Our international community media organization equips women and men in underdeveloped areas with critical thinking, creative, activist and video journalism skills, enabling entire communities to expose underreported stories from their communities and take action to right the wrongs of poverty, injustice and inequality. In India, we have created the largest, most diverse network of salaried Community Producers in the world. Content produced by these fully-trained individuals has been broadcast in mainstream media and is regularly screened online and for hundreds of thousands of people during local events in disadvantaged communities throughout India. Because of our training, hundreds of villagers and slum dwellers working as diamond polishers, students, teachers, artists, photographers, rickshaw drivers, housewives, day laborers, and others from different walks of marginalized life have empowered their communities and transformed themselves into journalists and activists.
The profound lack of diversity in mainstream news media – both in terms of who is producing content and what is being produced – is one of our greatest concerns. We believe that who produces the news is as important as the news itself, and that all people have the right to speak, rather than be spoken for. Video Volunteers enables worldwide audiences to experience local issues of global importance through the eyes of those that live them, offering startling new perspectives from people with the local knowledge, expertise, and resources to effect positive social change.
Our expertise in enabling marginalized individuals to find their voices, raise them, have them heard, and change their communities for the better stems from our staff’s work in various communities in all geographies and social conditions. Our 30+ years of combined experience creating dozens of grassroots rights-based media projects in partnership with more than 50 NGOs has heightened our on-the-ground knowledge of rural India and what it really takes to enable underdeveloped communities to own their own media. The skills we pass on transform ordinary citizens into community journalists and activists – many of whom continue to use and develop those skills for many years.
Our Achievements
Trained 300 Community Producers, of which more than 100 are currently working full time to cover the stories their communities want told in more than 1000 villages in nearly every state of India.
Enabled 300,000 people to see these films during more than 2,200 night-time community screenings, and thousands more worldwide via online broadcast.
Enabled 17,000 people to take action and implement local solutions, directly benefiting 635,000 people and giving voice to millions more.
Publish one IndiaUnheard video a day online, with a total of more than 400 to date, freeing one unheard voice from India every day.
Sold virtually 50% of content produced in the last two years to mainstream media and NGO clients.
Continually demonstrate the viability of our business model to scale community media to all districts of India and eventually around the world.
Instrumental in evolving community media into a key factor of India’s social change agenda as demonstrated by 300+ partnership applications from local and international NGOs and more than $500,000 invested by NGOs in starting programs we have designed.
By leading with our unwavering belief that voice in itself is a right and an end in itself, Video Volunteers continuously creates pioneering and innovative models of community media that enable disadvantaged communities to raise their unmediated voices, create impact within their communities, and play active roles in the global media revolution. Read about our impacts here.
Our vision of the future is one in which every village in India – and the world – has at least one person using the most commonly used and appropriate technologies to document human rights violations, work with their communities to face their own challenges, and find solutions. We believe every village already has changemakers who simply need the right kind of training to be able to participate in a democratized media network.
Currently, less than 2% of stories that appear in Indian media are rural ones, while the other 98% emanate from urban areas. Our goal is to have 645 Community Producers, one covering every district in India, representing the broadest range of communities. By developing this professional rural stringers network, we can fill mainstream media’s need for high-quality, low-cost content from rural areas as well as enable marginalized individuals to earn revenue by selling content to mainstream media.
By engaging in all these activities and more, we will continue to create a new kind of media industry fueled by the knowledge and creativity of marginalized individuals.
Watch our Videos (updated daily)Donate to Video VolunteersPartnership Opportunities
This isn’t about filmmaking. It’s about giving people the information they need to be able to solve their own problems.
You don’t need to be literate to make a video or have an impact around the world. All you need is the right kind of empowerment: training, tools, and distribution outlets.
Video Volunteers is enabling the world’s disadvantaged to raise their own voices by mobilizing journalism, storytelling, activism and technology.
Community Media is hyperlocal content produced by, for, and about a specific community. It enables communities to raise and address issues relevant to them and participate in the global media revolution.
IMPACT STORY: Video Volunteers IndiaUnheard Community Correspondent Mukesh Rajak comes from a poor Dalit family in the Deogarh district of Jharkhand, which has some of the highest rates of teacher absenteeism in the country. On any given day, 41.9 percent of Jkarkhand’s teachers are wholly absent from the classroom. They also forced students to pay them bribes for everything from basic school supplies to taking exams to simply teaching. In 2010, Mukesh focused his attention, and his camera, on the situation in his community, made Pay Bribe, Take Education, and showed the video to authorities. Teachers were demoted. Mukesh no longer had to bribe his teachers to do their job. And neither did his 500 classmates.
Video Volunteers is an international media organization empowering the voices of the world’s unheard communities. Its mission is to empower the world’s poorest citizens to right the wrongs they witness by becoming players in the global media revolution. Video Volunteers provides disadvantaged communities with journalistic, critical thinking and creative skills, teaching people to articulate and share their perspectives on the issues that matter to them – on a local and a global scale.
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Community Video Units
Communities Taking Action
IndiaUnheard
Hear Us Now
The Swayaam Project
Communicating Empowerment
VCU.br
Video for Livelihood in Brazil
Community Radio
Democratizing India’s Airwaves
Videoshala E-CVUs
Diversity, Democracy and Citizenship in Education
Videoactive Girls
Projecting Girl Power
This isn’t about filmmaking. It’s about giving people the information they need to be able to solve their own problems.
You don’t need to be literate to make a video or have an impact around the world. All you need is the right kind of empowerment: training, tools, and distribution outlets.
Video Volunteers is enabling the world’s disadvantaged to raise their own voices by mobilizing journalism, storytelling, activism and technology.
Community Media is hyperlocal content produced by, for, and about a specific community. It enables communities to raise and address issues relevant to them and participate in the global media revolution.
IMPACT STORY: Video Volunteers IndiaUnheard Community Correspondent Mukesh Rajak comes from a poor Dalit family in the Deogarh district of Jharkhand, which has some of the highest rates of teacher absenteeism in the country. On any given day, 41.9 percent of Jkarkhand’s teachers are wholly absent from the classroom. They also forced students to pay them bribes for everything from basic school supplies to taking exams to simply teaching. In 2010, Mukesh focused his attention, and his camera, on the situation in his community, made Pay Bribe, Take Education, and showed the video to authorities. Teachers were demoted. Mukesh no longer had to bribe his teachers to do their job. And neither did his 500 classmates.
Video Volunteers is an international media organization empowering the voices of the world’s unheard communities. Its mission is to empower the world’s poorest citizens to right the wrongs they witness by becoming players in the global media revolution. Video Volunteers provides disadvantaged communities with journalistic, critical thinking and creative skills, teaching people to articulate and share their perspectives on the issues that matter to them – on a local and a global scale.
