Shooting for Social Change

Jessica Mayberry thinks she can see the world’s next social change revolution coming. The tools that will propel it are already here — cheap digital video cameras, easy-to-access video editing software, wide-screen projectors — but the revolution needs a little push. Grassroots media, she told me, will change the world, once we give the grassroots a bit of help to learn how.

After years working in television — at Court TV and CNN, among others — Mayberry went looking for something more and accepted a fellowship through the American India Foundation to spend a year training rural Indian women in filmmaking. It was a trip that changed her life.

One day, shooting a documentary in a village with a team of women filmmakers from the slums and a crew of English-speaking white men from the Asian Development Bank, she was struck with what a difficult time these outsiders had in getting their interview subjects — impoverished rural women — to open up and speak honestly. Once the Indian filmmakers sat down and started chatting with them, however, the women had plenty of powerful things to say.

It struck Mayberry that the vast majority of people in the Western world had never really heard these voices. “The wealthy world is literally blind to and ignorant of two-thirds of human experience — the worldview of the poor — because our media is so utterly dominated by elites,” she said in an interview with Echoing Green, an NGO that supports social entrepreneurship and where she was a 2007 fellow.

The trick, she realized, would not be to tell their stories for them or bend the elite media to showcase these voices, but to make these rural women and slum dwellers into media-makers in their own right. “The last thing the world needs is another young white American broadcasting her opinion on the developing world,” she told me. “You have to invest in alternative voices or you’re just going to hear the same voices all the time.”

Following this inspiration, she founded an NGO called Video Volunteers, which organizes and trains "Community Video Units" — teams of grassroots media-makers — to create half-hour video productions in local languages about solutions to problems marginalized communities face. These Video Units screen what they have produced for their neighbors, sharing news, information and stories and encouraging action on common concerns and problems.

The point is to help their communities work together to improve their lives. “If they can’t find a call to action,” said Mayberry, “they don’t do the film.”

The community producers’ training involves learning the ins and outs of various formats such as talk-shows, PSAs, documentaries and dramas, as well as methods of incorporating communities into the productions. Each film typically features around 40 to 50 community members.

The films often address sensitive or political topics that neighbors might not openly discuss. This barrier-breaking is key; someone viewing such a production might well end up thinking, in Mayberry's words, "wow, my neighbor feels that way? He also feels it’s wrong that girls aren’t going to school?" Audience members who had previously felt isolated in their opinions can see that others agree and learn how they can take action.

Several of the Video Units’ projects have already had real-world impacts. A video imparting information about domestic violence resulted in 50 women filing domestic violence complaints. After viewing a piece about electrification, several villages successfully lobbied the government to get electricity. Community members whose shopkeeper had been cheating them joined together to demand fair prices.

Video Volunteers’ efforts give the people behind the camera and onscreen a genuine voice for the first time. The focus on broadcasting the video to the media-makers' own communities makes the effort function in a similar way to blogs for a literate Internet-oriented audience, says Mayberry.

The growing positive reputation of the Video Units has brought in some local commercial business, which they have eagerly taken on. The organization is trying to develop a stainable business model to enable them to bring community media to a mainstream global audience. In the meantime, they are broadcasting some of the Video Units’ products on Channel 19 Website (Ch19.org) and have had limited success placing pieces on Nickelodeon, CNN, Current TV and MTV IGGY. Eventually, Mayberry believes the project will be able to create a CNN or BBC for the world’s poor.

According to the World Bank, the poor need to have their voices heard just as much as they need food and shelter. And with the right help, those voices are starting to come through loud and clear.

“There’s a lot of power in this idea that we’re demonstrating that you can be a powerful communicator even if you don’t have an education,” Mayberry said. “Some of them used to make boxes out of matchsticks and had never left their homes. And now they know how to speak to government workers. Now they know how to make films.”

Photos courtesy of stock.xchng (top), superfem via flickr (middle) and Meanest Indian via flickr (bottom)