I'm here at MIT (my fall place of graduate Urban Planning studies, btw) at the 2007 Women Action and Media (WAM!) conference this weekend, a yearly conference that combines a bunch of topics that interest me - media, activism, social justice, and women's issues. I read BITCHfest for my book club recently (selections from BITCH magazine), and it got me more interested in feminist media related issues, especially in that the techniques and lessons learned by feminist activists around framing in the media relates to many other issues (such as poverty, network neutrality, and more).

When people ask me (as they inevitably do when they find out I'm a full time volunteer) why I do VISTA, I often cite the ways it connects me to groups and people that I could have never imagined I could meet doing a regular job. In fact, my work this year doing digital storytelling facilitation and other related projects for MassIMPACT came out of meeting Natasha Friedus (of Creative Narrations) at UMass Boston and getting myself invited to her second Spreading the Stories train-the-trainer workshop last year. And so it was how I ended up at the MIT Museum this past week, working with able fellow facilitator Lisa Dush of Story Builders, UMass Amherst, and MIT in the fall. We were asked by Cesar McDowell of MIT's Center for Reflective Community Practice to help out with the new Museum Without Walls project.