By Veronica Morris MooreEarlier this year, Crossroads Fund and the Cricket Island Foundation came together to provide their grantees with a social justice youth media workshop. The goal of this workshop was to give the participants a better understanding of framing and how to create media with social justice values. Global Action Project (GAP) facilitated and designed the workshop. GAP works with young people most affected by injustice to build the knowledge, tools and relationships needed to create media for community power, cultural expression and political change. For too long mainstream media has been the primary way that stories of oppressed communities are able to reach the masses. Often the coverage of our communities gives no justice to our stories of struggle and too often distorts our truths to fit the agenda of the majority. Global Action Project provided the participants with several tools to help grassroots organizations produce media that tells their unadulterated truth.The workshop began with the basics of handling a camera. The group was shown different angles the camera can be placed into to provide different shots as well as the technical terms of those angles. After going over a few fundamentals the workshop participants were able to put their new skills to use right away. We seperated into 3 small groups and worked on 10 second clips that would be edited together for a montage on community safety. Each group had a few minutes to come up with a scenario that they felt portrayed what community safety looks like for them. We then filmed our separate clips, mashed them together, chose background music and watched our collective vision come to life.We also used an exercise GAP calls the TV tool. Using a drawing of an old school TV the facilitators describe how each part of the TV could be symbolic of what goes into framing & messaging. We discussed how oppressive mass media can be and then thought about ways we can use their same tactic and tools to spread the message of social justice.After lunch we all got a chance to talk about the work that we do in our different organizations. As expected a lot of our issues intersected. We started to talk about ways that not only this particular group but all grassroots movements could better collaborate when it comes to media. Organizations that were represented at the workshop were: Little Village Environmental Justice Org, Imagine Englewood If, Affinity, Albany Park Neighborhood Council, Fearless Leading by the Youth, and a few others. We talked about how people from our respective communities, predominantly people of color, are often portrayed as violent, uneducated, and vulgar. We also heavily discuss the criminalization of our youth through mass media.The workshop was set up to give the participants basic skills and knowledge of media framing & messaging but it was obvious at the end the group got so much more. Creating our own media takes a combination of technical skills and communications savvy that many of our organizations need to learn. Who better to tell our story than us? Our communities are being judged every day based off of three minute clips put together with a few facts from a reporter who has no connection to the story. We live the disparities they cover every day. The revolution will not be on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram alone.
