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by Nicholas Lavallee I escaped the clouds and rain we’ve endured in New England this summer to find sunshine in an unlikely place, the Pacific Northwest. I was fortunate enough to attend the Alliance for Community Media’s International Conference in Portland, Oregon. The unusually warm and dry climate, not typical for Portland, complimented the warming feeling of meeting peers who work in Community Media from all over the United States. The Annual Alliance outing is very important for all in access to attend, to meet one another and learn how access resources are used in areas other than our own Community.
The 3 day event included workshops, guest speakers, a trade show, and of course a party to bring everyone together complete with a karaoke host band. The theme this year, “Community Media at the Crossroads”, invited the discussion of ways to protect community media at the national and local levels, by exploring new concepts and challenging old ideas. New ideas are exactly what I look forward to when I’ve attended past conferences and 2009 presented me with the greatest idea yet, to build sustainability through documentary work.
Antoine Haywood of People TV in Atlanta, GA was part of a discussion on the idea of building community and interest through documenting your community’s neighborhoods. Haywood played clips from a program called “Sidewalk Stories” that he produces at his public access center. In each episode Antoine and his crew of volunteers provide organizations an opportunity to share stories about their communities in ways that accurately reflect their memories, values and ideals. The clips that were played during this workshop left me wanting to learn more about Haywood’s community in Atlanta. Haywood’s program inspired me to find ways to implement a similar “Sidewalk Stories” program in the community that I serve, Merrimack, NH. We document our Communities each week through municipal meeting coverage and the programs our volunteers submit; now I’d like to take that idea a step further and work to document our neighborhoods’ histories. Through digitally edited, visual storytelling, our
local organizations and residents can share past experiences with a larger audience that may not be aware of the rich history that exists in our neighborhoods. A program in Merrimack or your community will only draw the positive attention that our public access centers need. Inspiration was found at this year’s Alliance for Community Media National Conference. Let’s continue to inspire and be inspired by sharing concepts to one another. http://www.merrimack.tv
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