By Jessica Mayberry | Founding Director
VV’s newly launched website is finally ready for prime time and brimming with amazing new content.
The new videovolunteers.org shows the real India as it is lived by its citizens, and documents the myriad struggles taking place to make it a more equitable country. We invite you to explore the website today.
Find a story, and then help create a solution. Many of the stories have corresponding actions, such as this one on crumbling infrastructure in child care centres or this one on taxation of menstrual hygiene products. With these ‘take action’ videos, the audience can make a difference and engage directly -- whether by contacting officials or signing petitions, sharing videos and even volunteering.
If you are looking for inspiration, check out some of the impact videos. These focus on solution-oriented journalism and show how common technology like video cameras and mobile phones create more transparency and expose injustices in rural India. These impact videos also take the audience behind the scenes into Video Volunteers’ rural journalism enterprise and show how Correspondents manage to get an impact with 30% of their videos.
In other news, we are all hard at work preparing for our bi-annual National Meet next month. More than 200 Community Correspondents will come together from across India for five days of learning and inspiration and celebration of successes.
You are someone who has made a difference to Video Volunteers, and so we would like to invite you to be part of the National Meet. If you have thought about coming to Goa, now is the time to come!
Part of the focus at the Meet is mobile journalism. The arrival of the internet in villages, and in particular WhatsApp, is an opportunity to overlay digital activism onto already vibrant community-level activism - and for Video Volunteers to scale our work by changing the way our Correspondents make videos. From June 2017, all new VV Correspondents are editing the videos they shoot on a mobile phone and directly sharing it on WhatsApp and Facebook. This is a significant advance from the traditional video-making process and VV is thrilled to be at the cutting edge of bringing scalable video production to remote areas of the country. At the National Meet, Senior Correspondents will learn to train their neighbours as mobile journalists, and to use the internet to build communities, share their videos, and get their rural neighbours to take action.
We are eager for our Correspondents to be in Goa, so we can hear all of their ideas about spreading digital video in rural India, and come up with some new innovations. Please join us and be part of the fun!
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