VV’s Background – A Community Media Model
What is Community Media?
Community media is media that is for and by communities. It empowers those who produce it (and appear in it) with a voice; it builds the social capital of a community to address critical local issues and it gives people full control over their own narratives. And often, it communicates people’s needs to authority and leads to concrete resolution of local problems.
Our History
Since our inception, the leaders of Video Volunteers, Jessica Mayberry and Stalin K.,have been asking one key question: what kind of model will enable community media to scale to every local community in the world?
Before devising our current model, IndiaUnheard, we prototyped several different models of community-owned media. These all, to varying degrees, included the following four crucial elements we identified: the intellectual, creative, and leadership development of community media-makers; Community ownership of the content creation process; solution-oriented stories; and community discussion and viewing of the content.
Our Different Models
Community Video Units: |
Video for Livelihoods: |
VideoActive Girls: |
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NGO Media Units: |
Videoshala: |
Community Radio: |
A Globally Scalable Model
All of this experimentation and learning helped us ideate our current model IndiaUnheard.
We believe this is a globally scalable model that can contribute significantly to the global movement to democratize the media.
Why? Financial scalability. We are now producing in a way that is financially viable for both local producers and the media industry.
In a global media environment in which ‘citizen journalism’ means either intensive, expensive short term documentary workshops or the ‘accidental video’ produced by citizen journalists during high profile crises, Video Volunteers has created something new – an innovative, scalable, low cost model for empowering large numbers of marginalized community members to regularly publish articulate stories.
This provides a template for what a ‘media industry at the base of the pyramid’ could look like.
Want to know more?
Check out our annual reports to read about other campaigns, projects and initiatives with other technologies we’ve undertaken over the years.