This month, the VideoVoice Collective partnered with TLM, a microfinance organization in West Timur, Indonesia that we connected to through our friends at Kiva.org. We’ve had an incredible experience with TLM here in the far East of Indonesia. They work to give small loans to low income people so that they can start or grow their small businesses. Small businesses range from seaweed cultivation to pig farms to tempe production. Together, we trained staff at the microfinance organization to use video to evaluate client satisfaction and to advocate for improvements in the microfinance industry.
The staff did an incredible job! Most hadn’t used a video camera before this training. After just 2 days of training, they had taken about 10 hours of footage and were well on their way to producing their first video. Check out our pictures below or the whole VideoVoice in Indonesia slide show, images of microloan entrepreneurs in Indonesia that our videovoice team spoke to about the impact of small loans on their lives.
Join us for a presentation on participatory video and human rights in New Orleans at the 2008 Human Rights Center Conference!
Conference, November 6, 2008, 10AM to 5PM Alumni House, UC Berkeley
Health, Human Rights and Vulnerable Communities - 10:00 AM to 12 Noon (Toll Room)
Faculty Discussant: Cheri Pies, School of Public Health
• Caricia Catalani, School of Public Health, Berkeley, Participatory Video in New Orleans, USA
Abstract
Billions of people worldwide have gained access to the Internet, digital recording devices, and other new media tools. More and more, these new media tools are used as innovative solutions to enduring human rights struggles, however often without critical understanding of their potential strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. To begin to understand these aspects of new media more thoroughly, this evaluation of the New Orleans Videovoice Project describes the processes and outcomes associated with a particular participatory video methodology: videovoice.
Like its predecessor photovoice, videovoice involves partnering with communities to research health and human rights situations by putting digital cameras in the hands of everyday people. The New Orleans Videovoice Project took place in Central City, an underserved nieghborhood that was hit hard in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Those who have returned from displacement have faced a difficult recovery period involving loss of family and friends, loss of housing and possessions, closures of primary sources of health care, marginalization by government and its recovery programs, and the ongoing stress of piecing one’s life and the community back together.
The New Orleans Videovoice Project arose out of a need to organize around human rights and health concerns at this critical time. By building a partnership of diverse community members from the Central City neighborhood, public health researchers, filmmakers, and human rights advocates, the project has produced several participatory documentary videos. The videos describe the neighborhood’s historical and current struggle for human rights, and their own solutions for a better future. Beyond videos, this highly participatory project has resulted in other critical outcomes, such as increased capacity to produce media, understanding of community strengths and concerns, individual empowerment, and engagement in community action.
• Krista Kshatriya, School of Law, Berkeley, World Health Organization/Southeast Asia Regional Office, India
• Miranda Ritterman, School of Public Health, Berkeley, Christian Children’s Fund, Angola
• Nobuko Mizoguchi, Demography, Berkeley, Global Health Access Project, Thai-Burma border
What would New Orleans look like if it were home to the nation’s top urban public school system?
Executive Producer Matt Wisdom and Digital Filmmaker Tim Ryan hope to help convey that vision in a new short Internet documentary about recent successes within New Orleans public charter schools. In addition to an insiders look into what makes public Charter schools successful, the short film addresses the impact current public school reform will have on the future of New Orleans.
Howard Rheingold, a brilliant lecturer at UC Berkeley and Stanford and author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolutionis a major influence in our thinking about what internet-mediated video can do for public health research and advocacy. Howard Rheingold writes, and I completely agree, about the salience of this historical moment in technological and social change.
“If print culture shaped the environment in which the Enlightenment blossomed and set the scene for the Industrial Revolution, participatory media might similarly shape the cognitive and social environments in which twenty-first-century life will take place (a shift in the way our culture operates)” (Rheingold, 2008, pp 99-100)
His talk at the TED conference — viewable here — encapsulates some of the thrilling possibilities for democracy, collaboration, and (in my mind) health promotion in our century.
Community-Campus Partnerships for Health is a network that works to foster partnerships between communities and educational institutions that build on each other’s strengths and develop their roles as change agents for improving health professions education, civic responsibility and the overall health of communities. They are a great source for partnership resources and tools, project fundings, and ongoing events.
