Just wanted to let everyone know: our application was reviewed by the Knight Foundation, and now they want a full proposal as follow-up to our letter of inquiry!!!! YAYAYAYAYAYAAYAYYYYY!!!!!

Almost 4 months at my site has passed. And soon enough my favorite season will be gone with all the leaves falling to the ground and bitter cold to come.

For these past months of Oct and November, my biggest focus is my org's Asian Pacific American Leadership Symposium for high schoolers. I've been trying many outreach methods to high school principals, teachers, counselors, students and community orgs to allow students to take a day off from school to attend this event at UMASS Boston. The discouraging thing is that everyone loves the program and what we're doing (workshops on APA identity, history, culture and building networks and supports for both high school students and youth workers). However, many of the schools (with high Asian American student population) we relied on in the past are now resistant to allow adults and students to attend this event as a field trip (because it focuses more on leadership development and not what is relevant in the hs curriculum.) Ironically, this is why we've had the symposium in the past, to share our resources to hs students who aren't exposed to contents of Asian American experience and studies to connect to their work at schools and in their communities.

I also helped with the adult workshop which I was going to co-facilitate, however I will not be around for the day of the symposium (Nov 20). The adult workshop is designed to focus on youth immigration issues: bilingual education, anti-asian sentiments and access to education for undocumented youth. This symposium is really important because it is a kick off event for the year to get more students involved with CAPAY or their communities; and to stay connected with schools and communities. I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope for 100 plus attendees; as my supervisor has said, people always register last minute, so you have to have faith that they will come.

While I was doing this project I realize as I was going through my org's database, that it's time for update of contacts and the database all together. So I will probably be working with Filemaker, because this is what they are still using (version 6.0). Hopefully I can figure out how to sync this program to send out e-mail blasts. This will take some time figuring out (especially if I can transfer files.)

Well, I will be leaving for Italy (Venice, Florence, Rome) this Saturday for 10 days.This will take off two wks of my November and soon enough the Holiday season will storm through. Ciao!

From July onward, I've spent much of my time at Portland Community Media working on a proposal for a project that would allow immigrants and Millennials to create media at low-cost anywhere and at anytime. To do this, we focused on the cell phone as a media creation device and the Internet as the primary distribution platform with the hope of television as a second one. Here's how the idea began:

After coming back from Africa, I have a deeper appreciation for the immigrant experience. As a minority, I could only superficially understand the immigrant struggle till my experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Lesotho. In addition to this, there’s very little ethnic diversity in Portland, and I was curious why, out of the major West Coast cities, it had been excluded from the richness of cultural infusion.
My first day on the job as a CTC Vista, I had a talk with Jason, who managesthe government production side of PCM. I was asking about immigrant representation on PCM channels and programming done by immigrants, of which Jason said there was very little. We talked about the lack of outreach by PCM to immigrant communities in the area even though it’s in line with the mission, and we discussed the need for their presence in community media in Portland.
Having come from print journalism, I have a penchant for paper. Bea, my supervisor, shares this as a bookbinder. We discussed what would be the most comfortable and familiar medium for immigrants. Despite my position as the New Media Vista, I really wanted to bring print into PCM. We decided that, of all forms of media, paper is the most familiar in the world and probably the most comfortable form of communication that anyone can opt for.
Since I was hired on to be the New Media Vista without really understanding what the buzzword of “New Media” and “Web 2.0” were, I was also researching heavily during my first couple of weeks on the job. I read a lot about social media and also came across this website focusing on the phone as an activist tool. It was incredibly interesting for me to learn how phones were being used for flash mobbing and information distribution in third world countries.
At the time, my boyfriend was also about to replace his shitty phone and was intently scouring the Internet for new cell phone technology and customer ratings. I asked him about transferring contacts, SMS’, and other forms of data from his old phone to a new one. I remembered how all my phones used to have a voice memo feature and the short amount of time it allowed for recording. I figured this was anywhere between 1-10 minutes because I used to accidentally hit the voice memo feature on my old cell phone while on calls. I realized how that might be a possibility for new media use for immigrants and thought it might be appropriate technology because of what I saw in Lesotho: Everyone has a cell phone regardless of how remote they are, and a lot of it is driven by the phone as a status symbol. "Everyone" is a bit of an exaggeration, but I later learned that the most familiar and bestselling communicative technology device in the world is the cell phone, which suggests that the phone is at least more familiar than other new communication media.
I started to test the technical side of this idea with phones that belonged to coworkers and friends. The goal was trying to figure out the average amount of time that the memo feature records, and that’s where I discovered that, in fact, not all phones have voice memo features, and phones range in recording time from a minute to whatever amount of memory is left on the phone.
It was around that time that Bea put Jacob and me together on a project to figure out how PCM could address the needs of both immigrant communities and Millennials. PCM has a very hard time retaining Millennials at the facility, and yet they are some of the most media active and social justice oriented people in Portland.
Eventually, I stumbled upon a social networking site called “Utterz,” (now known as Utterli), and although the hope of the voice memo feature was zero-cost media creation, it seemed that a system like Utterli (people dial in to record memos and interviews) was the best compromise between cell phone plans and incongruencies in cell phone features. Utterli, however, is a free form social media site, and Portland Speaks has more of a focus in the form of target groups.
However, following a group brainstorm and dissection, Jacob and I felt somewhat confused and disillusioned since our parameters were loose and our ideas were being scrambled, so I set out to define the original idea and it burgeoned into the attached proposal and illustrations. It was then decided that the idea would be submitted for the Knight Foundation's News Challenge grant (our application can be found here).
All in all, this has been an incredible learning process with lots of creativity but also some incredibly devastating downs. Welcome to the real world, I guess.

Comment from Denise Cheng on November 3, 2008 - 6:50pm

I do want to say that I feel fairly disillusioned after the whole process. You know how they always warn that when the real world hits people lose their idealism? I'd put a twist on that and say I feel disillusioned because of how important credentials are to have creative oversight (the higher you climb, the more you can get) and how, even if you work to deserve a break, there's still that variable of unfairness as the real world standard. A vague comment, but there it is. As my friend put it, we have to make that choice between selfishness and selflessness, each with its own consequences.

I am submitting two reports at once this time. The past two months were so busy that there was little time to reflect or to write about what was going on.

During the second month at my organization, I delved further into media training and started an active video news project with some volunteers. Most of my work this month was interactive and in the community, so in contrast to my plans, I did not have much time to write training manuals. A notable exception was authoring a revised Airshifter Handbook for WRFU 104.5-LP, our community radio station, with an extra manual on remote/live broadcast and streaming radio. The last version of the handbook had been written two or three years ago, and lacked a discussion of the goals of the organization or a studio checklist for DJs new to the radio. After talking with the Station Manager, we realized that a new handbook alone would not have much effect unless we also scheduled small group training sessions so we could discuss the social, legal, and technical aspects of running a community radio show. Our efforts were successful and now WRFU has an established program for orienting new DJs and getting new shows on the air, while respecting the needs and goals of the IMC as a whole, which includes other groups beyond the radio station.

One of those other groups is IMC Production, a volunteer group that I helped create in order to carry on and combine the legacies of the separate Video and Radio News groups that ceased to exist around two years ago. Simply put, all the IMC groups make sure that some different aspect of independent media is alive, productive, and engaged with the local population. Production is here to create audio-visual content for the community and for other groups, and to provide the facilities and personnel to make this possible. While our work to improve the studio is slow, in only my second month as a VISTA, we were able to initiate IMC Video News. IMC Video News actively searches for local or regional stories that are not being covered by other stations, goes out on-site to interview and shoot, and then edits and produces short-length film for distribution online and on Urbana Public Television. Even though others in the IMC look to us for technical multimedia advice, we spend far more time interacting with the public than sitting in front of computer screens editing. This has turned out to be very beneficial for our organization’s outreach and public relations, because we are listening to – and publishing – voices that others are ignoring.

In September, we produced segments on a Greenpeace Solar-Powered Concert (where I ran the mixer, too – next to a solar panel the size of a roof) and the closing of Illinois State Parks. We also assisted with an Iraq Veterans Against the War forum on post-traumatic stress disorder (for UPTV) and re-published the local Books to Prisoners’ Our Volunteer Experience film online. A sample of our work to date can be accessed on our new UC-IMC YouTube Channel. To get this project going, we have been using Adobe Premiere, but we will be expanding to incorporate more open-source software for editing. Two open-source/freeware video utilities that have been crucial to my work here have been Handbrake and MP4CAM2AVI. Of course, Audacity is a robust, simple, and reliable solution for audio editing that I would recommend to anyone and which most people seem to know, anyway. Though not technically free (you can use it for free with no features suspended or get a license for $50), I recommend Windows’ Reaper for multi-track audio editing and sequencing because it is easy, allows for flexible routing, comes with high-quality processing built-in, and accepts most free or commercial VST and DirectX plugins.

It doesn’t end there, though. The Sunlight Foundation webinar that I scheduled between members of WRFU, Production, and Public i (the IMC’s independent newspaper) was a small event, but so useful that I am posting the links here for CTC VISTAs to view. Bill Allison guided us through an overwhelming tour of websites that allow any citizen with Internet access to closely investigate the finances, bills, and records of members in the United States Congress, as well as information on lobbyists, federal contracts, and elections. Obviously, these types of topics and data are of great interest to journalist and media organizations like mine in the IndyMedia network, but this set of links provides another set of tools that all community organizers can use to bridge the digital divide and help the groups they are working with attain greater access to knowledge and the political process in their states and in the nation:

Congresspedia
OpenCongress.org
GovTrack.us
Senate.gov
Federal Election Commission
Sunlight Media Services - This deserves a special note for technology users/junkies: widgets with updated political and congressional data that you can embed in a web site or blog.
Politicker.com
OpenSecrets.org
Fortune535
FedSpending.org
TaxPayer.net

Finally, when even progressive mainstream media does not address all the questions your community may be asking:
DemocracyNow.org
Pacifica.org

I hope some of you find these links useful in your own VISTA work. Between radio, video, and live events, I trained around 30 individuals in the second month and identified many new resources that have helped me and others. Meanwhile, I got inundated with direct service… but I’ll save that story for the month 3 report.

A couple of weeks ago I participated in a couple of workshops that I found helpful for my organization:

• Outcomes Evaluation
• Hosting an Open House

The Outcomes Evaluation was especially good since it gave me insight into how to help write grants for our organization. Most of my help with grant writing has been editing the grant for spelling and grammar errors and checking to ensure that the questions asked in the grants were answered. Now I'll be able to help with actual writing.

Time goes by so quickly here in the mountains, but maybe that's because I've spent a good portion of the past month away from Whitesburg. I was in Oakland, CA, for a week for the Critical Resistance 10th Anniversary Conference. It was a great week of meeting people, and learning about other organizations and resources. And I got to lead a workshop. First I had volunteers from the workshop session read the Thousand Kites Play aloud. In this informal staged reading, a diverse group of voices were heard and a variety of experiences with the criminal justice system were expressed. Act 2 of the play is the audience's chance to tell their story. We heard from a man who was formerly incarcerated, a woman who's boyfriend is currently incarcerated, among others. It was a great conversation and I think that people walked away with some actions steps. Next time I do the presentation there are things I would like to do differently, but for a first go around, I think it went alright.

I also went to a session that was a planning group for a national coalition for prison arts work. I joined the technology team (so as to use all my new ctc skills!) and have created the blog for the group.This isn't technically part of my job, but my organization is part of the coalition, and it's something that's important to me, so I'm excited about it.

Last week I went to the Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago and learned so much about radio! As I am a weekly radio producer, it seemed like a good festival for me to go to. Many big NPR personalities were there, and I learned a lot about radio documentary, and also about using social media to promote the work. It was a cool conference, indeed.

In the past month we also finished up the facilitation guide (attached) and have revamped the website. So now I'm finally able to really start in on our StoryLine project, which will use a digital google map as the key element. Right now I'm working on getting audio files into the website, and doing outreach to get more people to share their stories.

And next week I'm starting a creative writing workshop in the nearby women's prison. I'm hoping that eventually I'll be able to turn it into a digital storytelling workshop and since they have computers there it might be possible. That's not work related. It's just fun.

So needless to say, I'm busy down here. But the weather is still good, and I'm still getting some good hiking in!

And yes, I hear the banjo almost daily in my office. What would a good appalachian office be without a banjo?

Comment from Morgan Sully on October 21, 2008 - 7:36pm

Awesome! Appalshop is one of our faves around here at the NAMAC offices. Loved their Facebook videos too! I didn't know you were in Oakland! Would have had a critical mass of VISTAs to meetup - currently, there are 6 CTC VISTAs within 30 minutes of each other.

Comment from Nickey Robare on October 24, 2008 - 7:48pm

I'm sure being in a tiny town like Whitesburg gets old, I really want to come visit! Maybe when I find that fabled money tree in North Portland... Keep having fun. :)

Thought I'd share a more appropriate post that I wrote for the PCM blog a couple of days ago. This is probably what I should be submitting for my field reports...

-----

Digital storytelling: The wonders never cease

I've had the privilege of being part of two digital storytelling workshops at Portland Community Media: once as sort of a teacher's aide and the second time as a participant.

I first heard of digital storytelling in 2006 as I was rounding the corner to my last semester in college. I was home for winter break and decided to take advantage of my locale to learn about media centers in the San Francisco Bay Area. I met Theeba Soundararajan of Third World Majority (TWM) and Jessica McCoy, who was the CTC Vista for Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) at the time.

Both were storytelling organizations with slightly differing missions. They're media centers focused on expression, but TWM was more focused on giving minorities and immigrant communities the media tools that have traditionally been used to ignore, suppress or misrepresent them.

Theeba opened my eyes to digital storytelling as a tool for those who have been sidestepped and wrongly represented on the local and national scene. As a person who has trained in journalism, I've seen much of this and even experienced it, which can be very jolting for someone who plays on both sides.

I've had a couple of experiences now, but the most shocking was after returning from Lesotho as a Peace Corps volunteer and hearing an NPR Marketplace broadcast entitled Chinese businesses rile Lesotho locals. To establish the scene, there's a lot of resentment against the Chinese by Basotho because the Chinese have been economically successful there while the Basotho are cementing themselves in poverty. As a Chinese American, I experienced a hefty amount of misdirected discrimination. The Marketplace broadcast seemed to side with the idea that the Chinese were snatching up every economic opportunity, leaving nothing for the Basotho. Granted, there are sketchy business decisions that some Chinese have made, but the Basotho are in their particular position most of all because of lack of entrepreneurial spirit (my official title as a PCV was "Small Business Advisor"). It was disturbing to hear the NPR report not because I share a physical appearance with the Chinese, but because I had experienced both sides and could not believe the lopsided situation an NPR show represented. Talk about a group that's exploited Lesotho's economy, where was any mention of South Africa and their complete infiltration into Basotho commodities and cultural goods? In many ways, Marketplace legitimized the discrimination against Lesotho's Chinese community. I still haven't heard a peep after writing a letter to the editor, not even acknowledgement of receipt.

Of course, this goes on everyday. There are countless misrepresentations in the news, and while it's hard to combat if you have limited media resources at your hand (which I've also experienced), it's even harder when you have none. In that case, there's no reason to even cultivate an audience.

Jessica and I spent much more time talking about the role of storytellers and story holders. Storytellers in our society can be seen as journalists, filmmakers, politicians--those who don't tell their own stories but tell other people's. Story holders are the people whose stories are being told. The big question for me at the time was if storytellers and story subjects share the intent of confronting readers with a question, is it better for the storyteller to tell it or the story holder? An unresolved question, but ultimately, we came to the conclusion that as nonprofessional storytellers, story holders have much more power to eschew pretenses and rules, dramatic questions, rhetoric or otherwise. Doing personal storytelling also serves to empower people in addition to getting the word out.

Back to the present-day, where I've been a part of two digital storytelling workshops. The first digital storytelling workshop I attended was a partnership between PCM and CDS. One particular person's story was about her predicament as an illegal immigrant who grew up in the US and knows no other home than the States. She doesn't qualify for college scholarships (a heavy burden for any student, especially spotlighted now in our recent economic crisis) because she'd have to prove citizenship. She speaks of looking "American" and being Latina, of being a high-achieving high schooler in AP courses with other Americans who are blind to her ethnicity and asked why "they" don't just go "home" and immigrate legally. At worst (and it's quite a short step in the case of illegal immigrants everywhere) she risks deportation with slim chances of return. At best, she can hope for sanctuary and some financial alleviation if the Dream Act passes.

Our instructor for the second workshop played this person's story as an example of digital storytelling. Several participants mentioned how uncomfortable the story made them feel, how her voice was trembling so much they thought she'd shatter into tears at any moment over her situation. They didn't know what to make of the story. Aside: I love awkward movies (The Squid and the Whale is a fantastic one), the tension around the white elephant in the room; I'm certain that awkwardness is an art itself in the art of film and acting. But that day in the second digital storytelling workshop, as I listened to the person's story again and heard the comments after, I realized that story holders have a power that storytellers do not. Because they're not ideas represented by actors and polished words, story holders have the power of truth in the voiceover room through the emotions they can't mask. It would be a shame if they could remove themselves.

Check out:

• The Oxford Project - A fantastic example of what storytellers and storyholders can do together.

Things have been up and down, that why we're Rollin' on a river!
Our kids just did a Health Rocks presentation at The YMCA. They did a great job! The kids were really responsive during the presentation. They did the one I like with the straws. Health Rocks is a presentation for 8-12 year olds done by kids around that age and older. It is lead by a teen (Yasmeen) who birthday was on the eighth of October she is wonderful and 17. (Happy Birthday Yaz!) I am proud to work with this beautiful well rounded young woman who loves children and is a born leader. She would work with children no matter what the circumstance.

We are presently working on a presentation for Health Rocks that we will be presenting at the Coastal Carolina Fair. Ten kids will participate in this presentation. We have two kids who are creating a Folklore Project in honor of their mother who has passed away. This project is a media project. Once they have completed it I will send you guys a copy of it. We will also have an art exhibit one of our students is drawing. We will also being doing a cooking presentation. They will be cooking no bake cookies. Our second and third graders will make that presentation. Yasmeen is the super teen leader supervisor who keeps me grounded. Keeps me forever pushing on!

Last month we trained a group of middle school teens to become mentors. Our training lasted three weeks. It covered documentation, communicating with your teen leader and communicating with the kids, positive reinforcement for good behavior and a point system for those who are hard cases. We also talked about maintaining your grades while helping others. We created a time for our youth leaders to work on their own projects after the kids have been served. The final portion of the training was working on a service project. So far the trainees are doing okay with the kids. We have had no major catastrophes. Yasmeen and I revamped the whole system. Volunteers will have more support because of what we changed.

We have financial challenges at this time. We continue to push forward. We have a website that you can donate on. We are working on some creative ways for fundraising.
The links are below. http://cash.zeropricetags.com/?REF=55870

http://cards.swiftrewards.net/?ref=Hipkhouse

I have been working on collaboration with the Art Institute in Charleston to host a graphic arts class for our kids. I am hoping that the program will be ongoing as the Art Institute offers a host of other programs that our kids would be interested. We are in the beginning stages of this project. We are also working on a mentorship program with Clemson finding mentors for kids whose parent or parents are prisoners. Building Dreams is the name of that program.

Well that all for now.....Bye
Renae

Laura has inspired me, and it's a slow day in the office, so it's field report time!

Last night I was tapped (by process of elimination) to give a presentation on Digital Storytelling to the East Bay Mac Users Group at Ex'Pressions in Emeryville. I spoke for an hour, running through the history of CDS, an overview of the workshop process (including a writing exercise) and of course I showed some digital stories. All in all, I think it went really well, and we might even get a few volunteers out of it!

Next week starts the onslaught of workshops: a 3 day general at the end of next week, a 5 Day TTT the week after that, then hopefully Chicago for the open workshop in mid-November, then my and Laura's KPFA workshop the first week of December. I'm excited about it, but also nervous. We did a tutorial run-through with Andrea a week or two ago, and that combined with my presentation last night has made me feel better about doing a workshop, but there's still so much to learn.

Laura and I are also working on the CDS archive, which you can read about in her blog here. Also, I got the intern, Zoe, to fall for the updog AGAIN. Exciting stuff!

Also, on a more personal note, I bought a TiVo. If you've been thinking about it, do it, friends. It will change your life.

Have a fantastic weekend!

Comment from Morgan Sully on October 11, 2008 - 11:45pm

Totally smells like updawg in here. Awesome to connect with the East Bay MUG at Ex'Pressions. Great context for meeting with a pertinent group for a cool topic - I'd imagine they might make some tech-saavy/tech-passionate volunteers/storytellers. Awesome to have the writing exercise there too. Link?

What's TTT? Other folks might not know about that model or how it relates to capacity-building...

-m

P.S. hilARIOUS on the updawg.

P.P.S. Kudos for slow days in the office - good time to reflect and do things like yr Field Reports;)