Last week, YouTube partnered with WITNESS, an international group that uses video to promote human rights, to begin a series of blog posts that will demonstrate and explore how film has become an integral facet of the worldwide human rights initiative.
Last week Saturday’s blog post kicked off the start of the series, and featured the full-length version of “For Neda,” a documentary on citizen reporting. The title of the documentary is a reference to Neda Agha Soltan, the young Iranian woman whose death by a sniper during the 2009 Iranian election protests was captured on camera and quickly distributed across the internet.
This is the final blog in a three-part series about FANRPAN's work. It was co-written by Sithembile Ndema, FANRPAN's Natural Resources and Environment Programme Manager and Danielle Nierenberg. Crossposted from Nourishing the Planet.
The Food and Natural Resource Policy Analysis Network's (FANRPAN) Women Accessing Realigned Markets (WARM) project aims at strengthening the capacity of women farmers influence in agriculture policy development and programmes in Southern Africa. It doesn't sound especially entertaining-but it has some innovative strategies for bridging the divide between women farmers, researchers, and policy makers.
FANRPAN is using Theatre for Policy Advocacy to engage leaders, service providers, and policymakers; encourage community participation; and research the needs of women farmers. Essentially, theatre is being used to explain agricultural policy to people in rural areas, and to carry voices from the countryside back to government. Popular theatre personalities travel to communities in Mozambique and Malawi and stage performances using scripts based on FANRPAN's research, to engage members of the community. After each performance, community members, women, men, youth, local leaders are engaged in facilitated dialogues. The dialogues give all community member-especially women-a chance to openly talk about the challenges they are facing without upsetting the status quo. More importantly, it allows women to tell development organizations what they really need, not the other way around.
Ultimately, FANRPAN hopes to train women community leaders to use the theatre advocacy platform to discuss other issues and problems in their villages, including HIV/AIDS. And because this project involves all members of the community, it doesn't alienate men, but includes them in developing solutions.
For more information on FANRPAN and its work in Africa see the following www.fanrpan.org
Thank you for reading! If you enjoy our diary every day we invite you to get involved: 1. Comment on our daily posts-we check comments everyday and look forward to a regular ongoing discussion with you. 2. Receive weekly updates-Sign up for our "Nourishing the Planet" weekly newsletter at the blog by clicking here and receive regular blog and travel updates.
This is the final blog in a three-part series about FANRPAN's work. It was co-written by Sithembile Ndema, FANRPAN's Natural Resources and Environment Programme Manager and Danielle Nierenberg. Crossposted from Nourishing the Planet.
The Food and Natural Resource Policy Analysis Network's (FANRPAN) Women Accessing Realigned Markets (WARM) project aims at strengthening the capacity of women farmers influence in agriculture policy development and programmes in Southern Africa. It doesn't sound especially entertaining-but it has some innovative strategies for bridging the divide between women farmers, researchers, and policy makers.
FANRPAN is using Theatre for Policy Advocacy to engage leaders, service providers, and policymakers; encourage community participation; and research the needs of women farmers. Essentially, theatre is being used to explain agricultural policy to people in rural areas, and to carry voices from the countryside back to government. Popular theatre personalities travel to communities in Mozambique and Malawi and stage performances using scripts based on FANRPAN's research, to engage members of the community. After each performance, community members, women, men, youth, local leaders are engaged in facilitated dialogues. The dialogues give all community member-especially women-a chance to openly talk about the challenges they are facing without upsetting the status quo. More importantly, it allows women to tell development organizations what they really need, not the other way around.
Ultimately, FANRPAN hopes to train women community leaders to use the theatre advocacy platform to discuss other issues and problems in their villages, including HIV/AIDS. And because this project involves all members of the community, it doesn't alienate men, but includes them in developing solutions.
For more information on FANRPAN and its work in Africa see the following www.fanrpan.org
Thank you for reading! If you enjoy our diary every day we invite you to get involved: 1. Comment on our daily posts-we check comments everyday and look forward to a regular ongoing discussion with you. 2. Receive weekly updates-Sign up for our "Nourishing the Planet" weekly newsletter at the blog by clicking here and receive regular blog and travel updates.
When progressive groups fail to challenge what they oppose in Congress because they think the other side is too big, has too much money, or has already won the public opinion war, they should take a lesson from Friends of the Earth [FOE] this past week.
I'm reading a lot of uncertainty everywhere about how progressive both the Obama administration and Congress will turn out to be. Many of us are trying to divine what agendas lie behind the curtain based on cabinet appointments and committee chair posts. Isn't this tea leaf-reading a waste of time?
We have little, if any, influence over these decisions (except, possibly, to raise a big, public stink about a totally unacceptable choice). It seems to me that our goal (as several netroots writers have pointed out) should be to figure out how to influence policy once the new Congress and administration are sworn in.
The people who will be taking power are transitioning from election mode to governing mode. So are the wingnuts, by pushing the "center-right nation" meme. What is the online progressive community doing to manage the same transition? What, exactly should we be doing? Is fretting openly about White House staff appointments the best use of our energy? If not, what is?
(Blogging isn't organizing, either. But the two can intersect, and/or interact. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Popular conceptions of civic action in America have become extremely impoverished. While struggle goes on in many arenas of our society, coherent traditions of community organizing in America have mostly faded to myth in the popular imagination.
Old black-and-white newsreels of marching students, brave sharecroppers, and police-wielded water cannons from the 1960s flicker through our minds. But these images have lost most of their concrete meaning and contain few coherent lessons for social action.
I've been writing about community organizing, but I haven't been clear about exactly what I mean by this. There is no single effective model of "community organizing." Currently, however, the approach Saul Alinsky developed in the 1930s on the back streets of Chicago has become dominant in America-for good or ill. I call the current version of this model "post-Alinsky" since it has been significantly developed and changed by people like Ed Chambers, Ernie Cortes, Heather Booth, and others who came after Alinsky.
STATE BLOGS
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