Idea Lab

Video Volunteers Creates a New Kind of Sustainability Using Community Video

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

"You mean to say that sending the email is free?! I don't have to pay for it?" Laxmi was amazed that there is no equivalent on the Internet to paying for a postage stamp to send a letter. The first twenty minutes of this workshop on digi-activism being held in Goa, India were over her head, but when she saw her own language, Telugu, appear on the Google.co.in search page, she jumped to attention. For the first time, Laxmi is seeing something on the Internet that she can actually read. She smiles and begins chattering away in her own language...

• August 21, 2009
• 7 comments

How Video Volunteers Improved Women's Rights, Sanitation in India

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

How do you teach creativity and critical thinking to people from very disadvantaged communities, with little formal education? Doing this is a major goal of Video Volunteers' work in training community producers. If organizations don't develop these training tools, the world could find itself in a situation where technology allows the poor to produce content, but the vast expressive potential this could release is still left untapped. VV gives writing exercises to community producers to help them develop their ability to think through an argument. I am sharing below two recent pieces of writing by community producers. These were written...

• June 7, 2009
• 1 comment

MTV Iggy and Community Video Coming Together

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Video Volunteers has partnered with MTV Iggy to produce videos in Kashmir about life in the refugee camps of Jammu. Here's a link to one of the videos, about a boy who watched his entire family be slaughtered: mtviggy.com | desi MTV igg is a new channel/show of MTV that is focused on Diaspora youth. The partnership unfolded as follows: in December, I did a small fundraiser in NY for Video Volunteers. At events like that, when people as ask how they can help and what we need, one of our appeals is, 'we need connections with the mainstream tv...

• April 17, 2009
• 1 comment

Each Culture Should Communicate News Their Way

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday I finished a field visit to one of the Community Video Units Video Volunteers has helped to set up, in rural Rajasthan, in villages outside Jodhpur. Rural Rajasthan is an incredibly colorful and culturally rich area, and so the "Community Video Unit" has lots of potential for great programming on arts and culture. But rural Rajasthan is a deeply conservative and feudal place, where the women are veiled, and there is very high incidence of child marriage and female foeticide. My hat goes off to the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation, the NGO who has set up this Community Video Unit...

• January 24, 2009
• 5 comments

Community-Owned Media: What Does It Mean?

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Many people today who work in social change are convinced that the typical 'top down' approach to development, where bureaucrats and international agencies design large-scale social programs and then impose them on millions of poor people, isn't working. Instead, they favor the idea of 'community-led development', in which communities themselves design the social programs, and interventions only arise from the stated needs of the communities. The goals of all these programs is the idea of eventual 'community ownership' of programs themselves and of the social change process. It means that communities won't only participate, but they will be able to...

• December 24, 2008
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Is a CNN For the Base of the Pyramid Possible?

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

When we and our NGO partners initiate community members--young men and women from the slums and villages of India--into their new full-time jobs as 'Community Video Producers,' we often start the training sessions by drawing a triangle on the board. 'This pyramid,' the Video Trainer says, 'represents the global media.' The Producers then divide up the triangle into different layers--the nightly news programs at the top. Then, going down, CNN. Then India's Murdoch-owned English language stations. Then India's regional language private news stations, then India's national televsion, 'Doordarshan,' etc. etc. At each layer, a slightly wider percentage of the global...

• July 11, 2008
• 2 comments