Citizen Engagement
Move your work out into the world and into action
CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT AND PARTICIPATORY MEDIA
The founding members of Media Working Group are pioneers in participatory media and citizen engagement. Many of us came to the media arts through activism (labor, environment and local telecommunications) and brought organizing and coalition-building skills to the practice of documentary making. Visit our history archive get an overview.
Over the years MWG has developed a culture of community partnership resulting in well honed strategies to create grassroots and national citizen engagment campaigns. This culture of collaboration has allowed the organization to produce documentary art and authentic participatory experiences with a diverse collection of groups and organizations from government, planning agencies, school districts, and teachers associations, to labor unions, organizations of coalminers, literary groups and national public interest campaigns; as well as artists, environmental activists, peace activists, Native American land rights groups, homeless people and their advocates.
Since the group formed in the mid-1980s we've been early adopters of new technology. We incorporated online learning in 1995, and social networking via listservs and threaded discussions in the late 90s. Now we enjoy the social networking and video sharing platforms such as FaceBook, Vimeo, BlipTV, Twitter, etc.
Media Working Group uses associative and relational thinking to create strategies for partnership and civic engagement. This unique method sometimes creates unexpected and deep relationships born out of common core values and mission.
In order to engage communities well, you may need -
To Convene Content and Geographic Communities - Structured deliberation around issues is a core element in creating knowledge and making media matter. We can help set up culturally appropriate processes relevant to participant community's goals.
Online Producing - We can train you to use social networking planning and implementation or we can do it for you.
Curricula and Study Guides - Get your films to the people who can use it - teachers, organizers, students. We can help plan and produce classroom or workshop curricula and action toolkits.
A Social Media Strategy - Identify and design the correct approach to socail media.
Online Project Mapping - Develop strategies for visualizing impact and interactivity of your project, its potential, geographic spread, and other conceptual potential.
Collective Marketing - we have an extensive list of library and university acquisitions departments to whom we send special mailers to promote member films and videos.
Film Product Package Design - We can help you create beautiful, and inexpensive cover art, posters, post cards and fliers.
Product Fulfillment - we can handle your sales shipping and handling from our nationally central location. Special rates are given to producing members.
HIGHLIGHTS
Media Working Group's Participatory Media and Civic Engagment Practice
Media Working Group's commitment to democratic participation in media is grounded in an understanding that art and literature are rich sources of authentic experience, that can foster transformative communication and social understanding between cultural groups and across political boundaries. On this continuum, Coal Black Voices, a documentary featuring African American poets, was an intervention about race in the cultural landscape of Appalachia. In 2002, MWG conducted a three-day gathering of artists, students, educators, community activists, and Black churches for Indaba-Days of Coal Black Voices, during a period of racial tension in Cincinnati. [View Clip]
From 2003 through 2008 MWG created a national civic engagement campaign for The Gender Chip Project documentary directed by Helen De Michiel, funded by the National Science Foundation. The film focused on gender equity in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, tracks the experiences of five young women as they enter their academic studies at Ohio State University.
The Gender Chip Project's civic engagement campaign, training, and attached materials are designed for adults who are supporting girls (mentors, professional development people, teachers) in their pursuit of study and careers in STEM. That project has reached more than 250 organizations across the country from the Girls Scouts, USA in New York, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, to the National Girls Collaborative Project in Seattle. [View Clip]
Media Working Group's association and experiments with the BBC's Community Programme Unit represent ground breaking work in early participatory media and democratic access to broadcasting. The participatory culture of the Community Programme Unit at the BBC eventually spawned high-profile projects such as Video Diaries and Video Nation, and some say the experimental videos that became commercialized as reality TV -- some of us hope this is not true.
Hybrid City is a documentary project created with Architects and Designers for Social Responsibility, broadcast on BBC 2's long running Open Space Series in 1992. Hybrid City looks at the politics of urban space in the emerging global city and asks what urban planners and architects must do to address the issues of access to the city. [View Clip]
Death on Delivery is a documentary produced with and for Britain's Campaign Against the Arms Trade in 1990. Fred Johnson, while working with the BBC's Community Programme Unit, worked with the Campaign to write a narration performed by actress Glenda Jackson. When aired on BBC 2's Open Space it was highest fundraising event ever experienced for the Community Programme Unit.
