Transmission Project - poverty

Grassroots & Groundwork: Seizing Opportunities to Reduce Poverty and Build Sustainable Prosperity

Belinda Rawlins — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 14:50:01 +0000

This conference is about shining a light on practical strategies and tools working – right now – to reduce poverty and build sustainable prosperity.

Grassroots & Groundwork touches on a wide range of solutions in a variety of venues:

* Smaller, more intimate 70-minute break-out sessions that showcase proven, innovative poverty-reduction models and tools
* Unique Q&A session with distinguished activist Marian Wright Edelman, founder of Children’s Defense Fund
* Keynote address by Paul Saginaw, nationally recognized advocate for socially responsible business
* Site visits to successful and unique Portland poverty-reduction projects, sponsored by the Portland Economic Opportunity Initiative – These are filling up fast, so don’t miss out!
* Half-day hands-on interactive workshops as part of the Community-Builder Institute.

You’ll have a chance to network throughout the conference. We’re even hosting a special networking reception for all conferees on Thursday night.
Don’t miss this opportunity to share, learn and connect!

Transmission! Nashville

Ben Sheldon — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:03:28 +0000

I will be in Nashville, Tennessee on Monday to participate in Listening to the Poor, a Learning Circle on Poverty hosted by the Inter-Agency Task force on Ministry with the Poor of the United Methodist Church.

The learning circle and dialog will be webcast live Monday, March 8 beginning at 10am CST and go through approximately 1pm. I will be addressing issues of media literacy as it relates to the poor and providing vehicles for voice for the poor. I was invited to speak because of my work with Survival News (“The voices of low-income women”) and the role the Transmission Project has in building a robust and diverse media ecology enabling a world built upon the full participation of society.

If you can’t make the webcast tomorrow, you can watch the media clips I’ll be using as part of my dialogue and I’ll be sure to share clips from the webcast after the fact.

Top 10 items in my download folder that I keep coming back to

Belinda Rawlins — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:47:53 +0000

1. Powerful People Make Good Decisions Even When they Consciously Think
Is it the way you think that is affecting your decision-making or your power position?

2. The Future of Public Media FAQ and Public Media 2.0: Dynamic Engaged Publics
Jessica Clark synthesizes all things public media. I think I’ll consider her my personal moog.

3. Process is Powerful: Planning and Evaluation for Media Artists
“The purpose of grounding our work in principled practice, strategic planning and evaluation is so that we can develop the knowledge and methods to respond quickly and effectively to situations without being thrown off course and without being derailed from our long-range goals.” Word.

4. Cry Baby Cry – Van & Titus
Oh, wrong list. But I can’t take it off…it’s too good.

5. Maximum Performance – Different Things to Different People
Part of my honest practice philosophy that I’m cultivating, this article offers a variety of frameworks to assess organizational effectiveness.

6. Net Neutrality’s Impact on Low Income Communities: Equal Access for All
A fabulously wonky mix of stories, stats, and smack down, this doc from Public Knowledge makes the case and rebuts the arguments.

7. The Great Leap of Faith
It might be a couple of years old now, but I frequently find myself thinking back to Ginny Berson’s reflections on the changes facing community radio. And then I wonder what she’d change in those reflections today.

8. Same Old Song: An Analysis of Radio Playlists in a Post-FCC Consent Decree World
Didn’t payola die with Alan Freed? Funny, radio play was easier then than it is now. Uncovering the structures that shut out voices of new artists is the first step to reform.

9. The ACORN 361 Affiliated Organizations list
Are you sure you’re not on it? Did you even know that there was a list?

10. A Field Report: Media Justice Through the Eyes of Local Organizers
Before deciding it’s time to work with non-media focused groups, you’ve got to read this.

Horizontal Learning and Urban Poverty

Ben Sheldon — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:50:47 +0000

There is a fascinating of example networked-learning practice from Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI)They have developed peer-to-peer learning and sharing systems to spread community developed solutions between geographically dispersed urban environments. (via NetCentric Advocacy)

Horizontal exchange, then, is the primary learning strategy of SDI. Participants within the savings networks learn best from each other - when one savings group has initiated a successful income-generating project or has replanned a settlement or has built a toilet block, SDI enables groups to come together and learn from intra-network achievements. The community exchange process builds upon the logic of ‘doing is knowing’ and helps to develop a collective vision. As savers travel from Khayelitsha to Greenpoint or Nairobi to Colombo, the network is unified and strengthened - not only at a street level but between towns, regions and provinces, and nation-states. In this way, locally appropriate ideas get transfered into the global millieu through dialogue amongst slumdweller partners.

Community-to-community exchanges allow participants to see themselves and their peers as experts, thereby breaking isolation to create a unified voice of the urban poor, reclaiming sites of knowledge that have frequently been co-opted by professionals, and strengthening solidarity to increase critical mass. The pool of knowledge generated through exchange programmes becomes a collective asset of the SDI network - so that when slumdwellers meet with external actors to debate development policies, they can draw from international examples, forcing government and other stakeholders to listen.

As a connector of different organizational communications–media, arts, technology, broadcasting and movement building–it’s great to see the same practices we trade in used to empower people directly. Doing is Knowing.