Goa Media Center
Video Volunteers is setting up a Media Center in Baga, Goa to innovate, train and strengthen a community of media activists. The center will support the existing and already vibrant activism in the state, develop new methods of using video for community organizing, and enable more local activists to use digital tools. The Media Center will conduct regular workshops of 2-10 days duration, and will be staffed by Video Volunteers’ professional media advocacy trainers, who have over 40 years of collective experience. WORKSHOPS
Workshop topics will include video blogging Video advocacy, mobile journalism, rural wireless networking, video campaigning, digital storytelling, community radio and community video, and others. The focus will be on low-cost, easy to use digital technologies that can fit seamlessly into an activists’ existing work. The goal is to help local activists and interested citizens to harness these tools to use in their work. Some workshops will be for those who already have an organizational structure in place, such as NGO workers, and others will be for the more uninitiated such as students or the general public. ETHOS
All training conducted at the Media Center will be:
• Rooted in communities – one of Video Volunteers’ key expertise is in training communities to use media, and all our workshops encourages participants to produce and share media that is accessible and rooted in the realities of communities
• Sustainable and impactful – VV engages with its partners over long years, which is one of the key features of its community video program. So all workshops and activities will have intensive follow-ups afterwards.TEAM:
Stalin K.: Stalin K. is a filmmaker, activist, and the co-founder and former director of one of the country’s leading human rights and media organizations, Drishti. When running Drishti he oversaw the production of dozens of films, rights-based campaigns, street theater and community media programs. His two films, “India Untouched” and Lesser Humans on the issue of caste have won several international awards including the Bombay International Film Festival. He is a leading authority and practitioner of community media and has lectured on the topic at Stanford, Berkeley, NYU, and numerous other universities. He is convener of the Community Radio Forum, designed one of the country’s premier community radio programs at KMVS, and helped to draft the legislation to open up India’s airwaves along with other colleagues in the community radio movement. He has also up 12 Community Video Units with different NGOs across the country.
Jessica Mayberry: Jessica is the Founding Director of Video Volunteers, which works to create a network of thousands of grassroots journalists across the world. Prior to founding Video Volunteers she worked in television in New York, at CNN, the Fox News Channel and Court TV. Jessica Mayberry is a Fellow of Echoing Green, (www.echoinggreen.org) an organization that supports leading social entrepreneurs and a winner of the Knight Foundation News Challenge, and was selected as one of 11 ‘Architects of the Future’ by the Waldzell Institute of Austria. Under her direction Video Volunteers has won numerous awards including being a top five finalist for the King Baudouin of Belgium Devleopment Prize, a Tech Award, Development Gateway Award, and the winner of the NYU Stern Business School Business Plan Competition.
Freeman Murray: Freeman Murray is a board member of Video Volunteers and an ardent believer in the power of the internet to effect positive change in society. He has worked in the high tech industry in California and India for the past 12 years. He worked in the Java group at Sun Microsystems and at a variety of startups including IUMA, Mixercast and Kendara which he co-founded and sold to Excite@Home in 2000. In 2001 he set up the Murray Internet and Education Fund through which he has provided support for numerous tech related education projects like Curriki.org, the Digital Studyhall, Video Volunteers and the Vigyan Ashram
Namita Singh: Namita Singh is a video trainer and researcher focused on community media. She is a recent graduate of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, where her thesis on the community video program of Drishti and Video Volunteers won the top thesis prize in her year. She worked as a Research Officer at the Indian Institute of Management, and subsequently joined Drishti as a video trainer and then as research officer for two years. She has recently relocated to Goa to help get the Media Center off the ground.