Community Radio and Community Video

Video Volunteers and Drishti are creating a ‘social media network’ that uses video to accelerate socio-economic change. We partner with local NGOs to create Community Video Units, teams of 7-10 local people who learn to produce a 30min Video News Magazine every month on different areas of critical social need as determined by the local community. These are screened outdoors and discussed nightly in 25 villages each month, reaching up to 10,000 people per Community Video Unit (CVU). The net result is the creation of a genuinely local media voice which is proving to expand the scale & reach of beneficial programs and to provide communities a unique platform to identify their own solutions to local and global problems. We work primarily in India, where we have launched seven CVU’s to date. We plan to begin to globalize the Social Media Network later this year, by launching in Brazil. We firmly believe that our approach has not only a great opportunity of overcoming barriers to ‘bottom-up development’ in disadvantaged communities, but also significant opportunities for sustainable earned income and a media industry at the base of the world’s economic pyramid. Video Volunteers (www.videovolunteers.org) was recognized in 2006 for our CVU Model as a Tech Museum Award Laureate, and a finalist for the 2006 Development Gateway Award. I’ve attached some recent press and an overview of our work – but to really get a sense of what it looks like to have local communities finding their own stories and solutions to poverty, you can see it first-hand here: http://tinyurl.com/y4luam as well as here: http://tinyurl.com/yyk9lk Community Radio: Drishti has created one of the most successful community radio programs, Radio Ujaas with KMVS in Kutch. Drishti's director, Stalin k., has also been made Convenor of the Community Radio Forum India, largely in recognition of his great skills in community participation.