Blog

Our workshop at the 2010 United States Social Forum was a great success!  We've set up another website to facilitate continued communication with our participants and anyone generally interested in digital storytelling - check it out: http://ussf.adaptingtoscarcity.org.

We took some of our own footage of the event, hopefully we can piece together a little clip for you all sometime soon.  Also, we will be publishing all of the footage generated during the workshop to the workshop website.

We are at the US Social Forum, soaking up all the collaborative goodness and energy of the event.  On Friday, we are co-facilitating a Digital Storytelling for Social Change workshop at the forum.

10 Am - 12 PM at Cobo Hall in room DO:6B

Please pass on the workshop to interested contacts and come if you can!

We spent a week following the Río Santiago from beginning to end, Lake Chapala to the ocean.  We wanted to find out how the water flows, connect with people and movements along its path, and witness dams, new tributaries converging, and where it meets the sea.  Fishing, dams, and the cleansing power of nature were recurring themes on the journey.  

Our month has been so busy we haven't had time to blog about it!

Before we leave for a week long story mapping tour of the Rio Santiago watershed, I wanted to post a quick update.  

With the help of our video workshop participants and some amazing organizations, we pulled off two community cinemas, one in the public Parque Revolución in Guadalajara and the other in the Central Plaza of El Salto.  The students of Iteso also organized their own cinema at the university.  The cinemas were a complete success and we are so thankful for all the support and help we received.  It was wonderful to see the workshop participants and their families so proud of the videos created.

With the hard work and dedication of 60 students, we are a day away from the culmination of our video workshops in El Salto/Juanacatlán and Guadalajara!  We have organized outdoor community screenings for this coming weekend.  If you're around, join us on Friday, the 7th of May from 8:30pm - 10pm in Parque de la Revolución in Guadalajara and Saturday, the 8th of May from 7pm - 10pm in La Plaza de Arriba in El Salto.  On Saturday, there will be snacks, artisans and two local bands playing from 7pm - 9pm followed by the screening of the videos.

A lot of our time here is spent learning and listening.  Sometimes I like to think of it as a study in social movements - they are so vibrant and resilient here, and there is much to learn.  Lately, we have been spending time with a community based, horizontal organization in El Salto called Un Salto de Vida (A Leap of Life).  From running a community recycling program to facilitating a medical study on the health of children in the community, their grassroots collective is inspiring and creative.  We visited the office the other day and were really moved by the expressive art on the walls inside and outside of the building. It left me thinking about what art's role is in social movements.  It is so important, yet manifests in so many ways that is difficult to pinpoint.  Click read more to check out all the good stuff they've come up with.

In search of

Interviewing is a challenging and rewarding process. Until recently, I didn't fully enjoy conducting interviews because it was exhaustingly demanding and somewhat daunting, particularly in Spanish. However, and this may seem obvious, so many people have so much to share if you simply ask the right questions. There are morsels that pop up in interviews that may never arise in a day to day conversation and those tidbits are beautiful, raw pieces of humanity to witness and learn from. While interviews may be nerve biting and awkward, interviews are also SO COOL. (Keep reading!  Click 'read more' below)

...be sure to set up a photo exhibition!   We put this video together to share with the kids of La
Huizachera who shot and selected all the photos for their exhibition, "Con los Ojos de Niñas y Niños.

We had lots of fun and received wonderful support and feedback during our trip to San Francisco. Thank you all who came out to support the project at our two events and thank you Treat St. for hosting a wonderful fundraiser! Now we have two months to finish filming our documentary and organize two community cinemas to share the videos from the video workshops. It is going to be a busy two months.