Dear all,

It’s so great to be back working for The Modern Story! This is a project I really respect and believe in, and I am extremely hopeful about the future of TMS – its successful implementation so far, as well as the lessons we have gained from this experience, are important harbingers of its future development.

And one vital aspect of this development is networking. For this purpose, I have just returned from the Video Volunteers Community Video Camp in Goa, an international event that aimed to bring together individuals, organizations and government entities which, working in the realm of community video, sought to empower communities through the channel of self-produced media.

Video Volunteers, a dynamic NGO led and founded by Stalin K. and Jessica Mayberry, is one of the strongest organizations working in this field. In the 3 years since its inception, Video Volunteers has trained more than 150 community video producers, who now work full-time creating and screening journalistic videos of local relevance to the communities they belong to. In an age where mainstream media represents the interests of the privileged few, and fails to address the concerns of underpowered many, it is more crucial than ever to develop media that is made in, for and by the local community. In this sense, VV is a paragon of vision and efficiency, and the work that has come out of this project is truly inspirational.

However, while seeing these community-produced videos is impressive in itself, meeting the actual filmmakers who are responsible for these videos truly makes one realize the success and potential of this strategy. On the first day of the CV Camp, I was extremely pleasantly surprised to see that a large number of the participants were community video producers from the various video units that VV has set up around India. For the following 5 days, working side by side with them in the different workshops were offered, having lunch or dinner with them every day, joining them in traditional dances for the open mic sessions, I came to get to know them personally and that is when I truly understood the immense promise of this media practice. These gifted people, young and old, the sons and daughters of farmers and daily wageworkers, have become not only excellent filmmakers – shooting and editing on a professional level – but perhaps even more importantly, they have turned into community leaders. Confident and smart, they are the future of these villages, the new wave of change. As I have seen in the creative workshops we took part in together, their thinking is original and imaginative, and their resourcefulness and civic consciousness qualifies them perfectly to deliver media messages that are locally relevant, daring, and investigative par excellence. As such, their videos tackle subjects like regional government schemes that could improve the lives of the community members, social issues such as disease, access to education and literacy, or locally-specific stories such as corruption at the village ration store.

Beyond the personal impact that meeting these community producers had on me, reaffirming my belief in media made “in, by and for the local community”, the CV Camp was a success because it offered me the opportunity to meet representatives from different organizations working on projects that are similar to ours. On Wednesday, I held a presentation on TMS and showed clips from some of the videos our students have produced, in front of more than 200 people. Our program really caught their attention, and they were extremely impressed with the children’s videos, so after the presentation I was approached by a lot of people who wanted to learn more about it, to discuss possible partnerships in the future, or to look into introducing our digital storytelling curriculum in schools in the districts and villages where they work. Many of these individuals and organizations operate in Andhra Pradesh, so I look forward to connecting with them over these next couple of weeks, visiting their project sites and seeing in what ways we might work together in the future. I will keep everybody updated on these future developments in the coming month.

Finally, it was really encouraging to receive such positive feedback on our project – most of the participants at the CV Camp were engaged in community video projects for adults, so they were extremely interested to see the strategy applied to schoolchildren as well, and congratulated us for realizing the potential of using media training within the formal educational system in public schools.