Bridging the digital divide
by Chad Sansing | A spotlight on We Are All Connected, a 2018 Global Sprint project
We Are All Connected is a collaborative youth video production and curriculum project organized by the Educational Video Center (EVC). The Educational Video Center is a non-profit youth media organization dedicated to teaching documentary video as a means to develop artistic, critical literacy, and career skills of young people, while nurturing their idealism and commitment to social change. EVC brought together youth from New York City and the Clearfork Valley, in Tennessee, to discover connections between their communities and explore social issues like the opioid epidemic and broadband access. Mary Grueser is the Director of Professional Development Programs at EVC, and Emmanuel Garcia is an EVC Media Instructor on the project.
I interviewed Mary and Emmanuel to learn more about We Are All Connected and how you can help at the Mozilla’s Global Sprint 2018.
What is We Are All Connected?
We are All Connected is an urban-rural project that the Educational Video Center has revived from the 1980s. The project ran for 6 months as part of the former Mozilla Hive NYC. It launched in July 2017 with a week-long, intensive documentary filmmaking summer camp where 4 youth from NYC traveled to Clearfork Valley, Tennessee, to work with 4 local youth and learn about their community. During camp, the group decided to collaborate on a documentary about the opioid crisis. After camp, participants worked together remotely throughout the fall of 2017 producing a collaborative website and a documentary about the opioid crisis as well as visual stories about the digital divide in their respective communities. The We Are All Connected students presented their work on the digital divide at MozFest in October, 2017. In December, 2017, the group reunited in NYC to launch their website, screen their film, and celebrate the new year together.
Why did you start this project?
This project was revived as part of an original EVC project from the 1980’s in which EVC’s founder and former Executive Director, Steve Goodman, collaborated with Marie Cirillo, a community organizer and activist from Brooklyn, New York, who had lived and worked in Appalachia for over 50 years. For three years, they worked together to offer documentary filmmaking camps where youth from New York City and youth from Appalachia would live and work together to produce a collaborative documentary film about a social issue affecting their communities.
How did you decide to connect youth from New York City with youth from the Clearfork Valley in Tennessee?
We have a long standing relationship with Marie Cirillo, who lived and worked with Clearfork Valley coal mining communities for over 50 years to bridge divides and establish community land trusts for workers. In the tradition of her work and the work of our founder and former executive director, Steve Goodman, we collaborated with Marie and her partners in the Clearfork Valley to revive and develop our current urban-rural youth media project, We Are All Connected.
What has surprised you about the work so far?
Mary: I’m not sure if I expected our urban-rural youth to react to each other with the high level of love and acceptance they have for one another. They have developed strong bonds that transcend their cultural and political differences. I have great hope for our future because of them!
Emmanuel: Along with the great bond that the students quickly developed with each other, I was also surprised by the great difference in obtaining interviews between New York and Clearfolk Valley. In New York, having to work around people’s schedules, it could take students weeks to secure interviews for their documentaries, but in Tennessee, phone calls were made in the morning and within hours we would have multiple interviews already scheduled for that same day! There’s some irony in the difference of pace we experienced when you think about that.
What else should potential contributors know about the Educational Video Center?
The Educational Video Center has worked with under-resourced youth producing social-justice-driven, youth-centered documentaries for over thirty years in New York City, across The United States, and internationally. The EVC has also facilitated career and college pathways for youth interested in media and has significantly supported youth to become first generation college students.
What challenges have you faced working on this project?
Mary: One of the biggest challenges we have faced has been equitable access to technology. For example, communicating and sharing material with our Tennessee partners was a challenge due to lack of high speed internet access and even cellular signals in the region.
Emmanuel: To add to Mary’s point, differences in schedules among the students and instructors further made communication a challenge. This type of work requires serious time commitments, with tight deadlines, and everyone involved had various other responsibilities outside of this project going on in their lives. So in trying to facilitate stronger collaboration among the two groups of students when working remotely (after the summer camp together), being able to schedule times when we could get everyone together to communicate with each other as a whole group proved more difficult than we anticipated.
Also, in terms of the curriculum we’re developing, the goal is to create something that is more adaptable for documentary projects in both urban and rural contexts. Our experience with this past collaboration has provided us with some important insight, but it can also be hard to determine how much of what we experienced can be attributed to urban and rural characteristics and how much of it was due to the specifically unique characteristics of New York City and Clearfolk Valley.
What kind of skills do I need to help you?
The urban-rural youth media project EVC has revived is a work in progress and we need collaborators with many kinds of skill sets!
People with skill sets and / or interests in any of the following areas can help us with our project: media, filmmaking, education, community organizing, activism, technology, youth development and urban-rural coalition building
How can others join your project at #mozsprint 2018?
Visit our GitHub site:
Send us a message in our Gitter room:
Email us with any questions:
- Mary Grueser: mgrueser@evc.org
- Emmanuel Garcia: emmanuelgarciab@gmail.com
What meme or gif best represents your project?
Join us wherever you are May 10–11 at Mozilla’s Global Sprint to work on many amazing open projects! Join a diverse network of scientists, educators, artists, engineers and others in person and online to hack and build projects for a health Internet. Register today
This post by Chad Sansing is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
