But then you meet someone like Abhay Deol who is young, creative and is very much his own man. He is busy with multiple acting assignments, as well as his own production business. But despite the busy schedule and several engagements, he has time to do other things, especially things that he feels could be instrumental in bringing a notable social change. One of them is community media. And this is why the young actor was this Saturday, 23rd Jan in a slum of Chembur, Mumbai, watching films made by slumdwellers themselves. These were the slum people’s own films, their stories, told in their own language, reflecting their own thoughts, sentiments, tears and smiles.

Sitting with Abhay was Stalin K, founder member of Video Volunteers. It was Video Volunteers that had, in partnership with NGOs Akshara and Yuva, set up two community video units (CVUs), in Mumbai 3 years ago and took up the challenge of teaching slum people how to make films and use film making as a tool of self-empowerment. Now it was this very work of Video Volunteers that made Abhay decide to support the organization as an ambassador. According to Stalin, Abhay’s visit to CVU thrilled the crowd, specially the Community Video Producers. But it also thrilled Abhay himself who looked visible moved to know that the filmmakers around him were actually people who drove autorickshaws, sold vegetables on the street and did several other thankless and odd jobs to make a living, not very long ago. ‘Abhay has truly understood our ethos and work’, said Stalin to me later.

So what exactly is this ethos of Video Volunteers that someone like Abhay finds worth standing for? In Abhay’s own words, ‘In a place like India where there is a very high level of illiteracy, video and film are perfect tools to empower people….by giving communities these tools, Video Volunteers is trying to create a digital and social revolution through which the poor in India can finally make their voices heard to the mainstream media and to government.”

That this statement would come from someone who hails from the very popular and very powerful world of commercial Hindi films, where clichés have ruled for decades, provokes some interesting thoughts.

To begin with, it shows that our young actors are now ready to go beyond playing the rhetorical ‘zara hathke’ roles on screen to playing truly offbeat, impactful roles in real life. This again means, the popular belief – thinking of the society is a retired actor’s job – is slowly becoming a myth.

But the most interesting of all is perhaps the fact that an actor is now ready to see his ‘public’ switching places, becoming a storyteller and accept it as a natural and need-of-the-hour transition. And this is where Abhay and Video Volunteers think alike!

According to the Guardian, ash from a Vendata aluminum-refinery is already a problem. The new bauxite mine will erode perennial streams that nurture local animal populations and make life in the hills impossible. The Dongria Kondh are protesting what is essentially a text-book colonizing project updated for the 21st century. An international opposition campaign protests the company, and even the British government has condemned the negotiations, but they still broke ground this year, falling hundreds of trees and turning arable hills into a pond of red mud. The villages around the mine report rising mortality from tuberculosis and crop loss.

Roy’s article emphasizes the alliance that many desperate indigenous people form with the Maoist army, taking up arms in a last ditch attempt to fight for their land. In retort, the Indian government declared the bedraggled rural Maoists ‘India’s largest threat’ – convenient nomenclature for groups who slow so-called industrial progress. The national media meanwhile stir up fears of ‘red terrorism.’ Roy’s warning is clear: in areas where land can turn a big profit, “the state will use the opportunity to mop up the hundreds of other resistance movements in the sweep of its military operation, calling them all Maoist sympathisers” Roy fears the creation of a manufactured, perpetual war, similar to Kashmir, where civilians suffer the most.

Roy’s article also breaks down the economics of the mining industry in the ecologically-vulnerable area – the massive money at stake, and unknown number of cronies and unofficial stakeholders feeding off the bonanza, on land home millions of Indian tribals technically protected under the constitution.

In Goa years of iron ore mining have also stripped the coasts’ trees and dumped toxins in the drinking water. VV teamed with local anti-mine activist and blogger Sebastian Rodriguez at the recent Goa Camp, to bring the issue into public discussion. Last year Rodriguez was handed a Rs 5 billion suit by mining corporation Fomento for ‘defamation,’ but he continues to trumpet the issue.

Hopefully prominent voices such as Roy’s, Rodriguez’s and VV’s will make Indian mining a central international issue, one that binds ecological pollution with indigenous rights, government accountability, and the desperate need for new economic models beyond base and corrupt multinational industrial practice.

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 Museu, knowing they will be archived for history; people come to the Museu’s recording studio and are interviewed; and museum staff go out into the world to gather the stories – doing 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.
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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 – 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. Since 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 US 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 since 3 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 VV 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 thirty days in a row! They were also ordered to pay a small – way too small –amount to assist 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 was the alternative media scene. 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 –say, gender, violence, homosexuality – 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.

Almost undoubtedly, Brazil is the country in the world with the greatest public investment in community arts and culture. There are dozens of groups teaching video, hip hop, graffiti, circus, carnival-related arts and digital media to youth from favelas. In Rio alone, we visited five groups doing community arts, and between these five NGOs we calculated there were around 500 kids from favelas this year alone learning video up to a semi-professional level. Coming from India, where there is very little community media (when we started, there were only two other groups in India running permanent programs in community video), this was amazing and wonderful to see. Here are some of the reasons for this, as well as our main observations, inspiring moments and facts regarding Brazil’s community media that we learned in our month 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, because much of this information is simply notes I took during fascinating discussions.

The Brazilian government is highly committed to supporting community arts and culture. There is a 3% tax break for corporations that support the arts, and this only applies to the arts! The government created a program of “points of culture” around the country, where they have invested in 150 community arts projects around the country, to the tune of R$150,000 (around $75,000) per year, for three years (this figure may be wrong). 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 to some degree.

Capoeira in the city streets

Work of Great Production Value

It makes sense that this level of investment would be happening in Brazil and not in countries with more desperate poverty situations. One of the major societal challenges in Brazil is to keep young kids from favelas out of gangs and drugs and violence. So 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, the director of the Brazil Foundation, says 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, with some artists from favelas having been exhibited in major museums in European capitals. 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 some powerful ways. For instance, there was a community frescoing program in many parts of the city a few years ago, where kids from favelas worked with professional artists to create frescoes exhibited on the sides of buildings all over the city, all of which carry plaques reminding passers by leaving their expensive dinners that they were produced by slum kids.

a hip hop Sunday at Casa Das Caldeiras. Kids come en masse from all over Sao Paulo to dance and have fun, and also partake in educational activities.
The quality of community arts work is generally very high. Several of the NGO programs have been started either by famous directors (for instance, Cinema Nosso which grew out of the City of God), TV producers (Instituto Criar in Sao Paulo, which was started by a Globo Executive) or musicians (ie, Afro Reggae, started by a hip hop artist.) Therefore, lots of this 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 much more on how it will inspire action. But because of their quality, these Brazilian films seem to have a much higher chance of marketability in the mainstream.

Kids Learning video at Cinema Nosso

The purpose of most of the community media groups we met is to empower youth to fight the stereotypes that predominate in the Brazilian media about favelas. 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 the favelas observing the rest of the city, and this is a very different way of doing urban planning. They speak not of “city center” and “periphery areas” as is the usual nomenclature, but rather of areas of high and low public investment.

Photography class at Observatorio de Favelas
It is clear in five minutes in Brazil that the favelas are shown in the media almost exclusively as sites of violence and never as the culturally and creatively rich areas they are, and this creates real fear in the middle class population. The hotel receptionist begged us not to go to a certain favela area when we asked her for directions. Some cab drivers refuse to take people to certain places. The point of most of the community media we saw is to change the stereotypes of the mainstream, and to teach the kids to be critical of this media. (So there is relatively little community media/journalism being done as 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 on has a different outlook or way of using community media. In India – at least in our work – media is a tool to empower people to take action; it is a tool to accelerate other social change efforts. In the US, the scene is much more about news and information and how do we respond to the current crisis in journalism. In the US, investment in community arts and culture projects was much higher ten years ago than today. In other parts of South America, there is a very strong indigenous media scene that unites different tribes across North and South America. In Brazil, the focus is very 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 on the distribution of that content or its use.

Some Media Stats for Brazil

We learned some interesting media facts and policy facts from our conversation with Flavio at Ashoka, Bia Barbosa at Intervoces, and John Prideaux the Economist correspondent in Brazil. Newspaper readership is extremely low as 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 ourselves how media-watching habits seem much more unified here, like in 1970s America. A recent very popular “telenovela” was a drama set in India, and everyone mentioned it. People were coming up to my partner Stalin in the metro giving him a Namaste bow and repeating “arre baba.” Just one of the ways you see these two incredibly strong emerging markets coming together through globalization. 90% of the country is reached by terrestrial TV (thanks to the efforts not of the government as in other countries but of Globo), and very few (maybe less than 20%?) have cable or satellite TV. We asked Bia if there were any efforts by media activists and community media organizations to jointly create a TV channel, given that there is such a huge amount of content produced by all the community media groups. She said an impediment to this is the fact that terrestrial TV is the only option. There is literally no more bandwidth available.
All of Brazil media is controlled by six families/companies, and there are no limits on cross ownership of media or limits on how much of the audience one company can reach, as there are in other countries. This is something Bia at Intervoces is fighting for, because it means that single corporations are often dominating public opinion on one place. Other policy effort media activists are fighting for are:

• The creation of independent public TV, a la BBC, which doesn’t currently exist. There was recently created a government education channel, which does make more space for socially relevant media, but it is controlled by the government.
• The increasing of diversity on television. Bia is arguing that with so many community media groups and productions, the government should make space for this programming that truly reflects the diversity of the country;
• Liberalization of internet laws. One upcoming fight will be to allow political parties to use the internet to gain support. What Barack Obama achieved 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. I apologize for any errors in the above facts, and hope people will correct me.

When I started VV in 2003, for a couple of years we did do projects in other countries, such as Brazil, Rwanda, Uganda and the US, in addition to India. But at this point, what we were doing was relatively easy, identifying volunteers, designing some basic video training modules or film script ideas, and sending them off. Once we came up with the idea for the Community Video Units, we realized we needed to focus on just one country. The work was too intense for us to be able to manage in several countries, especially given what a hands-on process community media is. In our experience, social change processes based on empowerment , voice, and creativity are hard to replicate, 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, 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 to be “global” that make it smart to expand? These are some of the things that we debated. But in the end, one thing really convinced us – the Brazilian community arts and culture scene. It is so rich and so fascinating, probably the biggest in the entire world and with amazing media being produced. We had to be there. So now that we finally have expanded outside of India, what have we learned that might be relevant for other organizations of a similar size to VV?

• Differences of Culture: the hardest and the best thing about working in another country. One big difference between Brazil and India is 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 voice and be heard is a human right, we also see our work as a tool in community-led development, strengthening local governance, etc. So in India, media and information are seen as tools in poverty alleviation or human rights – most probably because India’s problems in these areas are so much deeper than in a richer country like Brazil’s.
  In Brazil, by contrast, community media is first and foremost a form of creative expression for youth, with a primary purpose of giving people a voice to combat misrepresentation – and funders, government, etc. seem not to demand more than that. As a result, the videos are very high quality, and the young people in the youth media/journalism programs are free to express themselves on what they wish. But because the environment (probably the funding environment primarily) allows these groups to stay focused only on empowerment and self-expression, issues like mainstream distribution, sustainability and job creation, or coordinated efforts around media reform, seem like they are not happening at the level they could.
  We found some people who seemed to doubt the importance (not just the feasibility) of young people being able to earn a living as a result of these programs, which I think is a big cultural difference between the nonprofit world in the US and India, and in Brazil. Since at least a decade in India and the US, livelihood, sustainability, and revenue creation have become so ingrained in the thinking in the nonprofit world. I think it largely has to do with the economic situation there. The issue they are dealing with in urban Brazil is youth violence and disaffection. Perhaps people have realized that the best way to combat this is not livelihoods and jobs, but rather, empowerment and self-expression. I wish there was actual research on this fascinating question.
• Organizational Set Up: 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 legally. Either register a Brazilian nonprofit, and staff it locally, and then begin work. Or identify a partner NGO that you hire as consultants. At VV, to say the least, institution-building is not our strong point. So we could not imagine starting in Brazil by first taking a year or two to go through legal and government processes of registering. We knew we needed to first do a pilot project – just start the work — , and then if it is a success, register later. Also, registering and opening an office would clearly have been prohibitively expensive for us. But there are drawbacks. Working through consultants and partners gives one 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.
• Partner Organization Selection: We developed the proposal with one organization in Brazil, and 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, and had a good “gut feeling” about, rather than going for the most experienced organizations in our field. Very vague, I know. 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, and have as much riding on its success as we would. I could sense integrity, energy, passion and creativity, and these were the most important qualities. So far, it’s been a great partnership. They themselves 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, etc. So all of this creativity is influencing our project.
• Expect Some Things to be “Lost in Translation:” Managing things at a distance is hard. In 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 kinds 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 these issues of earned income for three years now, and we have a lot of ideas and learnings to transfer to this 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 so important that Stalin and I could spend the whole month of October training in Brazil.

All in all, going beyond India has been a good step for Video Volunteers. If there are other people reading this blog who run small or medium sized NGOs who would share their own processes of expansion to different countries, I would love to hear your experiences.

The nine Video Producers/Fellows in VCU.br plus Stalin, Jessica, and the VCU.br training team
The project, funded by the Art Action Foundation of Singapore, is taking place in Sao Paulo. Over a nine month period, we’re working with nine Brazilian youth from the favelas to help them learn to run their own video businesses. After conceiving of the project and getting the grant, we found an amazing arts organization in Sao Paulo called Casa Das Caldeiras with whom we have partnered to execute the project locally. They run artist in residency programs for artists and are part of lots of interesting community programs with youth focused on graffiti-ing, hop hop and many others. They are based out of an incredibly beautiful space in Sao Paulo, a converted factory from the 1920s, and they use the revenue they generate from renting this space out for events (it’s one of the prime party venues in the city) to fund their community projects.

Our Entrepreneurship Curriculum

We’re giving them entrepreneurship training in things like how to make contacts in the TV industry, how to write a proposal for grants or for NGO films, and how to write a “pitch” to a TV station. They are learning about financial planning for themselves and for a small business, and how to work with clients. Most crucially, they are learning about the spaces that exist for people like them in the new world of “citizen journalism” and low cost technologies, and are thinking deeply about the kinds of unheard stories from their favelas that they may be uniquely poised, above even the “professionals,” to tell. We are trying to turn their background, which until now was a huge disadvantage for them, into an advantage, something unique and valuable. Over nine months, the Fellows are attending six hours a day of classes conducted at CDC, and are each producing three videos. The first video was a videojournalism-style piece through which they learned about producing for news. The second video, which they are making now, needs to be for a particular client who agrees to use the video. (So one boy is making a video on abandoned animals for a chain of pet stores to play in their shop, others are making videos for different NGOs to use in fundraising, etc.) The third video needs to be for a paying client.

Filling a Gap in Existing Youth Media/Journalism Programs

The nine Community Producers were selected in June, with the following criteria: they had to be from a needy social background, had to know the basics of video production already, and had to demonstrate that they had tried but failed to continue with their video work after their initial training. So, for instance, one young man had tried to enroll in a university course in media, but didn’t have the right high school qualifications. Another had applied for a job in a TV station and was told he needed a degree.
All of the Video Producers had been through some video course already, run by different NGOs, but had never been able to earn a living from it. When we had visited Brazil three years ago to see where VV could be most relevant, it was clear there was no need for more video training programs. There were a huge number of groups doing amazing video training in favelas to help kids find their voice and to make media that might change perceptions about the Favelas. But the problem was that their graduates were not finding jobs in video, and when they left they faced either unemployment or menial labor. The impact on the youth was therefore not very sustained. In addition, a huge pool of talent – kids with great computer and camera skills – was being totally under-utilized. And thirdly, it might be counter-productive. To raise people’s aspirations but then fail to meet them is often a mean thing to do. We’d learned this ourselves the hard way in some of our early VV projects. So, we decided that livelihood is what VV would work on in Brazil.

Can Young People in Slums REALLY Earn a Living in Video?

But, you will surely ask, how can people from slums earn a living through video? News is in crisis and even many professionals cannot earn a living today! Well, the options we are exploring for these Video Producers include lots of non-news options such as starting a small production company that makes films for NGOs, local businesses and even wedding videos; getting a job as an NGO’s videographer; getting funding to create community video projects in the favelas with NGOs; and running “cine-clubs” in the favelas that show films. In time, citizen journalism on the web will become a way for communities to earn revenue. Even though they may end up producing more for corporates, we are still focusing the training to prepare them to produce TV news, as that also fulfills the Community Producers’ desire to increase the visibility of the favelas they come from

The Economics of Video Production in the Favelas

Ultimately, the economics of this are quite interesting. Our Video Producers in Brazil say they need around $460 a month to live on, plus they need to get equipment. So is it possible for them to earn around $5500 a year (including equipment) through video? In India, one of our community producers would require half or a third of that. Does their lesser financial requirements make them financially competitive with professionals? Could TV producers from slums become part of the market, not just because they are low cost but also because they have access to great stories? It’s not guaranteed, but I think it’s likely.

Ricardo, at one of the favelas, giving us a tour of his community area in Guarulhus
I’d love to hear people’s advice on this, as it is a question VV is thinking about in all aspects of our work. We have a partnership with the Indian Institute of Management, the best business school in Asia, to explore revenue models in community video. And we are about to launch a new community journalism program focused on rural video producers being able to produce for TV markets. This is what it means to make a community-based social venture based on creativity, not manual labor. This is what we mean by one of the taglines we use a lot, which says our goal is to create “a media industry at the base of the pyramid.”
So where will this project in Brazil go? Well, we recently visited about 20 of the leading media NGOs in Brazil, and hope that this project will be useful for them. We’ll be writing up our experiences here into a kind of training manual that other organizations can use to build in a video entrepreneurship element into their work. We also see real opportunities for VV in Brazil in other areas: for instance, our experience in using video screenings in slums/villages to result in real impact is relevant here. We would like to offer Fellowships in our new Community Journalism program to students of the various media organizations we’ve met here. And if we could be really ambitious, it would be fascinating to work with the different media producers and activists here to create a TV channel. There is so much amazing community-produced content in Brazil, that it seems the perfect place to launch a TV station focused on social issue documentary and alternative voices. But that’s for the very long term!

But our future plans depend entirely on whether this current project is a success. So we are saying it here now: if, in a year or two, the nine Community Producers who will soon graduate from VCU.br are still making videos and earning from it, it was a success. If they are not, then it was a failure. So please hold us to account, and demand to know how many of these new favela video entrepreneurs succeed.

The nine young people are all from favela/periphery areas of Sao Paulo, and on this day, we are doing a workshop on how to market yourself to clients.

One young man starts to read aloud: “My name is Allan Jones, I’m 24 years old and lives in Guarulhos municipality of São 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 meet 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 yet manages to run a theater workshop in the community of Vila Isabel, in Guarulhos.”

Video Entrepreneurs from Communities – turning disadvantages into advantages
The primary purpose of the exercise is to teach the 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 the so-called “professionals” they must be able to communicate to clients the value of their perspectives as community members. Why? Because their personal perspective, as people who live close to the stories they are telling, is the only thing they have which a professional does not. The problem is, they themselves have spent so long hiding the fact that they are from the disadvantaged parts of the city, that they are reluctant to write about it.

The personal narratives they eventually write reveal much about the forces that hold the poor back in the big cities of emerging markets like Rio, Sao Paulo or Mumbai: the massive distances the poor have to travel from their homes to work in the city centers, and the high costs of public transportation; the need to support their families financially, incredibly poor public schools, and –the one they keep repeating – no professional contacts. For one of them, a kind word from a TV reporter covering a story in his favela when he was 16, whom he got up the courage to approach on the street for advice and who gave him good tips on breaking into television news, was a turning point that gave him the conviction to develop 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 seem a little incredulous when we tell them that their backgrounds are in fact a strength?

As the days go by, the Fellows learn the step-by-step process of managing an independent video business, from identifying clients, writing proposals, creating a budget and a rate sheet, and “closing the deal.” But really, they are learning to tell and celebrate their personal stories, and find the personal connection to their work that makes all work meaningful. We tell them how they need to dig deep inside themselves to find this. Being an entrepreneur, ultimately, is about finding your personal power and confidence and belief in yourself and your ideas. Even if they send the most intense favela story to a television producer, that TV producer will always have the option of sending his own more “professional” freelancers to cover it. They need to learn to convince people that they have something these professionals don’t, a perspective that will be enlightening to their audience.

After a couple of hours of them slightly struggling to “get” this, one girl jumps up.
She is Beatrice, a beautiful and lively girl with hair that has gone in the three weeks we’ve been here from extension corn braids, to a Nefertiti-style tall wrap, to, finally, a beautiful and fully disco Afro: “I see! It’s because we live there that we’re unique!” “That’s it!” Everyone says, and from there, they start making the connections more easily.

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 right by you when you try to get their attention, and that’s why she can tell an interesting story about street artists who also have to fight for the acknowledge of passersby.
Another girl, Juliet, is the right person to tell a story of schizophrenia because her brother is schizophrenic.

A third person feels inspired to tell the stories of stray and injured animals because he used to see so many dogs getting run over when he was working as a delivery car driver. This was just one exercise, but the process, I think, is 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 own background in a favela or village or slum, and 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, would we be able to find people who were entrepreneurial and who would want to run their own video business, as opposed to having a less satisfying career but one that guarantees work? Because we had our doubts as to whether entrepreneurship could be taught. 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 but instead everyone needs to earn their own salary,” most people would quit. But yet, that is what many people in the NGO sector expect the poor to do.
But as we see the Producers personal business plans develop, we are convinced that these 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. Rafael is already writing proposals to the government to create video projects in the slums. Luana is pursuing internships with TV stations they’ve connected with during the project. Says Layla: “my experience in VCU.br is 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 so much latent talent and knowledge out in the world that is untapped, 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

Jessica with Samvad CVU, 75% sustainable from outside projects.

There’s an ongoing conversation, in the west at least, about the death of old media. Traditional journalism, magazines, book publishing houses, broadcasting stations, the corporate music industry – all are scrambling to find revenue as advertisement dries up and more and more and more cultural products become available online for free.

While we should celebrate the rise of new voices who take full advantage of the digital age’s cheap creative tools – including VV’s community producers – there’s still a lingering question: how are we going to pay for it all? As traditional economic models grow obsolete, how will we monetize our art, news, and entertainment? Importantly, how can VV find opportunities in this economic shake-up?

One answer is a hybrid business model that offers some free services, but with subsidiary content for sale.

A few examples: Lastfm, a free internet radio site that makes money by a combination of ads, user subscriptions and donations. Another example is open access publishing, free online scholarly journals that either require the author’s payment in exchange for exposure or are subsidized by academic institutions. And the Prelinger Archive allows non-commercial access to 48,000 downloadable video files but profits from fees paid for a licensing clause.

VV is now working towards a similarly creative strategy. Currently one of its CVUs, Samvad in Ahmedabad, is about 75% sustainable. That is, it only relies on financial support from VV for a quarter of its costs. The rest of its income combines revenue from community workshops, wedding videos, and work-for-hire for other NGOs. Likewise a quarter of the other original CVUs now make 20-30% of their operating costs from earned income. And this year VV launched its VCU.br program of ten graduates from Brazilian favela media programs who train for a year in making and selling videos for mainstream TV.

It’s a challenge to be sure. To make a CVU sustainable, for instance, it would need to earn around $30,000 a year. Plus the CVU must sustain its function as a vital social service, even as it earns additional income. Striking the balance between empowering the poor with a voice and creating a sustainable financial future is key.

VV is working with the Indian Institute of Management to research hybrid models and roll out a future business plan, the goal being 30% sustainability for all CVUs after two years. Here are a few ways IIC suggests CVUs could earn revenue in the future:

• Wedding videos
• Children video workshops
• DVD sales
• Films for other NGOs
• Government programs buying advertising
• Operations as a production company for hire by local businesses
• Stringers for local news, such as CNN IBN’s Citizens Journalist program
• Producing for television, such as Current or MTV Iggy
• Providing vocational training in movie making to other local NGOs
• Showing advertisement for local shops in the screenings
• Screening Government films or films by other NGOs
• Providing computer education to the villagers
• Paying to organize screenings in other villages
• Operating as an internet kiosk
• Equipment rental
• Operating “media clubs”

For more on this issue, read Jessica’s article on PBS’s Mediashift blog and also this article from the Christian Science Monitor.

Posted by Morgan Currie, VV volunteer.

Image from Alamy via the Economist.

Both the NY Times and the Economist reported last month that mobile phones are aiding development in fascinating new ways. Just to name a few: The Grameen Foundation’s phone app helps rural Ugandan farmers track crop diseases before they spread, sending digital photos and GPS coordinates to scientists in Kampala. India’s Nokia Life Tools app give instant farming advice, weather data, and crop prices. And Africans can now text for money transfers, to turn on water wells, and get soccer scores.

Mobile phones also empower communities: citizens are reporting on human-rights violations, coordinating aid projects, and getting the scoop on local politicians. Just this year Indian voters used phones to call up data on their candidates. And Kenyans’ mobiles aided them in crisis management by texting to NGOs during post-election violence in 2008.

What’s the significance of this for VV? In certain communities, people proficient with their mobile devices are becoming town information specialists, using cheap applications to pull up data on local agriculture and prices, or to google neighbors’ questions. They’re advising school kids on the endless information now accessible to them. Could CVU producers become “community knowledge workers,” using their technical know-how to get information to their communities not only through video, but via mobiles as well?

How else could CVU producers incorporate such rapidfire response tools into their work? Could VV set up an application that allowed community members to message CVUs during a crisis that needed video coverage? The potential seems there.

Posted by Morgan Currie, VV Volunteer.