I am requesting a grant to fund the first community-media workshop from the New Orleans Center for Community Media. The workshop will take place over the course of four Saturdays. Facilitated by two teaching media artists, and attended by ten community members, the workshop will cover the basics of storytelling and interviewing, and it will include an introduction to multimedia tools. Participants will work in groups to create a short reporting piece covering an issue in their neighborhood.

The Current Context
New Orleans is a city where stories hold power. But not every community has access to the tools that would allow them to communicate their stories in the steadily shifting media landscape. There are still many barriers to media engagement, particularly for low-income communities of color.

The Vision: Storytelling for Transformation
The New Orleans Center for Community Media is a start-up media training and resource center supporting community-based and grassroots media production aimed at elevating the voices of communities across the city. Our work is centered in bringing communication tools to underserved populations, providing these communities with the media production technology and resources to tell, document, and preserve their own stories and the stories of their communities through both traditional and emerging media platforms. Using a multipronged approach steeped in media literacy, media training, media justice, and the media arts, we work with and within communities to use media as a tool for advancing community voice and social justice.

Our community workshops seek to use media and media training as a way to elevate the voices and experiences of those most often kept out of the centers of power when it comes to rebuilding the city. We envision a city where low-income communities of color have the skills and the access to the technologies that will allow them to document their lived experiences and to further social change.