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They change their lives making media that can change the world – Help Community Voices reach the world. Support Vividh Community Journalists.
Corruption, violence and discrimination are rampant in communities that do not have effective monitoring and reporting systems to shine a light on human right violations. Video Volunteers envisions a world where remote villages have at least one person armed with a small video camera, who captures wrongdoings on video and shares the solutions with the world.
In our new Community Journalism program, called Vividh, we will train community activists in video journalism from rural areas in each of India’s 28 states. Each month, these 60 “community journalists” will create short videos that document local issues like health care, education, infrastructure and government programs. We will distribute these videos to social movements, NGOs and mainstream media, resulting in concrete change when the views of communities are delivered directly to decision makers. In time, this will scale to be a news agency from the slums and villages of India, a low cost way for the mainstream media to access fascinating stories from unheard and unseen areas.
A donation of $75 will support one Community Journalist for a month. We are training them to earn this income on their own within several years as rural media entrepreneurs. Give them the support they need to begin their careers as journalists and storytellers.
Help us enable the most disadvantaged communities to participate and shape the public debate. help us empower community voices.
There are four ways you can support us THIS MONTH to make their voice heard:
2. Contribute in the UK via GlobalGiving. For the first time, VV’s UK friend’s can make tax-deductible donations to VV. If we raise £2000 in the UK this month, we will have a chance of winning £1000 prize.
3. Donate by check. Send your checks to: Video Volunteers, c/o Temin and Company, 750 Lexington Avenue, 26th Floor, New York, NY 10022. Indian nationals can send their checks to Video Volunteers India. Click here for the India address.
4. Donate cameras – cellphone cameras, flip cams, or mini-DV cameras
Highlights from 2009
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* Community Video Units, Local People Taking Action: We hit the milestone of 100 producers, and 200,000 viewers in slums and villages this year, and are now partnered with 16 leading NGOs in India. Read about the impacts on producers, government and local people HERE in a new booklet about the CVUs’ first three years.
* Video Volunteers Launches in Brazil: We are training young people from favelas --Brazilian slums--to set up video businesses. They learn about entrepreneurship, working as a video journalist for TV, and setting up their own production company. Brazil has more young people from slums learning video in NGO programs than any other country in the world and there is a real need for the livelihood training programs.
* Partnership with the leading business school in India: We are carrying out a collaborative research with the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India’s leading business school, to make Community Media Units financially sustainable. The learning from this study will be freely shared with all community media projects in the world.
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* The Community Video Camp-- growing the community video movement in India with the largest ever community video gathering in India. We brought together 130 people – academics, NGOs, journalists and our community producers – for a five-day Training Camp in August. With many of the college students in attendance saying how much more skilled the community producers are than they are, it became clear to all that you don’t need to be educated to make meaningful media.
* Video Volunteers India is registered as a non-profit with Stalin K. as its Managing Trustee. Its office is in Goa, in an old Goan-style house perched on top of a small hill in the jungle, with lots of outdoor space and a real community feel to it. In the next couple of years, we plan to build it into a media training center.
* Partnerships and Awards: We were one of five finalists for the King Baudouin Foundation (of Belgium) International Development Award, one of the most competitive development prizes in Europe, and Jessica was made a TED Fellow. We carried out joint projects with Global Fund for Children, WITNESS and Tactical Tech of the UK, and a variety of media companies including MTV Iggy.
Please support VV’s new batch of Community Journalists and help them to lead their own communications revolution. It costs only $1500 to support a community journalist for one year or $75/month.
Your support makes it possible for us to empower others to drive change from the bottom up.
Thank you again for your generosity and a happy end of the year!
In gratitude for all that you do,
Jessica, Stalin and VV Team
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Newsletter produced by Video Volunteers
C/O Temin and Co., 750 Lex Ave., 26th Fl. New York, NY 10022
info@videovolunteers.org | videovolunteers.org |
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