We know how to produce the content that people in rural India want to see; the evidence for this is that people turn up in large numbers for the screenings and actually take action.

The Indian government has several major programs to bring Internet and information to rural areas -- one is the Common Service Centers, a program to bring fiber optic cables to every 10th village; another amazing one is the $35 video-enabled tablet computer.

We think these new government programs can give a huge boost to community media in India, and they can help us scale, provided we create the right partnerships. We're thinking about things like web channels for content aimed at rural audiences for the tablets, and citizen journalism reporting apps. The public screenings on projectors that the people in our Community Video Units do are immensely powerful, but in time, a similar effect will emerge as people are able to share videos in villages over their cell phones and watch them on computers.

So far, these programs are conceived as a way to push information out to the rural areas, so the poor get information on government programs and plans. We come in, because we can reverse the system -- we can bring the knowledge and ideas of the poor to the government. We can enable people to produce content for these new distribution pipelines. No one will use them if there is no locally available content.

So when we meet government officials, our message is this: Enabling the poor to produce content, to be heard, and to share their own knowledge is crucial for democracy.

Why funding matters

In Part 1 of this series, I focused on Video Volunteers' work with IndiaUnheard, our flagship rural feature service. But many other projects have kept us busy this year: We did a series of trainings for tribals in Gujarat, India on documenting local culture for a local museum; we provided support to a community radio station called Sramik Bharti; and we launched a very exciting program with UNDP in Eastern UP where 20 rural women are trained to use video to monitor their self-help groups and the use of funds that are earmarked for their investment.

We received visits from Semester at Sea, the University of Nebraska Journalism school, and several Indian NGOs (non-governmental organizations). We spoke about our work and showed our videos in numerous places: the WSSCC international water conference; the Dalit Solidarity Network Conference in Kathmandu; TEDx Mumbai; the India government's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting conference; and the University of Nebraska where I was an "Innovator in Residence."

Funding has continued to be hard, and we haven't been able to take on as many new community correspondents as we would like, because for the last year we've relied a lot on smaller donations that are harder to come by. We find that the obsession with "something new" is making it hard for us to fund projects that we've been running for more than a year, such as our Community Video Units program, which is 5 years old.

However, I've recently met with several foundations that seem to really see the value in creating a model to bring content out of all rural areas, and so I hope we'll be able to make the leap from a $300,000-a-year organization (where we've been for the last five years) to an organization with twice that budget. As I've said in the past, the costs of maintaining rural stringers for all of India are relatively low (around $400,000 a year), and we hope that someone will see the value in being able to make information flow from remote areas in a rational manner.

Watch a few of our best videos from the year:

In August, the Video Volunteers staff attended an amazing program called the Global Social Business Incubator at Santa Clara University, where we developed a new business plan focused on income from the mainstream media. Our idea is to have one rural reporter in each of India's 645 districts, set up like a rural stringers network, to deliver a pipeline of high-quality, low-cost human interest content to television stations. The maintenance costs of such a network, once it's set up, would be relatively low -- about $300,000 a year for 645 rural correspondents, or about the cost of 20-30 television producers in Delhi. 

Ultimately, we feel that the recruitment, training and generation of impact will need to be supported by philanthropy, but that production and distribution should be taken care of by the market.

We made significant progress in 2011. In May, NewsX, the Indian network, broadcast our 13-part series called "Speak Out India." We sold them eight stories a week, and they produced a show around it. It was the first time we know of where a mainstream news company has paid for content produced by people living at the so-called base of the pyramid, and the successful run of that show has given us a successful track record with the media. The problem was, they only paid us the stringer rate for the stories, so about 1,500 rupees ($30) when our costs of production are more like 8,000 rupees ($160).

Our next goal was to see if an Indian TV channel would sign a contract with us for a similar amount of content each week (about 30 minutes) at our fully loaded cost of production for a 3-minute story. Hence, Video Volunteers' earned income goal for the end of this year was $100,000, or about 40% of our total budget. This would still be significantly lower than the costs of a TV station doing these stories themselves.

In the last three months, we've made two trips to Delhi and Mumbai to meet the TV channels, and the response has been very enlightening. So far, we've met about half of the top 20 English or Hindi news channels. They all like the content. They find our community correspondents full of energy, and feel that our flip cams are generating adequate quality.

The fact that India is in the throes of an anti-corruption movement is a really good thing for us, because we have lots of great corruption stories that they want. So far so good, in that they clearly are saying, "We'll run this content." This is a big step from a few years ago, where everyone we spoke to said we were crazy to think TV stations would run stuff produced by poor villagers. 

The Rural Newswire

As for the idea of a "rural newswire," they also get the concept. One senior person at CNN IBN said, "It's a well-known secret in Indian media that abysmal stringers are a huge problem." The chief executive of CNN IBN has talked in media interviews (including when he's been interviewed about Video Volunteers) about the "tyranny of distance," and how the remote areas of the country are often prohibitively expensive to cover. Someone at a government channel even told us that our idea couldn't work with the government channel "because all our stringers are political appointees!"

But despite all this, we're not sure they're ready to pay for quality. One producer at a news channel here who was really championing us internally said, "I'm pitching this as a high-quality stringers network. Everyone knows our stringers are awful, but the problem is they are OK with bad quality."

Bottom line at the end of our first 10 TV station meetings: Stations will take our stuff for free. They would probably also pay us the stringer rate -- but not necessarily the fully loaded cost. So now we're working with one station that's going to try to find a corporate sponsor, and will probably be the first mainstream media contract to materialize for us next year.

Online Distribution Helps

Thankfully, the Internet is a space where we can produce and publicize our content without depending on a broadcaster. We are currently publishing one video a day on our site, which is searchable by issue, region and community correspondent. The good news is that we've doubled our viewers over the last six months. The less good news is that the numbers are still low. We're going to start tweaking our format to show the back story and the trials and tribulations of the community producers more.

We've set aside one day a week, Wednesday, to publish impact videos -- this will have an impact on us in terms of fundraising! And we hope to start producing our own podcasts where we club together videos on a particular theme and have someone in our office as an anchor. We now have more than 450 edited 3-minute videos on every conceivable issue of human rights, poverty alleviation, and local culture. We're sitting on a gold mine of content, and now the fun starts of repackaging it and seeing what themes emerge and getting others to comment on the content.

We're confident this will work, because when our content is on other platforms that get traffic, it does very well. We're now partnered with several online companies, namely MSN, Rediff, Viewspaper and ViewChange.org. The partnership with Rediff is particularly promising; our first video with it got 100,000 views and loads of comments.

We also reach greater numbers of people through commissioned film projects. We've been hired this year by several organizations to gather stories or footage, such as: the one day on Earth project; YouTube's Day in a Life project; and the Red Cross, for whom we produced 12 videos on hunger in rural India that they're using in campaign events around the world. We've also gathered stories of climate change for our partner organization Laya; stories of development-induced displacement for Witness; stories on domestic violence for Breakthrough; and on local farming for the Gene Campaign.

Our correspondents gathered "recce" footage on caste for one of India's major production companies, and got answers from dozens of people to the question, "Are You Happy?" for a film project replicating Jean Rouch's seminal 1961 movie "Chronicle of Summer."

Are you happy? - from Jharkhand from Video Volunteers on Vimeo.

Stay tuned for our fourth and last post of the blog series, in which we'll discuss our other activities and programs and our vision for the future.

Part 2 outlines new ideas we implemented into our training programs in 2011. For instance, we set incentives for our community correspondents in India. This triggered a series of valuable positive changes for the communities concerned.

Incentives work

In October, we held an advanced training session for our strongest community correspondents which focused on activism and getting "impact." (To us, "impact" means that the community correspondent is able to resolve the problem the video addresses.) We told them we had decided to incentivize impact.

They would be paid 5,000 rupees (approximately $100) -- more than twice the regular stipend -- for an "impact video," which means they would make a video; show it locally to get the issue solved; and make another documenting that process and proving the impact actually took place -- and for that second video, they would get the 5,000 rupees.

Some amazing impacts happened this year: In Orissa, illegal timber smugglers were stopped by local villagers. In Mumbai, a factory was forced to clean its pollution. In Assam, politicians released desperately needed water to villagers. Rather than be turned away, Dalit children got help in village child centers. Expectant mothers received folic acid which had previously been withheld. And, in one area, some 600 women for the first time were paid minimum wage.

These are just some of our stories. You can watch our impact videos here.

Recruitment is challenging

Our goal is to have 645 community correspondents, or one in every district of India. We had to think hard about how we could quickly scale up if we needed to.

Our first two rounds of recruitment for IndiaUnheard was through our existing network. We sent emails asking people to nominate someone from the villages they work in and then to help them fill out the online application. We got a few hundred applications that way and thought we could keep doing it like that. But when we tried for the third round, the number of eligible applications was low (though the overall applications were higher than previous years). Maybe we had tapped out our existing network.

So how could we quickly scale up? Possibly through big non-profit institutions (like microfinance). We are reaching out to them now.

Choose the right geographies

For our first two rounds, our goal was to get one or two people in every state. Now that we've almost done that, we're going to focus on key regions we feel are "unheard."

Last month, we took about 20 new community correspondents from Jharkhand. We chose Jharkhand because it is part of the so-called Red Corridor where there is a Maoist insurgency taking place. In the future, we'll look at the North East where other separatist movements are taking place, and Kashmir. (Those two areas were out of our budget this year.)

My colleagues Kamini Menon and Stalin K. spent two weeks traveling around this area meeting the activists and doing the recruitment; this live recruitment is making recruitment easier and will also make retention higher because the 13 new correspondents, each representing one district in the same state, can support each other.

Partnerships are challenging

Two years ago, when our Community Video Units were our primary focus, we felt that we could scale this network through investments from NGOs (non-governmental organizations). We've realized that co-ownership is very difficult and can at times be a hindrance to innovation.

We now feel that we can scale better through partnerships with the mainstream media, rather than NGOs, and so for that reason, a huge focus this year has been on ensuring the content can work for both a local community and outside audience.

From our Community Video Units, we've learned a few other things: One is that a model where people are paid only when they perform is better than the Community Video Units model, in which the six or seven people who work together on a film are given a monthly wage.

Women produce more

Two observations we are thrilled to see: Women produce more, and retention is higher with the underprivileged. It suggests that journalism really is an appropriate livelihood for the poor. We started to see that with online recruitment, we had selected certain people whose incomes were clearly higher than they had told us on the phone. Live recruitment in extremely remote areas of Jharkhand will help get the correct balance.

The amount they can produce is low

We ask correspondents to produce two videos a month. They produce on average one or less. One reason is that being a journalist is difficult; it takes a lot of personal courage to confront officials and ask people private questions. They can spend a whole day on a bus getting to an official who then won't see them. They have to take care of their families, too.

I learned this year about the concept of "businesses in a box" and franchises, such as rural women selling solar lamps or soap sachets, and I discovered that we should make the process as simple and step-by-step as possible.

But journalism is simply harder than selling soap. We also ask them to produce tough stories that they have to research and which take time, unlike stringers, who are told to "go film this event and send us the footage." This means that our "cost per story" is higher than we would like. But we also aren't taking huge steps to increase their productivity right now, because we don't yet have enough buyers to support a huge level of production.

Choose the right people to train

The fact that we put such effort in selecting interesting people to train is a huge asset for us. Our new batch of correspondents includes people whose personal stories are, in some ways, the story. We have two boys from Kashmir who have seen the insurgency; a young man whose sister was the first dowry death in his state; women who have experienced sexual violence and have the courage to speak about it; and a good representation from the North East, including one young man who got the first footage of a particular insurgent camp because he's from that area.

In our training, we teach them that their power as a community correspondent will come through using their personal experiences and connections to the issues. This is what they have that no professional, no outsider, can ever replicate. They learn that they themselves must speak out, and speak personally, if they want their communities to do so, too.

Good training is not necessarily scalable. (That's another thing that we learned in 2011 -- that the training aspects of our work will always be expensive because education doesn't have a lot of economies of scale.) But it is the most valuable investment.

You can watch a video from our trainings here:

Stay tuned for Part 3 of this series, which will focus on our modes of online and offline distribution and our experience with earning income from partners and the mainstream media.

At every community video training that Video Volunteers conducts for people from marginalized communities in India, more and more people are showing up with $15 Chinese-made video-enabled cell phones. It's now possible for rural people without data connections to send tweets via SMS. In India, the government has ambitious programs to bring the Internet into the villages.

Everything seems set for a mass of content to be coming out of rural areas -- which brings us to our problem: the fact that it is not.

The mere presence of information technology, like the 800 million cell phone connections in India, does not ensure local content creation. If you search the names of most remote Indian villages on YouTube, nothing will appear. If you search them on Google itself, never mind YouTube, most of what appears is raw government data. Content is produced by a small group of people, and the world's poor, in particular, are producing virtually zero digital content. Content continues to be made by the "drivers" for the "driven."

Video Volunteers is seeking to change this one-sided status quo; we're posing as a question the statement with which I started this post: What would it take for every village in the developing world to have someone -- a local changemaker -- who broadcasts that village's issues to the world? How can one provide the training, support and human connection for some of the world's most underprivileged communities to feel that their voice matters?

Over the last year, we've re-strategized our programs and revamped our business model in the search for a truly scalable model of community media. As part of a 4-part series, I'll be sharing what we've done over the last year, our experiences, and what we've learned. This has relevance to people interested in numerous issues, from improving the quality of journalism, to understanding how communications between government and its citizens can be two-way rather than one way, and increasing the quantum of good ideas the world has for tackling poverty.

In this post, Part 1, I'll be giving a basic introduction to IndiaUnheard, our flagship rural feature service. In Part 2, I will share what we learned in 2011 on how to make community media a sustainable enterprise. Part 3 details our distribution plans and strategies to earn revenue from the mainstream media. Part 4 looks toward the future.

A network of community correspondents

IndiaUnheard is Video Volunteers' network of community correspondents. In February 2011, we took in our second batch of IndiaUnheard community correspondents, bringing the total number of community correspondents to 52, 45 of which are still with us. They now cover 24 states in India and 45 districts.

The basic model is as follows:

• We recruit grassroots activists through a network of social movements and NGOs (non-governmental organization.)

• The basic criterion is that the candidates be economically poor and also have a history of volunteerism and a strong sense of belonging to their community. This is to ensure that they'll stay committed to producing the videos of the stories their communities say need to be told.

• We only work with socially marginalized and oppressed communities -- Dalit, Tribal, religious and sexual minorities, and women.

• We train them for two weeks at an intensive training camp in video activism, journalism ethics, and television news-style production.

• We give them each a low-cost HD video camera. Cisco has recently donated 500 of them, and we are very excited.

• They return to their villages and produce at least two videos a month.

• They come up with stories from their own village and in neighboring villages in their district.

• They each work with a mentor in the Video Volunteers office. Every senior staff member mentors 5-7 community producers, advising them once a week by phone on their stories.

• They shoot their stories, go to an Internet cafe, and transfer the footage to DVD, which they snail-mail us to our office in Goa.

• It's an entrepreneurial model where they are paid on a per-video basis. We pay them what we know the Indian media pays its stringers, or its local freelance reporters.
  A team of editors in the office edit the stories.

• They are then posted on our "website:"http://www.indiaunheard.videovolunteers.org where we broadcast one video a day, accompanied by an article, which is generally written by a research intern.

Once the video is online, the community correspondent can download it from the Internet and start using it to get an impact in her village. Meanwhile, from our office, we can start the next level of distribution to mainstream media and other NGOs.

In the longer term, this low-cost, innovative model is a way for every village in the developing world to have someone trained to use the latest technologies to advocate for their rights. There are now video-enabled cell phones in all corners of the world, and a model like IndiaUnheard can enable these technologies to be used to capture human rights violations and bring them to the attention of the world.

Here's a video compiling different sound bites from the community correspondents. You can watch more videos here.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series, in which we'll discuss what we've learned about what makes community media a sustainable enterprise.

Here are some videos to show you what it's about: The village of Natpura, featured in this video below, in rural Uttar Pradesh has no women left in it. Every single one of them has been sold into prostitution rings in India and around the world by their families.

At the other side of the country, in another village, impoverished children featured in this video are not able to take their national exams because headmasters demand a bribe their families cannot afford to pay.

These two stories were broken not by mainstream journalists but by people living in these actual communities -- people who themselves experience these same kinds of exploitation and disadvantage. Because of that, the reporters (or community correspondent, as Video Volunteers calls them) have a vested interest in making sure something happens as a result of the video. They are de facto activists. In the case of the second video, the teacher in question school has been demoted. After seeing that result, the people in a neighboring village asked the correspondent to come make a video about their horrible school, and the teacher in that school was also suspended. Angry villagers mounted a rally led by our young, 19 year-old community correspondent, Mukesh Rajak, himself a young Dalit from the "lowest" caste in India. Mukesh went to the government official's office and showed her the video on his cell phone. The official was furious and took action against the bribe-taking teacher. This is the power of community media and the cascading effect of local media.

How it Works

Our 30 community correspondents (CCs) are stationed across India, nearly one in every state. They make us on average one video a month and we pay them about $30 a video. We are trying to set them up as entrepreneurs -- they make videos, they get paid. If they don't, they don't get paid. This is different from the more charitable model of most community media and is possible because we are working with adults, not youth or children.

The first 30 CCs were trained in March 2010, with support from the News Challenge. They had a two-week residential training in all manner of video journalism. In our primary program, dubbed the Community Video Units, we give them 18 months of full time training that we have felt is necessary when working with such rural communities, so a short intensive training was a departure for us. We plan to take in two new batches of Community Correspondents every year.

A Diverse Network

Community Correspondents are dalits, tribals, Muslims, rural women, among others. Our CC in Chhattisgarh is Sarwat. He is a member of his village council and feels that IndiaUnheard offers a better platform for tackling real issues than local government does. Rohini is our CC from Walhe village in Maharashtra. She was married off right after she finished her 10th grade. She is determined to change the condition of women in her community and her videos bear testimony to this. She's made video stories on devdasis (temple slaves/prostitutes), early marriage and anti-women customs like dowry. Christyraj is a transgender CC from Bangalore. He is one of the only transgender journalists in India and works tirelessly to bring the issues of his community to the fore.

Since May 1 (we launched on World Press Day) a new video report on key issues such as caste, conflict, identity and education is being released every day on the IndiaUnheard website. They are also further distributed through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other online news portals like Ground Report. Though these communities in India don't have Internet access, they are speaking directly to a global web audience. The impact stories we have -- such as medical supplies being delivered to villages after an IndiaUnheard report, by a web viewer, and people getting their ration cards because of the pressure of exposure on corrupt officials -- are examples of something that is still very high tech in the developing world (cell phone video) actually seeping in to make an impact on corruption.

The people we work with are still totally unconnected, with only one cell phone shared between many family members, no computer skills and Internet cafes often hours away. We struggle with how to bring their media and their voices to a global audience when they themselves can't participate in the online dialog. We've designed some rather unusual solutions to this digital divide challenge-- such as maintaining Facebook and twitter accounts for them which we maintain on their behalf and call them on the phone when anyone asks them a question -- but the internet is still rather unreal and insignificant to them, though storytelling and the desire to be heard certainly is not.

IndiaUnheard fits with lots of efforts being made in India by the UN, the Indian government and NGOs to promote local democracy. IndiaUnheard's role is to promote democracy by enabling marginalized communities to represent themselves and their issues. Hyperlocal media models empower people with the tools to bring attention to their own issues and to come out from the shadows. India is the world's largest democracy; however, most people don't know their rights as information does not reach the poor majority. Simultaneously, government and the mainstream media cannot easily access the knowledge and perspectives of the poor. IndiaUnheard enables marginalized people to influence policies, highlight gross injustices and take a stand, so a better-informed nation can better tackle issues like rural corruption or failing rural schools or health systems.

A Business Model?

IndiaUnheard is an innovative business model for democratizing the media. I've written about this in other posts on MediaShift Idea Lab to make the point that India and other developing countries have a very small number of stringers in rural areas and those that exist are usually not professionally trained journalists. Video Volunteers believes the poor can be winners in the changing media landscape and that some community correspondents can, in time, support themselves in the market. It's not just that our community correspondents would be cheaper than other freelancers the mainstream could draw on. With the advent of citizen journalism and changing viewing habits thanks to the Internet, the world is hungry to see content they've never seen before. Our producers are in places that the mainstream media cannot or does not access so this is a window into the real India.

Mainstream journalists working in India tend to cover only a certain demographic, they do not dig deep to uncover the stories of the marginalized. Video Volunteers will be feeding IndiaUnheard stories to print and television media, giving journalists -- especially local media -- another source of interesting stories.

What Next?

Our ambition is to expand the program nationally to a point where there is one community correspondent in all 626 districts of India, and internationally, in partnership with NGOs, filmmakers and journalists. This is totally funding dependent, of course, but if we can find people to invest for a few years, I believe that eventually we can be earning a sizable chunk of our revenues from the mainstream media. The question is: is it 20 percent? Fifty percent? Eighty percent? We are trying to work that out now.

In the longer term, this low cost, innovative model is a way for every village in the developing world to have someone trained to use the latest technologies to advocate for their rights. There are now video-enabled cell phones in all corners of the world, and a model like IndiaUnheard can enable these technologies to be used to capture human rights violations and bring them to the attention of the world.

So, please go to IndiaUnheard and watch some of the videos. Write a comment, ask a question of the person who made the video. We'll get on the phone to them and post you an answer. In doing this, you'll help one isolated community in rural India feel a little bit more "heard."

Zuckerman said it's a big myth that the web is bringing us closer to other cultures or countries -- when we're on the web, we're basically in our own small islands of our social networks. Most of us who are building businesses/non-profits around non-traditional media content know this, but he has some great PowerPoint slides that add a lot of meat to the arguments. Give it a look:

Cultural DJs

In addition to providing some very telling facts -- did you know that "Madagascar" the movie is a bigger brand than Madagascar the country? -- he talks about translation. And not just the challenges of literal translation from one language to another, which is something Video Volunteers faces in our work all the time, especially now when we have community video correspondents working in nearly every state of India, a country with dozens of official languages. He talks about "cultural translation." He makes the point that we need more "DJs ... skilled human curators" who can speak the language of the West and of other cultures at the same time.

The incredible editors at Global Voices fit that bill, and so does the blog Afrigadget. Video Volunteers attempt to do this, too, in the articles that accompany the online videos made by our community correspondents in our new IndiaUnheard community news network.

This is really interesting to me because at Video Volunteers we talk a lot about the need for "unmediated" voices -- essentially, voices that are not culturally translated. This is one of the differences between community video, which to us means equipping traditionally "unheard" communities to tell their stories in their own words, and documentary film, where a professional uses his or her artistry and insight to translate community voices for outside audiences.

At VV, we believe, in fact, that so much is lost in translation that you want to keep "cultural translation" to a minimum. And so, with our newly launched IndiaUnheard community news network, we want to bring voices out voices in their raw form. As my partner Stalin K. often says, "if I say the words 'Masai warrior' you get an immediate visual in your head. You don't, in a similar fashion, hear their voices in your head."

We know from TV what the Masai look like. But we don't know what they sound like, because in traditional National Geographic-type media, we just see the Masai with a narration; their whole culture, never mind their language, is translated for an international audience.

There are real limits to the possibilities for translation. As I heard Zuckerman himself say at a Civic Media conference, it's hard enough to find cultural translators for English to other cultures. But what about all the learning that could happen between the readers of, say, Kurdish media in New York City and Haitian media in New York City? How is that translation going to happen? I don't know that we could ever have enough translators to solve that problem.

Two Videos to Watch

So how do we get people to watch -- rather, to want to watch -- videos like these two posted below, made by our IndiaUnheard correspondents? If the world had an ideal system for enabling the poor to represent themselves in the media, which I would say is something like one community journalist per village (or even per 20 villages), how would we interest people outside those villages to watch this content? Here are two recent videos to check out and see what you think:

Children Carry Trash, Not Books shows how children of poor families do not benefit from the current schemes on compulsory free education. The video is produced by Pratibha Rolta, a community correspondent from the mountain state of Himachal Pradesh, who works as an activist on women's issues.

The second video, titled Children Denied Education, captures the plight of child labourers in Haryana's brick kilns who are deprived of several rights, including education. The correspondent here, Satyawan, was a Sarpanch (village head) for five long years before joining IndiaUnheard, and has in-depth knowledge of corruption within the local administration.

Besides our own website and within the communities where the producers work (where most of our work is shown) there are some forums for videos like this. I showed these two videos two weeks ago as a panelist at the IFP/UN-sponsored ENVISION 2010: Addressing Global Issues through Documentaries, an event organized by the IFP, UN Communications Department, and New York Times. This was a one day conference on education and documentary films and, happily, there was space for user-created content.

A few years ago there probably wouldn't have been. I was on a panel about the impact of user-generated media, along with with Mallika Dutt of Breakthrough, John Kennedy of World Without Borders and Ryan Schlieff of Witness -- all good friends in the field of media and human rights. People in the world of documentary film, or in the UN sector with its huge budgets for traditional communications, were getting a taste of what's possible when you turn the camera over to communities. This is progress towards the acceptance of these voices.

More Global Than Ever

With our work, I take a long term perspective. (Wanting every village in the world to have someone skilled and motivated to represent his neighbors' concerns in the media kind of requires that!) I think that media preferences are not fixed in stone. What Americans liked on TV and in the movies in the fifties is different from what we liked in the seventies and today. Who knows where people's tastes will be twenty years from now?

I'm an optimist. I think we will only get more global and more curious, and more open to raw, unfiltered reality. I believe there are even studies that show that kids today who've grown up with mashups and social networks are much more open to gritty media that their parents wouldn't look at.

In the meantime, we keep telling our correspondents to tell their stories in their own words, with their own style, their own analysis -- no matter how challenging it may be for outsiders to understand without translation.

For me, the highlight was MTV's A Thin Line campaign, which aims to reduce cyber harrassment amongst teenagers. This seemed a brilliant campaign because the issue is so totally unusual (at least to someone like me who has no teenage kids), which will certainly make it more fresh for the audience. They shared stats about the incredibly high correlation between cyberbullying and suicide, for instance, and about how often teenagers are forwarding naked pictures of their peers (very often.) MTV's online campaign had some very original pieces to it -- for instance, a digital, teen-made Bill of Rights where teens could work out together what their "community" considers acceptable and not. There is a portion of the site called ""over the line" ":http://www.athinline.org/overthelinewhere kids share stories of cyberharrassment and other kids vote on whether it is "over the line" or acceptable. One girl's story jumped out. She wrote on facebook about her father committing suicide, and kids from her school wrote comments on her fb page like, "if you were my daughter I'd kill myself too." How tragic, the moderator asked, was it that she had to even ask whether those comments were "over the line?" This is one of the most original online campaigns I've seen because it is not about people simply supporting an issue, but people collaborating to come up with an ethical framework in a new area of civic life -- the internet -- where such things don't exist. And that it's being done by teenagers is simply great. Well done MTV!

Moving on to other panels and speakers... I was glad that the conference addressed (at least in one of the panels) the issue of corporate whitewashing (the motivation for many companies in the world to do CSR initiatives) head on. The speaker Douglas Rushkoff presented his book Life, Inc. and made some great comments. He talked about how the core of a company's business should be doing good, so companies don't need to have separate social initiatives. it shouldn't be that a company makes things they are not proud of, and then does social investments to feel better about it. The business itself must be good for the planet.

One thing the companies all talked about a lot is transparency, and how in the internet age companies can't hide or lie or keep their employees quiet. I find it quite disingenuous when people say this, because the old rules do still apply and people will still get fired for speaking badly about their companies. The number of internet leaks or internet whistleblowers is tiny compared to the number of employees who are angry about something the public would find juicy. So I wonder how much the internet is really creating greater transparency about companies? If the live twitter feed running behind the speakers (with only positive comments for all the companies) is anything to go by, people are still concerned that they might actually have a real world reason to stay in their good books -- like a future job, for instance.

For a nonprofit media organization like this, a conference like this is both heartening and frustrating. It's heartening because one sees new ways of using online media, and new metrics of success, and so one get lots of new stories to add weight to one's own beliefs. And sometimes you see really usable ideas -- like Ed Norton (the actor's) new fundraising tool Crowdrise. But it's frustrating because a lot of it is still "old media" simply being pushed out via the internet -- really flashy funny video, written by comedians whose other jobs must be at ComedyCentral.) This is all extremely expensively produced, glossy, and beautiful. What I want to see are the successes of social media campaigns that cost next to nothing, and, ideally, could be replicated. Those are the kinds of things News Challenge winners can try to democratize.

As many of you know, it takes about a year and a half to train our community producers, all of who come from situations of dire poverty. What they have in common is their honesty, passion and intelligence. Our aim in training an individual with immense potential is not just to create a technically sound and editorially sharp professional, but also to encourage leadership in their local communities.

I'd love to share the story of one such person: Zulekha Sayyed.

Zulekha grew up in a slum under harsh conditions; her father died when she was young and her mother worked as a domestic maid, earning roughly $35 a month. Often, they went hungry. She remembers how she would scavenge food from the roadside. She joined Yuva, a local NGO, at the age of 13. Yuva is an organization that has been working with slum dwellers for 25 years to help them formulate their own action plans and mainly, secure their right to housing. They have been organizing slum dwellers against the city's continuous cycle of forced evictions, in which the government razes the shanties of thousands of the city's workers. Yuva has initiated an extensive water campaign in response to the proposed privatization of Mumbai's water supply, and the CVU contributed in a real way to the success of that campaign.

Yuva also runs the Knight-funded CVU Hamari Awaz (literally translated as 'our voice'), which Sulekha joined after finishing high school. She is well aware of the turn her life has taken and says that she wouldn't wish her childhood on anyone else.

Hamari Awaz is a CVU that operates out of the slums of Mumbai. A quote Zulekha has given for our official brochure tells us a lot. She said, "The TV reporters never come to the slums. They only come when something like a bomb blast happens. We are the only local reporters here. So, community media is necessary."

As part of her team's efforts, Zulekha has been helping slum dwellers organize action plans to secure their right to housing. She has helped to organize people to fight against the city's continuous cycle of forced evictions, in which the government razes the shanties of thousands of people to make way for new developments.

As Zulekha's example demonstrates, using the community media in these underprivileged areas is not merely creating journalists, but creating leaders and social activists. To that end, our mandate increases from simply providing journalistic training to supporting entire campaigns carried out by communities. For example, when we aired a story about applying for "Below Poverty Line" cards issued by the government, our producers had to help with filling out application forms too. So, the producers cannot behave like traditional journalists, for whom the story can end once filed with the bureau.

But that is the genius of community media and community journalists. There is no "off" switch. It becomes a passion and a calling. It is then VV's duty to constantly innovate methods of communications and provide them newer platforms to make their voices heard.

Producers like Zulekha make it well worth the effort! (To read more about the work of Zulekha Sayyed, check out this story on GlobalPost.)

As of right now, Video Volunteers has been supporting local media units in India and Brazil whose basic job is to make video stories about their local issues and then screen them locally -- so locally that most videos are seen in between 25 and 50 neighboring villages. As is obvious by that sentence, geography has played an important part in the manner in which we have built these programs. We believe that national (and to some extent regional) media cannot possibly touch upon various local issues that need addressing. Therefore, keeping in mind the scope (and limitations) of such a program, we have worked hard to devise ways in which these local media units -- called Community Video Units (CVU) -- can turn a profit.

Some have been able to sell their videos to the mainstream media, while others have produced some other local media, such as wedding videos; but, ultimately, there is no system in place that can guarantee sustainability. In a sense, that suits the program because we'd rather have the CVUs focus solely on producing media that will encourage positive social change, instead of turning into production houses. But, that is still a step away from one of our ultimate aims, which is to have these marginalized community voices represented in mainstream media.

Platforms and Partners

Fortunately for us, the term "mainstream media" is fluid. New information outlets are established everyday -- who could have predicted Twitter? -- and for an organization like ours that produces short video clips, both television and the Internet provide ample opportunities to showcase our work. The main challenge, therefore, is to identify these platforms and to join hands with like-minded partners to undertake these projects. Therefore, platforms and partners are the two most important facets.

To work with campaign partners across different platforms, Video Volunteers had to expand the CVU program to create a more focused, commercially viable entity. Thus was born the idea of a "community journalists network" where we plan to train Indians who come from disadvantaged backgrounds and turn them into videographers/journalists. At its most basic level, we will be training people ("Fellows") to shine a light on stories that would otherwise remain hidden in slums, tribal areas, villages and the rural pockets of the country.

Leaving aside the challenges of training such a diverse set of people, and the logistical challenge it will be to run this program (more on that later), we must, at first, forge partnerships with people who can provide platforms for this work. An obvious choice has been to approach TV channels to ask them to air stories from us that they consider interesting and of decent quality. We also now understood that we face an additional challenge: To try and differentiate a community journalist from a stringer -- and then to make people care about that difference.

A channel would rather call us and ask "Do you have a man in 'x' village? If so, please take footage of a flood" than have us send an email saying "our community journalist in 'x' has shot a beautiful story about the caste bias that exists within the government school mechanism." It will be our challenge then, to "push" stories from slums/tribal/rural areas to the mainstream media. As things stand today, largely, the stringers are told what to shoot while correspondents (employees) pitch stories. This is because of the relationship between the channel and stringer is one sided, and mostly because the stringer is not really a trained journalist.

We are going to dramatically change this paradigm because our CJs will be looking at their surroundings with a journalistic mind. Video Volunteers will act as a filter and pitch these stories to the channels. Over time, we hope to establish this system as a formal and indeed more productive stringer system in the country.

"Pushing" Stories

A little sidenote as to why it is important that our CJs "push" stories: While TV channels have reporters in big cities and growing towns across India, the geography of the country makes it difficult for any channel to have a presence all over. This is why they employ stringers.

As a result, the bulk of the "news" comes from the places their staff are stationed in, and "incidents" from the rest of the country -- such as floods, rapes, and fires -- get short mention. With this new CJ program, we are essentially planting reporters in oft-neglected pockets of the country. When they produce and we push these stories, then the mainstream media will be able to accurately represent what happens in the entire country, as opposed to a limited section of it.

We have certainly made headway in this regard, and have been very fortunate to meet kindred spirits, but have "miles to go before we sleep." If we can get a series, or branded programming (which makes it obvious that the particular clip is by a VV CJ), it will result in giant strides for the community media movement.

By comparison, we feel that it is easier to find campaign partners at NGOs, companies and government bodies because we can work together to produce material for a particular campaign, and so on. There is no dearth of issues that need to be spotlighted, and we must tap into the development community that works on these issues.

In the months to come, we hope that we can find even more creative ways of attracting traffic to our cause. A big initiative we plan to take is to create a website that showcases these videos by region, topic and "Fellow" (or community journalist). With a highly interactive and frequently updated website, we hope, people will become attracted to both our content and our CJs, and keep coming back.

Below are some interesting things we've learned about how journalism happens in remote areas of India. We've recently started to explore this as we think about revenue models in community media. One of the things we had promised in our Knight-funded Community Video Unit program is that there would be ways to make the Community Video Units sustainable. Now, these projects do earn revenue, but not enough to qualify as sustainable. So this has pushed us to explore other ways to train and organize people at the "base of the pyramid" in media/journalism production, that could earn more revenue and be more scalable, and we hope to develop these ideas into other programs.

About the stringer system in rural India:
• There are probably less than 600 in the entire country, according to one of our advisors, a journalist at NewsX, who is one of the leading TV news producers in the country. That's about 1 stringer per 2 million people, which is the equivalent of the US only having 175 people out of the major cities whom news agencies can call upon for stories.
• The majority of those are in Bombay or Delhi, so the numbers for rural areas is even less
• None of them are professionally trained or schooled in journalism. They can shoot raw video footage upon request, they can conduct and transcribe an interview, they can do some basic reporting and give it back to the journalist they are working for over the phone.
• Their main job is selling newspaper subscriptions, so there is a serious conflict of interest with the bigwigs in their area, who would be the ones to buy bulk subscriptions. This prevents them from gathering stories that look negatively on the local power dynamics
• They are nearly all male
• They are nearly all Bhrahmins, members of the "highest" caste - the local newspapers have shown a preference for working with Brahmins because they think they may have greater access. But this is surely one of the reasons stories of untouchability and gender descrimination don't come out

Looked at from the point of view of the newspapers and TV stations, what does one see? Like in many parts of the world, the news bureaus are shutting down, and travel budgets are slashed, so news journalists based in the "center" have less ability to travel to tell stories they would like to tell. The head of CNN IBN Rajdeep Sardesai spoke to the Editors Guild recently about why news is becoming more focused on cities and the issues of the wealthy, and he blamed "the tyranny of distance." (and crucially, NOT the issue of lack of interest on the part of the audience.) As we build relationships with TV stations and newspapers to use our community-produced content, we hear the same thing in a lot of places. Someone at the Asia Desk in London of the BBC told me how difficult it is for them to get even simple stories covered. The BBC had lowered the rates they would pay freelancers, causing many of the usual journalists in the big cities to refuse to work with them. This BBC Producer talked about how difficult if not impossible it is to find a lower cost alternative, and how she wishes one existed. For us, this sounds like an opportunity for a community journalist.

With a system like this, there is very little chance that, say, a story from a remote area of a dowry burning, or of an interesting rural technology innovation, or a dramatic story of local corruption, is going to make its way to a TV station. Because content is not getting "pushed" out of rural areas. It is only getting "pulled," i.e., the reporter in the city calls up all the local people and says, "can you go cover the bombing that's just happened... or the political rally." These Delhi reporters never get a call saying, "something really interesting has just happened in my area. I think your readers will be interested. Here's the story - shall I report it for you?" And stations want this content. A few news editors have told us about how the most watched content online is often the more exclusive, unusual human interest stories, and not the usual political or national news that is the same in most stations. From our discussions with TV stations it seems the problem is that they don't have the budgets to find these stories on their own, and there is no good system for getting the stories out from these areas.

It seems a really sad state of affairs to have such a breakdown in journalism in rural and urban areas. It means that what happens in rural areas is literally unknown to people outside of those areas, and even to those within those areas who aren't directly affected. It is always the poor and disadvantaged who will suffer in such a situation, because they will never know how to access the national press and so have a real need for a vibrant local press. Stories of gender discrimination, caste, religious tension, corruption will rarely come out, and so the public get a warped sense that these issues don't exist.

The idea that we want to explore further in VV is, can community journalists fill this gap? We have looked at the financials of this, and they are very interesting. It seems that a rural stringer generally makes around Rs. 6,000-10,000 a month which would be a very large sum to someone whom Video Volunteers would train - i.e., someone from the lowest economic strata, who also represents an "unheard" community, meaning in the Indian context a Dalit, Muslim, Tribal or woman. So a community journalist could even compete just on the basis of being able to undercut the market. All of this makes me wonder - could the poor be the winners in all the changes happening in journalism?

I would love to hear people's ideas and criticisms and suggestions on the idea that the poor can be the winners. Where is my thinking wrong? What am I missing out? This is an idea VV is committed to developing, because our organization's purpose is to figure out ways that the creative and thoughtful expression of the poorest communities can make its way to wider audiences.

Having a celebrity ambassador will be helpful for a lot of reasons. One, he is going to help us in our outreach to TV news networks whom we are approaching to air content produced by communities. His name will mean a lot there. Also, he can help us popularize community media amongst his fans and his peers in the Bollywood film industry. This is important because we don't want community media to always be seen as alternative and unusual. The poor represent the majority of humanity and so their media representatives needn't always be seen as "special" and alternative. He and his friend Imtiyaz Ali, a director of some of the best Indian films of the last few years, stood on the stage and told the Producers at the screening that their videos were better than some of what was coming out in Bollywood.

As young people get more into making their own media - mash ups, facebook, cell phone videos, etc.) and seeking it out proactively from hundreds of sources- a massively beneficial side effect is that they learn to critique the media. Though we may not have seen it yet, I think in the next few years we'll see people turning more towards documentaries instead of TV. As these kids teach themselves to make media and express themselves on what they are passionate about, won't they naturally be drawn to the media form - documentary - that is most driven by someone's personal passion and concern for an issue? So in that sense, when a big star wants to tell his own audience to see the connections between the alternative and the mainstream media, I think he is tapping into something bigger.

I had met Abhay Deol earlier at TED India, where I was one of the TED Fellows. He was one of the speakers, talking about storytelling and how he works to get his passion projects taken up. So many of the issues he cared about - issues with Muslims, Tribals and other disadvantaged groups -were issues we work on so it felt like a real affinity. His latest film is essentially an Indian "Cinema Paradiso." He plays a guy who travels around India with a projector showing films in villages... very similar to what we do! We talked about VV's work and he was excited, and so agreed to come on as an ambassador for us. We have a few more ideas for press events with him, like having him do trainings with the community producers and inviting some key magazines for that, and this weekend he's the guest editor for one of the major Indian papers and will be interviewing us. I've always thought that people from Hollywood would be natural endorsers or supporters of new media projects but never knew how to reach out to them. So we're excited this has happened.

Here's what he's said, which has been quoted directly in some of the articles:

"They need financial support and have over 100 trained producers. They are also willing to provide new content to TV channels thus making reporters out of local people who make short films on community issues like infra- structure, domestic violence, child marriage, clean water. Anybody who is interested in filming can join. They teach editing and computers too."

Abhay feels, "This is the potential of the digital revolution, the poor in India can finally make their voices heard to the mainstream media and to government," says Deol. "And in a place like India, with high levels of illiteracy, video and film are a perfect medium. Giving people the tools to make their own media is a great way to enable more people to participate in our democracy."

We were there to conduct a workshop about entrepreneurship in the creative field of video. The purpose of our recently-launched program in Sao Paulo is to create "video entrepreneurs," and this post is a snapshot of one of the exercises we did while we were there.

The nine young people were all from favela/periphery areas of Sao Paulo, and on that day we were conducting a workshop on how to market to clients. One young man started to read aloud from his introduction:

My name is Allan Jones. I'm 24 years old and live in the Guarulhos municipality of Sao Paulo State. My parents were born in the Amazon. My mother works as a seamstress and my father, I do not know who he is. I graduated high school only last year because the work I had to do did not allow me to study. I've worked in several areas, including as an installer of air conditioning, and around this time I had the opportunity to visit several theaters and see many shows. It was there that sparked my desire to work with theater and learn video.

Today I'm part of the project VCU.br, which is about how young people can work as independent videomakers, and I want to work in the area of script and production. I'm making a video about community theater in my area. My video tells the story of Mrs. Santa Catarina, an independent artist. She is self-taught and without resources or support, but manages to run a theater workshop in the community of Vila Isabel, in Guarulhos."

h2. Turning Disadvantages Into Advantages

The primary purpose of the exercise was to teach these young people to write compelling video proposals for different clients. But the deeper purpose is to teach them to turn their disadvantages into advantages, and to inspire others to see it that way.

If they are going to go into the market and compete with professionals, they must be able to communicate the value of their personal perspective. Why? Because their perspective as people who live close to the stories they are telling is the only thing they have that a professional does not. The problem is that they have spent so long hiding the fact that they're from the disadvantaged parts of the city that they're reluctant to write about it.

The personal narratives they wrote during the workshop revealed the challenges faced by the poor in the big cities like Rio, Sao Paulo or Mumbai. These include the long distances the poor have to travel from their homes to work in the city centers; the high costs of public transportation; the need to support their families financially; and insufficient public schools. In terms of our exercise, they all also highlighted the fact that they didn't have any professional contacts.

For one participant, all it took was a kind word from a TV reporter covering a story in his favela when he was 16 to give him the courage to ask for advice and tips about breaking into TV news. That was a turning point, and it gave him the conviction to pursue a career in media. Compare that to the 101 pieces of career advice that a privileged young person will receive by the time she is 21. Is it any wonder our Fellows seemed a little incredulous when we told them that their backgrounds are in fact a strength?

"It's because we live there that we're unique!"

As the days went by, the Fellows learned the step-by-step process of managing an independent video business, from identifying clients and writing proposals to creating a budget and rate sheet and "closing the deal."

But, really, they were learning to tell and celebrate their personal stories, and to find the personal connection that makes all work meaningful. We told them that they need to dig deep inside themselves to find this connection. Being an entrepreneur, ultimately, is about finding your personal power and confidence, and believing in yourself and your ideas.

The reality is that even if they send a compelling favela story to a television producer, the TV producer will always have the option of sending his own more "professional" freelancers to cover it. Our Fellows/Producers need to learn to convince people that they have something the professionals don't -- a perspective that will enlighten and captivate the audience.

After a couple of hours of them slightly struggling to "get" this concept, Beatrice jumped up. She is a beautiful and lively girl. Over the course of our three weeks together, her hair transformed from extension corn braids to a Nefertiti-style tall wrap to, finally, a beautiful disco-inspired Afro.

"I see!" she said. "It's because we live there that we're unique!"

From there, they started making the connections. One girl, Layla, used to work handing out fliers on the street. She knows what it's like to feel invisible on the street and have people walk by you as you try to get their attention. That's why she can tell an interesting story about street artists that have to fight for the acknowledgment of passersby. Another girl, Juliet, is the right person to tell a story about schizophrenia because her brother is schizophrenic.

A third person felt inspired to tell the stories of stray and injured animals because he used to see dogs getting run over when he worked as a delivery driver. This was just one exercise, but the process, I think, was key to the whole idea of community video as a social venture for the poor. Community producers need to be their own agents in terms of convincing the "market" of the value of their background. That means not just having self expression -- a voice -- but also self-reflection, and a large degree of self-awareness.

Identifying Entrepreneurs

Going into this project, one of our concerns was whether we would we be able to find people who were entrepreneurial, and who would want to run their own video business. The reality is that other jobs are less satisfying, but they can guarantee work. We had our doubts about whether entrepreneurship could be taught, so we needed to find that drive in our Fellows/Producers.

Business skills are easy to teach, but personal drive or motivation is another thing. Not everyone is an entrepreneur. If we were to tell our staff one day, "from today onwards, no one is getting monthly checks; instead, everyone needs to earn their own salary," most people would quit. Yet that's what many people in the NGO sector expect the poor to do.

As we saw our group's business plans develop, we became convinced they were the right people. All are committed to a career in video; all are committed to developing their own creativity, and to working for their communities.

For example, Rafael is now writing government proposals for him to create video projects in the slums. Luana is pursuing internships with TV stations they connected with during the project. Another participant, Layla, had this to say:

My experience in VCU.br was so good and the other Video Producers are such interesting people. Next year, I hope we'll get together to make some production companies. I want to really go ahead with videos, and I think I also have the capacity for fiction, too. I don't want everyone here to go off on their own and leave the group, so I'm thinking about how to make the idea of a group production company happen. Some of us love to write, some like to produce, others to edit. For me, we have a production company right here.

Stalin and I are convinced, as we always are with our community producers, of one thing: there is an abundance of undiscovered talent and knowledge out in the world, and we need to start tapping into it. When you give people opportunities, and you help them find their voice, there is no end to what they can achieve.

By contrast, when we started Video Volunteers in India, there were only two other groups in the country running permanent programs in community video. So the difference in Brazil, where we recently launched, was amazing and wonderful to see.

Below I've collected some of our observations about Brazil, and listed a few of the inspiring moments and facts regarding Brazil's community media that we learned during our month spent visiting the different groups. (I hope I've gotten all the facts correct, but please correct me if you see any mistakes in what I've written below; much of this information is from notes I took during fascinating discussions.)

Brazil's Commitment to Community Media

The Brazilian government is committed to supporting community arts and culture. There is a three percent tax break for corporations that support the arts, and this only applies to the arts! The government created a "points of culture" program around the country, where they have invested in 150 community arts projects to the tune of R$150,000 (around $75,000) per year, for three years. Many of the media NGOs we visited were funded in this way. The singer Gilberto Gil is currently the minister for culture and, given that he's one of the most revered celebrities in the country, this focuses citizens' attention on the importance of the arts.

It makes sense that this level of investment would be happening in Brazil and not in countries where poverty is more prevalent. One of the major societal challenges in Brazil is to keep young kids from favelas out of gangs and drugs and violence. Speaking to them in the languages they understand and love -- hip-hop, graffiti, video -- is possibly the best strategy for reaching disaffected youth.

Susan Worcman, director of the Brazil Foundation, said this is because "artistic talent in Brazil is generally very high. We have a lot of creative people." Driving around Sao Paulo seems to confirm this. The city is the graffiti capital of the world, and some artists from favelas have exhibited in major museums in Europe.

All over the city, as much in the hipster area of Villa Madelaina as in the favelas, you see incredible graffiti murals. It integrates the middle classes with the favelas in powerful ways. For instance, there was a community fresco program in Sao Paulo a few years ago, where kids from favelas worked with professional artists to create frescoes on the sides of buildings all over the city. All of the works included plaques reminding people that they were produced by slum kids.

The quality of community arts work is generally very high. Several NGO programs were started either by famous film directors (such as, Cinema Nosso which grew out of the film, City of God), TV producers (Instituto Criar in Sao Paulo, which was started by a Globo Executive) or musicians (such as Afro Reggae, which was started by a hip-hop artist).

As a result, community video work has been seen on TV, won awards, and one even resulted in a feature movie deal ("Cine Cufa," though the project may now be on hold). For us, we've put less emphasis on how artistic a community film is and focus more on how it will inspire action. But because of their quality, these Brazilian films are more marketable to the mainstream.

Photography Class at Observatorio de Favelas

The purpose of most of the community media groups we met is to empower youth to fight stereotypes about the favelas that dominate Brazilian media. One great organization we visited is the urban planning organization Observatorio de Favelas. Its very name implies changing the point of reference of who is watching whom. It is about the favelas observing the rest of the city, and this is a very different way of doing urban planning. Instead of talking about the "city center" and "periphery areas," they highlight areas of high and low public investment.

Portrayal of Favelas in the Media

It is clear after spending even a brief time in Brazil that the image presented of the favelas in the media is as sites of violence. They are never shown as the culturally and creatively rich areas they are. This creates real fear among the middle class population of Brazil.

The receptionist at our hotel begged us not to go to a certain area when we asked her for directions. Cab drivers refuse to take people to some places. The point of most of the community media we saw is to challenge the stereotypes and teach the kids to be critical of the media. (As a result, there is relatively little community media/journalism being done the way VV does it, where the purpose is to screen media back to communities.)

Arts and Culture vs. News and Information

Each country VV has worked in has a different outlook or way of using community media. In India, at least in terms of our work, media is a tool to empower people to take action; it is a tool to accelerate other social change efforts. In the U.S., the scene is much more about news and information, and how we can respond to the current crisis in journalism.

In other parts of South America, there is a very strong indigenous media scene that unites different tribes. In Brazil, the focus is definitely "community arts and culture." It's about community media as a right in itself, and as an educational tool. Most of the organizations we met were focused primarily on training, as opposed to the distribution of that content or its use.

Brazil Media Stats

We learned some interesting media and policy facts from our conversations with Flavio at Ashoka, Bia Barbosa at Intervoces, and John Prideaux, the Economist's correspondent in Brazil. Newspaper readership in Brazil is extremely low compared to other countries. TV is by far the dominant information source in the country, and nearly everyone watches only one channel, Globo.

We saw for ourselves how media-watching habits seem much more unified in Brazil. A recent and very popular "telenovela" was a drama set in India, and everyone mentioned it to us. People were coming up to my Indian partner Stalin in the subway, giving him a Namaste bow and repeating "arre baba." It's just one of the ways you see these two incredibly strong emerging markets coming together through globalization.

Ninety percent of the country is reached by terrestrial TV, thanks mainly to the efforts of Globo. Very few people have cable or satellite TV. We asked Barbosa at Intervoces if media activists and community media organizations had tried to jointly create a TV channel, given that there is such a huge amount of content produced by community media groups. She said an impediment to this is the fact that terrestrial TV is the only option.

All of Brazil media is controlled by six families/companies, and there are no limits on cross ownership of media, or on how much of the audience one company can reach. Barbosa is fighting for the introduction of these limits, because as it stands corporations are able to heavily influence public opinion. Other policy efforts undertaken by media activists include:

• The creation of independent public TV, a la BBC, which doesn't currently exist. The government recently created an education channel, which did create more space for socially relevant media -- but it is controlled by the government.
• The increasing of diversity on television. Barbosa said that with so many community media groups and productions, the government should make space for programming that truly reflects the diversity of the country.
• The liberalization of Internet laws. One upcoming fight will be to allow political parties to use the Internet to gain support. What Barack Obama's did with the Internet would currently be illegal in Brazil.

There is clearly much more to learn about the movements in Brazil to reform and democratize the media, and these are just our first impressions.

Making the Decision to Expand

In our experience, social change initiatives that are based on empowerment, voice, and creativity are hard to replicate. This is because the training needs to be of such high quality, and the projects need a lot of hands-on management. So we focused on India for three years, always telling ourselves, "next year... next year... we'll be ready to launch outside of India."

Our board and other mentors seemed to be divided about whether we should expand. Will it detract from the work in India and spread us too thin? Do we need to be in other countries in order to continue to learn and test our models? Are there practical issues like availability of funding or being perceived as "global" that make it smart to expand? These are some of the questions we debated.

In the end, one thing really convinced us: the Brazilian community arts and culture scene. It is so rich and fascinating, and probably the biggest in the entire world. It's also producing some amazing media. We had to be there.

Lessons Learned

Now that we have finally expanded outside of India, here are some lessons we've learned that might be relevant to organizations of a similar size.

Understand Cultural Differences: This is the hardest -- and the best -- thing about working in another country. One big difference between Brazil and India are the priorities and outlooks of the groups working in citizen/community media/journalism. In India, community media is generally seen as a tool, never as an end in itself. So for VV, though we are motivated personally by the belief that the right to speak and be heard is a human right, we also see our work as a tool for community-led development, strengthening local governance, etc. In India, media and information are seen as tools for poverty alleviation or human rights -- probably because India's problems in these areas are so much deeper than in a richer country such as Brazil.

In Brazil, by contrast, community media is first and foremost a form of creative expression for youth. The primary purpose is giving people a voice to combat misrepresentation. That's what funders and the government seem to demand. As a result, the videos are very high quality, and the young people in the youth media/journalism programs are free to express themselves about whatever they wish. But because the environment (meaning primarily the funding environment) allows these groups to stay focused only on empowerment and self-expression, issues like mainstream distribution, sustainability and job creation seem like they are not happening at the level they could.

We found people in Brazil seem to doubt the importance (as well as the feasibility) of young people earning a living as a result of these programs, which I think is a big cultural difference between the non-profit world in Brazil compared with the U.S. and India. Livelihood, sustainability, and revenue creation are ingrained in the thinking in the non-profit world in the U.S. and India. The issue they are dealing with in urban Brazil is youth violence and disaffection. Perhaps people have realized that the best way to combat these issues is not livelihoods and jobs, but empowerment and self-expression. I wish there was actual research on this fascinating question.

Think About Organizational Setup: Do you want to start with your own office in a new country, or partner your way in? In Brazil, the pro bono lawyers at Lex Mundi told us we had two options. We could register as a Brazilian non-profit, staff it locally, and then begin work. Or we could identify a partner NGO to hire as consultants. At VV, to say the least, institution-building is not our strong point. We could not imagine starting in Brazil by first taking a year or two to go through legal and government processes of registering. (Also, registering and opening an office would have been prohibitively expensive for us.)

We knew we first needed to do a pilot project in order to gauge the possibility of success. Then, with that completed, we could work on registering. That said, there were also drawbacks to the other option. Working through consultants and partners means less control and potentially less ownership. Some people might see you as a funder in their country, and people will question how committed you are to the country for the long term. But on the plus side, things can get going really quickly.

Choose Your Partners Carefully: We initially developed a proposal with one organization in Brazil. Then, for various reasons, realized we should go our separate ways. It took us almost a year to find another partner, and we interviewed several different groups to find one that would be suitable. After speaking to several of the leading media organizations in Brazil, we decided that the most important thing for us was to go with a group we trusted and felt like we knew well. A good "gut feeling" about the organization was more important than going for the most experienced group in our field. Very vague, I know.

Our eventual partner, Casa Das Caldeiras, did not have any video experience when we started this project, but I could tell that, as a relatively new organization themselves, they would make this project a priority. They have as much riding on its success as we do. I could sense integrity, energy, passion and creativity -- and these were the most important qualities. So far, it's been a great partnership. They are focused on the visual arts, and run artists-in-residency programs, as well as working with lots of Sao Paulo non-profits that run programs in the slums on hip-hop, painting, graffiti, and more. So all of this creativity is influencing our project.

Expect Some Things to be Lost in Translation: Managing things at a distance is hard. For our project, it's been a challenge to run the entrepreneurship side of the project from afar. CDC has managed the video production side of things fantastically. They've selected great fellows, who are producing exactly the kind of videos we need in a very short period of time. But the video entrepreneurship elements are harder for them, I think, because it is so new.

VV has been obsessing about the issue of earned income for three years now, and we have a lot of ideas and learnings to transfer to the project in Brazil. But this transfer of knowledge has been harder than we expected. It's an area where face-to-face contact is critical, and so it was very important that Stalin K., a VV board member and media and human rights activist, and I could spend the whole month of October in Brazil.

All in all, going beyond India has been a good step for Video Volunteers. I'd love to hear from other people running small or medium-sized NGOs who can share their own stories and lessons from expanding to different countries. Please share your thoughts in the comments.

All the while we typed away at our laptop, eager to capture all the innovations and unique stories of the Brazilian community/alternative media innovators. Below are our meeting notes, which we hope give a little snapshot of some of the amazing work being done here. I apologize to all the people we met for any mistakes and misrepresentation. When you're eager to get the full picture in a whirlwind meeting, sometimes the details get lost!

Karen Worcman of the Museum of the Person

The Museum of the Person started by Karen Worcman is an archive of 12,000 personal stories which they have been recording from private citizens the world over for decades. These stories are captured in several ways, many unsolicited by the museum itself -- people wanting to share their stories, write their personal histories and mail them to the museum, knowing they will be archived for history; people come to the museum's recording studio and are interviewed; and museum staff go out into the world to gather the stories.

They also do workshops with NGOs around the world, such as one with Dream Catchers in Tamil Nadu, or by putting up "story booths" in buses and train stations, and going into public schools in Sao Paulo to teach kids to document the histories of their neighborhoods. The stories are archived in a state-of-the-art manner, and most will eventually be online. Already they are searchable and highly used by academics and researchers and school teachers who use the archive to research particular themes -- such as trade unions, war, death, family, etc.

We asked Karen about the purpose of the histories. Is it for social change, community action, personal transformation, or a political statement about everyone's right to a voice? She said one major purpose is to create a record of the personal stories of everyone on the planet. This is a museum after all.

We also asked about the process and the methodology. Because most of the personal histories are in video and they work with the Center for Digital Storytelling (with whom they organize the "day of sharing life stories" once a year) in the Bay Area in the U.S. which has a very set process for story creation, we thought she might have a training methodology that we could incorporate in our work. She said the methodology changes for the purpose of the project, but that when she conducts the interviews, her methodology is that of a historian. Though most of her materials were in Portueguese, she offered to share with us her curriculum that she created in Tamil Nadu which is in English, and we will surely incorporate this methodology into our training.

Stalin pointed out the power of this method for documenting village histories in India, as he has done with KMVS, where they wrote the personal histories of everyone of the 900 villages in Kutch, for broadcast on the community radio stations. Karen's methodology could be very useful for the community radio scene in India, which (with licenses only being allowed for the past three years) is struggling for methodologies for creating content.

A few things struck us in particular in meeting Karen: one is the documentary use of this content for research and academia. We have wondered whether there is interesting anthropological evidence in our raw video tapes from the CVUs, and Karen has demonstrated the importance of community media for research purposes. The other is the seriousness of the archive. She has made dozens, if not more, written publications of these personal histories. The third is, of course, the importance and uniqueness of the idea of the world's history as a collection of millions of personal stories and histories. This was too rich and important an idea for us to explore in such a short meeting!

Bia Barbarasso, Intervoces

Bia is a young Ashoka Fellow who is one of the leaders of the movement to reform media policy in Brazil. The premise of her work is the lack of diversity in the media in Brazil. We met her on our last day in Brazil when she was kind enough to come to the house where we were staying, and it was a great way to end the trip. She was one of the few people we met with a truly multi-pronged approach that combined grassroots action, networking and movement building, training and policy. If Video Volunteers were to work in Brazil in a much deeper way, we would want to work like this.

We contacted her because of an amazing victory she had which we read about on her Ashoka profile, and which we wanted to know more about. A few years ago, she brought a case against a major television station saying that their programming had consistently discriminated against gays and violated their human rights. The basis for the case was a law that says that, because TV licences are granted by the government and are public property, they must show content that is helpful for society. The court agreed with her and ordered the TV station to show human rights focused programming for 30 days in a row!

They were also ordered to pay a small -- way too small -- amount to assist in the creation of this programming. So Bia issued a call for programming to the documentary producers and media NGOs in Brazil, and received over 500 applications! This was one of her first contacts with the video-producing groups, and it deeply impressed her to see how huge the alternative media scene was. So much great content, and no spaces to share it!

She used the small sum of money for editing, and combined the different video submissions into hour-long programs on a particular theme for one evening's broadcast. She has since used the success of this project in her lobbying efforts, arguing with the government that Brazil has masses of quality content and the government must give them space to distribute these alternative views. This story fascinated Stalin and me as it was one of the only examples I've heard of people successfully using the law to create space on TV for alternative programming.

These are short descriptions of only two of the amazing media activists in Brazil. As I continue to work my way through all my notes, I'll try to keep writing up these short profiles.