Bringing Community Media into the University: A Strategy for Developing Media Arts Programs
[Source: NAMAC, by jesikah maria ross; November 20, 2009]
Community media work has always been hard to fund, and it’s only getting tougher with today’s economy. Meanwhile, universities are looking for creative ways to reach out to the communities that surround them and have the resources to do it. As a media artist/educator living in a university town, it occurred to me that I could design the kind of participatory, social-change-oriented media projects I’m passionate about in a way that meets the university’s needs. So I put these puzzle pieces together and over the past two years developed the Art of Regional Change (ARC) at the University of California Davis, 15 miles west of Sacramento.
ARC is a media arts program that brings together scholars, students, artists, and social action groups to collaborate on projects that strengthen communities, generate public scholarship, and inform regional decisionmaking. Our projects take place off campus, primarily in rural communities in California’s Central Valley and Sierra Nevada mountains.
These projects:
ARC is a big experiment. And like most innovative endeavors it has its upsides and downsides. But I think it offers a model worth sharing for setting up sustainable community media programs.
Here is the strategic thinking behind the program, some lessons learned while developing it, and steps on how to set up a similar program in your area.
Forging Strategic Collaborations
Collaborations are something we all do in the media arts field. We’re constantly trying to leverage scarce resources, share knowledge, and produce stronger work by forming partnerships with other people and/or organizations. The trick is to find the intersection of common goals, figure out how the shared endeavor benefits all parties, and share leadership in project management. Collaborations become particularly strategic when each stakeholder brings something vital to the effort that no other partner can provide, AND gets something out of it that they really need.
In setting up the Art of Regional Change, I focused on how different collaborators could benefit from a university-community media program and what each could contribute to the endeavor.
Nowadays, universities want to be seen as more active and responsive to local communities, scholars want their research to be more relevant to the public, students want opportunities for field-based learning, and taxpayers want to see that their money is making a difference outside the ivory tower. Community media programs can be designed to meet these diverse university goals.
Communities, on the other hand, want resources to document their cultures, histories, struggles, and strategies for change. They need social animators equipped with facilitation skills and gear to help them identify the stories they want to share and craft them in aesthetically compelling ways. And they need technical support to get their stories out to broad audiences. Media artists/educators (like me!) have the unique skill set to meet these needs.
Media artist/educators, though, need a sustainable funding base to design and deliver community-based projects. We also need access to additional staff—accountants, tech support, development officers, PR gurus—so that we aren’t in the position of trying to play every role on a project. And it’s helpful to have a physical location to work out of and store equipment. The university can provide all of these things.
In discussions with potential partners at UC Davis, I pitched ARC as a strategic collaboration. I spelled out how it could give the university a platform for doing innovative campus-community engagement projects while generating media products that support university research, classroom teaching, and community development. I spoke about how ARC could provide communities access to university resources (scholars, students, artists) which would entice local groups to participate and how it would pioneer a new venue for media makers to do public projects. I also pointed out how the university could make good on its commitment to serving the broader community though ARC projects.
The pitch resonated with Carolyn de la Peña, who directs the Davis Humanities Institute, and Jonathan London, who directs the Center for Regional Change. As a result, ARC is set up as a joint initiative of these two campus units.
The upside of three-way collaboration: more resources! Carolyn can bring endowment funding to the table, Jonathan is an accomplished fundraiser committed to raising half of ARC’s annual budget, and I have the contacts for media, arts, and cultural funding streams.
Jonathan and Carolyn are also both able to tap into university funding for graduate student researchers who can assist me in planning projects, implementing activities, organizing events, and evaluating our work. The students get hands-on project management experience and I gain needed staff support.
Being a university project provides me with an office and gives me access to bookkeepers, webmasters and the UC Davis news service—the campus’ PR arm—which secures significant media coverage of ARC projects. These staff resources relieve me of trying to wear twenty hats on a project, making my community media teaching and production work stronger. This in turn helps ARC—and by extension UC Davis—shine.
All key collaborators are getting something they need that only the ARC program can provide: Carolyn is able to involve humanities faculty in projects that produce public scholarship; Jonathan can involve social scientists in using place-based stories that inform public policy; and I get to facilitate participatory projects that generate both community and public media. (Communities, of course, get to create and use relevant media pieces in their social change work. But since community partners change from project to project I’m not counting them as ongoing collaborators.)
I think this type of strategic partnership is a good example for both academia and the media arts field. It demonstrates how very different parties can mutually benefit by pooling resources and sharing leadership in program implementation. It also shows how universities, even in these sketchy economic times, can take risks and try new approaches to community outreach. For media artists/educators and organizations, it provides a potential new direction for doing the kind of socially engaged media work that we want to manifest. In an era when arts and cultural resources are drying up, I find this example very hopeful.
Lessons Learned
That’s the good news. But I don’t want to convey that establishing the Art of Regional Change has been entirely smooth sailing. Here are some of the tougher discoveries I made along the way.
Build cultural competency. Nonprofits are like Venus and universities are like Mars. To effectively bridge a media artist/educator/organizational mindset with the academic research paradigm requires understanding academia’s distinct organizational culture, embracing its idiosyncratic (and highly bureaucratic) approaches, and cultivating greater sensitivity to the different needs of students, staff and administrators. It’s not easy.
Get it on paper. In the intense flurry of activity to launch ARC, responsibilities, finances, and timelines kept shifting—making effective program management a real challenge. Co-create some constitutional documents early on with project partners that articulate the program mission, model, and work plan. The documents not only solidify roles, budgets, and activities but they are tremendously handy when it comes to creating talking points for the media, content for your website, and making a case to funders.
Leave the office. The daily grind doesn’t create opportunities for the kind of informal resource sharing, networking, and visioning needed for successful collaborations. So it’s important to spend time with partners where you’re not agenda-centered and behind a desk. I try and regularly share a meal, attend events, or go for walks with project collaborators. We’ve come up with some of our best ideas and gotten re-energized about our work doing things together outside the office.
Limit the moving parts. Community media projects usually include an organizational partner, an advisory board, and a group of participants. Add scholars and students to the mix and the level of complexity deepens. And since ARC is a joint initiative between two campus centers, I report to two directors and work with two sets of staff that follow different administrative procedures. My take away: work with one university unit, limit the number of scholars and students involved, and skip the community advisory group if you can. You’ll sleep better at night.
Setting Up a University-Community Media Program
Here are the steps I took to establish ARC. I offer them as a starting point for your own explorations in developing community media programs at a local university.
Identify potential collaborators. Make a list of campus institutes or centers (e.g., Institute for Youth Development, Women’s Research Consortium, Center for Art & Public Life) with an articulated community research or public service mission. These are the “units” that will be drawn on most setting up a university-community media program. You can try and work through a department, like history or journalism, but I don’t recommend it since they have frequent shifts in leadership and don’t typically prioritize community projects.
Do the homework. Conduct web research and informational interviews to determine which campus units on your list have a solid track record, stated community engagement objectives, and the capacity to do community-based work. Set up appointments with the directors of those units. Prepare to propose project ideas and articulate how they align with your potential partner’s own needs, goals, and resources.
Find a champion. Meet with directors and explore doing a pilot project together that advances their objectives while drawing on your passion and expertise. Identify one or two who are especially excited about your ideas, and have a clear vision for how they can contribute to and benefit from the collaboration. These champions are crucial when it comes to navigating the universities' bureaucratic systems and securing needed resources.
Do a pilot project. Test-drive the collaboration by going through a project cycle together—from fundraising and planning to implementing and evaluating. Be sure to design the pilot so that all partners get something they feel is important out of the collaboration. It’s helpful to have a memo of understanding that spells out everyone’s goals, roles, budget, and timeline. Throughout the project, connect with partners on accomplishments and challenges.
Leverage a successful pilot project into an on-going program. Midway through the pilot project, initiate conversations with campus champion(s) on how the effort might segue into an established program. Talk together about steps, process, and needs. My campus administrators were more open to doing an initial three-year program than setting up something in perpetuity—so we went with that. You may want to do the same.
Work-in-Progress
I’m sure there was some “right time, right place” involved in getting the Art of Regional Change off the ground. And now that I look back, I recognize that setting up this kind of university-community media program requires an entrepreneurial spirit, artistic competence, research training, and popular education skills—a somewhat rare combination that some, but not all media producers possess.
Nevertheless, I think that setting up community media programs through universities is a worthwhile strategy to explore in this challenging cultural and economic climate. Even in these tough times, universities are some of the most well-resourced local organizations in your area whose mandate matches the kind of community cultural development work we are engaged in and who have resources to make it happen. Consider creating a strategic collaboration with your local college/university.
--
jesikah maria ross is a community cultural development practitioner who works with organizations around the globe to create participatory media projects that generate media literacy, civic engagement, and community change.
Community media work has always been hard to fund, and it’s only getting tougher with today’s economy. Meanwhile, universities are looking for creative ways to reach out to the communities that surround them and have the resources to do it. As a media artist/educator living in a university town, it occurred to me that I could design the kind of participatory, social-change-oriented media projects I’m passionate about in a way that meets the university’s needs. So I put these puzzle pieces together and over the past two years developed the Art of Regional Change (ARC) at the University of California Davis, 15 miles west of Sacramento.ARC is a media arts program that brings together scholars, students, artists, and social action groups to collaborate on projects that strengthen communities, generate public scholarship, and inform regional decisionmaking. Our projects take place off campus, primarily in rural communities in California’s Central Valley and Sierra Nevada mountains.
These projects:
- Are designed and implemented in partnership with a community-based organization.
- Involve humanities scholars and social scientists.
- Address community questions, issues, needs, or aspirations.
- Generate community AND public media pieces (e.g., NPR commentaries, PBS documentaries).
- Produce academic essays, research papers, and educational materials that contextualize the media productions or serve as discussion guides.
ARC is a big experiment. And like most innovative endeavors it has its upsides and downsides. But I think it offers a model worth sharing for setting up sustainable community media programs.
Here is the strategic thinking behind the program, some lessons learned while developing it, and steps on how to set up a similar program in your area.
Forging Strategic Collaborations
Collaborations are something we all do in the media arts field. We’re constantly trying to leverage scarce resources, share knowledge, and produce stronger work by forming partnerships with other people and/or organizations. The trick is to find the intersection of common goals, figure out how the shared endeavor benefits all parties, and share leadership in project management. Collaborations become particularly strategic when each stakeholder brings something vital to the effort that no other partner can provide, AND gets something out of it that they really need.
In setting up the Art of Regional Change, I focused on how different collaborators could benefit from a university-community media program and what each could contribute to the endeavor.
Nowadays, universities want to be seen as more active and responsive to local communities, scholars want their research to be more relevant to the public, students want opportunities for field-based learning, and taxpayers want to see that their money is making a difference outside the ivory tower. Community media programs can be designed to meet these diverse university goals.
Communities, on the other hand, want resources to document their cultures, histories, struggles, and strategies for change. They need social animators equipped with facilitation skills and gear to help them identify the stories they want to share and craft them in aesthetically compelling ways. And they need technical support to get their stories out to broad audiences. Media artists/educators (like me!) have the unique skill set to meet these needs.
Media artist/educators, though, need a sustainable funding base to design and deliver community-based projects. We also need access to additional staff—accountants, tech support, development officers, PR gurus—so that we aren’t in the position of trying to play every role on a project. And it’s helpful to have a physical location to work out of and store equipment. The university can provide all of these things.
In discussions with potential partners at UC Davis, I pitched ARC as a strategic collaboration. I spelled out how it could give the university a platform for doing innovative campus-community engagement projects while generating media products that support university research, classroom teaching, and community development. I spoke about how ARC could provide communities access to university resources (scholars, students, artists) which would entice local groups to participate and how it would pioneer a new venue for media makers to do public projects. I also pointed out how the university could make good on its commitment to serving the broader community though ARC projects.
The pitch resonated with Carolyn de la Peña, who directs the Davis Humanities Institute, and Jonathan London, who directs the Center for Regional Change. As a result, ARC is set up as a joint initiative of these two campus units.
The upside of three-way collaboration: more resources! Carolyn can bring endowment funding to the table, Jonathan is an accomplished fundraiser committed to raising half of ARC’s annual budget, and I have the contacts for media, arts, and cultural funding streams.
Jonathan and Carolyn are also both able to tap into university funding for graduate student researchers who can assist me in planning projects, implementing activities, organizing events, and evaluating our work. The students get hands-on project management experience and I gain needed staff support.
Being a university project provides me with an office and gives me access to bookkeepers, webmasters and the UC Davis news service—the campus’ PR arm—which secures significant media coverage of ARC projects. These staff resources relieve me of trying to wear twenty hats on a project, making my community media teaching and production work stronger. This in turn helps ARC—and by extension UC Davis—shine.
All key collaborators are getting something they need that only the ARC program can provide: Carolyn is able to involve humanities faculty in projects that produce public scholarship; Jonathan can involve social scientists in using place-based stories that inform public policy; and I get to facilitate participatory projects that generate both community and public media. (Communities, of course, get to create and use relevant media pieces in their social change work. But since community partners change from project to project I’m not counting them as ongoing collaborators.)
I think this type of strategic partnership is a good example for both academia and the media arts field. It demonstrates how very different parties can mutually benefit by pooling resources and sharing leadership in program implementation. It also shows how universities, even in these sketchy economic times, can take risks and try new approaches to community outreach. For media artists/educators and organizations, it provides a potential new direction for doing the kind of socially engaged media work that we want to manifest. In an era when arts and cultural resources are drying up, I find this example very hopeful.
Lessons Learned
That’s the good news. But I don’t want to convey that establishing the Art of Regional Change has been entirely smooth sailing. Here are some of the tougher discoveries I made along the way.
Build cultural competency. Nonprofits are like Venus and universities are like Mars. To effectively bridge a media artist/educator/organizational mindset with the academic research paradigm requires understanding academia’s distinct organizational culture, embracing its idiosyncratic (and highly bureaucratic) approaches, and cultivating greater sensitivity to the different needs of students, staff and administrators. It’s not easy.
Get it on paper. In the intense flurry of activity to launch ARC, responsibilities, finances, and timelines kept shifting—making effective program management a real challenge. Co-create some constitutional documents early on with project partners that articulate the program mission, model, and work plan. The documents not only solidify roles, budgets, and activities but they are tremendously handy when it comes to creating talking points for the media, content for your website, and making a case to funders.
Leave the office. The daily grind doesn’t create opportunities for the kind of informal resource sharing, networking, and visioning needed for successful collaborations. So it’s important to spend time with partners where you’re not agenda-centered and behind a desk. I try and regularly share a meal, attend events, or go for walks with project collaborators. We’ve come up with some of our best ideas and gotten re-energized about our work doing things together outside the office.
Limit the moving parts. Community media projects usually include an organizational partner, an advisory board, and a group of participants. Add scholars and students to the mix and the level of complexity deepens. And since ARC is a joint initiative between two campus centers, I report to two directors and work with two sets of staff that follow different administrative procedures. My take away: work with one university unit, limit the number of scholars and students involved, and skip the community advisory group if you can. You’ll sleep better at night.
Setting Up a University-Community Media Program
Here are the steps I took to establish ARC. I offer them as a starting point for your own explorations in developing community media programs at a local university.
Identify potential collaborators. Make a list of campus institutes or centers (e.g., Institute for Youth Development, Women’s Research Consortium, Center for Art & Public Life) with an articulated community research or public service mission. These are the “units” that will be drawn on most setting up a university-community media program. You can try and work through a department, like history or journalism, but I don’t recommend it since they have frequent shifts in leadership and don’t typically prioritize community projects.
Do the homework. Conduct web research and informational interviews to determine which campus units on your list have a solid track record, stated community engagement objectives, and the capacity to do community-based work. Set up appointments with the directors of those units. Prepare to propose project ideas and articulate how they align with your potential partner’s own needs, goals, and resources.
Find a champion. Meet with directors and explore doing a pilot project together that advances their objectives while drawing on your passion and expertise. Identify one or two who are especially excited about your ideas, and have a clear vision for how they can contribute to and benefit from the collaboration. These champions are crucial when it comes to navigating the universities' bureaucratic systems and securing needed resources.
Do a pilot project. Test-drive the collaboration by going through a project cycle together—from fundraising and planning to implementing and evaluating. Be sure to design the pilot so that all partners get something they feel is important out of the collaboration. It’s helpful to have a memo of understanding that spells out everyone’s goals, roles, budget, and timeline. Throughout the project, connect with partners on accomplishments and challenges.
Leverage a successful pilot project into an on-going program. Midway through the pilot project, initiate conversations with campus champion(s) on how the effort might segue into an established program. Talk together about steps, process, and needs. My campus administrators were more open to doing an initial three-year program than setting up something in perpetuity—so we went with that. You may want to do the same.
Work-in-ProgressI’m sure there was some “right time, right place” involved in getting the Art of Regional Change off the ground. And now that I look back, I recognize that setting up this kind of university-community media program requires an entrepreneurial spirit, artistic competence, research training, and popular education skills—a somewhat rare combination that some, but not all media producers possess.
Nevertheless, I think that setting up community media programs through universities is a worthwhile strategy to explore in this challenging cultural and economic climate. Even in these tough times, universities are some of the most well-resourced local organizations in your area whose mandate matches the kind of community cultural development work we are engaged in and who have resources to make it happen. Consider creating a strategic collaboration with your local college/university.
--
jesikah maria ross is a community cultural development practitioner who works with organizations around the globe to create participatory media projects that generate media literacy, civic engagement, and community change.
