Next Steps

Our Next Steps project is well and truly under way. Just a reminder: this is our Comic Relief funded project taking place over the next two-years. It sees us working in partnership with the London Metropolitan Police Service and the POPPY Project to produce a DVD resource for women who have been trafficked into forced prostitution. The DVD will explore the issue of giving evidence in court with the aim of increasing conviction rates of traffickers whilst safeguarding the women. In the second year of the project we will work in partnership with the UK Human Trafficking Centre, Anti-Slavery International, the Crown Prosecution Service and the UK Border Agency to disseminate the DVD nationally and to train groups in its use.

So far we've met with our key partners who are all on board and ready to join us at the launch of the project which will take place at Lovells, who've kindly given us a space for free, on 11 June.

We've also set up a social media network for the project team and key partners. We hope to open it up to all stakeholders, however, this is still under debate as we are considering security and privacy issues. The purpose of the network is to open up a dialogue between members and build up a space of collective expertise. We really believe that in developing a critical mass of people in the sector who work in partnership and communicate across professional divides, we are putting the project in a far stronger position to make a real difference.

Workshops with the women, police, UKBA staff and others will begin in July these will be led by Rose and co-facilitated with Keren our facilitator whose worked on many other projects with us.

So far I've been project managing, but as some of you may know, I'm off on maternity leave at the beginning of July and so will hand over the project management to our partnership coordinator and long time co-facilitator Katherine Mann.

We'll keep you posted as the project develops.

Amy

Managing Risks

I sometimes wonder how the Police Woman we met to discuss our idea for a participatory video project sold it to her boss at the Metropolitan Police Service…

‘Living Lens want to produce a training video for us on trafficking’
‘Oh yes, what will it be about?’
‘Well I’m not really sure, but it will involve women who’ve been trafficked, they’ll make it.’
‘The women will make the film?’
‘Yes!’
‘Are they film makers?’
‘No!’
‘Do you know what they’re going to say?’
‘No!’
‘Do you think it will be any good?’
‘No idea!’
‘OK let’s do it!’

The project was Fresh Start and the project aim was to have victims of sex trafficking produce a training DVD for the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS). We knew we could facilitate a group of trafficked women to produce a training video, but could we convince the Met to use it?

There’s an unavoidable risk in taking on a participatory video (PV) project that aims to produce a usable product at the end of it. The very nature of the participatory process means that the participants, in this case victims of sex trafficking, devise the content and shoot the film themselves. What they want to say to the MPS, may not be what the MPS want to hear, let alone use as a tool in their existing training programme on trafficking.

The key elements we believe support us in taking on risks are:

1. a strong project team – in this case our team had members from the MPS, the POPPY project and Anti-Slavery International. Having members of the project team come from different backgrounds with different perspectives can be a challenge, but the results pay off. We advise meeting in a neutral space.

2. thorough planning – share your planning structure with your project team, review it at regular intervals and make changes. Working with risks means changes are inevitable, make sure everyone is kept up to date.

3. open communication – when things get dicey our natural reaction can be to take cover and try and figure things out, so we can present the solutions and not risk looking like we haven’t got a clue what’s going on. We’ve come to realise that this is the very time to be in open communication with the project team, sharing the breakdown and having everyone be a part of the solution.

4. being with the unknown – it is impossible to know how a participatory project is going to turn out, unless we’re willing to accept this, it is a very nerve-wracking and stressful process. The process requires us to keep listening and observing how the project is opening up. We respond to what is happening, rather than trying to control the process so it turns out the way we think it should.

The Myth of Authentic Voices

Our video projects are sometimes seen as a means of gathering the ‘authentic’ voices of a group or community. More often than not these voices belong to marginalised groups; those who rarely get to speak for themselves in public forums. The question of the ‘authenticity’ of the voice became a problem when we were working in Southern Madagascar. The project was responding to a lack of awareness amongst policymakers of indigenous people, their culture and environment. We were brought in to facilitate an indigenous community producing videos for them. The intended outcome was that the videos would educate the policymakers so they would acknowledge the community’s expertise, and respond appropriately to their needs and concerns.

It was a risky project, we were working with an indigenous community in Southern Androy – a region with no electricity, where video and TV were not commonplace. In fact none of the participants had held a video camera before the project. All our equipment had to run off generators that we had to strap to land rovers and carry for 10 hours on dirt roads to reach the village where we would work. Introducing these unknowns to the community was a risk in itself, and we knew it was vital to work with a local NGO to do this in a way that was relevant, sensitive and productive.

The local staff of Andrew Lees Trust had the local knowledge and experience of working with the community that we were lacking. We built partnership with them during a weeks training in PV techniques. This allowed them to take leading roles once we were working with the community on the ground – a good thing you might say, and we thought so at the time – but once the project was underway, we realised that it was going to be difficult for us to distinguish whose voice was being captured.

The local staff on the project each worked with a small local group. Each group produced a video on a different theme of their choosing. We were looking to capture the ‘authentic’ voice of the local community, but would the agendas of the local staff come through? Would it matter? Keren Ghitis from Panos and I debated the question in depth during the course of the project, and concluded that if the NGO staff were part of the group then their views must come out. Where we thought there would be a problem was if their voice was heard at the expense of the community’s voice.

This project left me wondering how one knows if the authentic voice of a community has been captured? After all, what exactly is an authentic voice? I’m not sure I’ve found mine! In Madagascar I was concerned that we were diluting the authentic voice of the Community with the views and agendas of the local NGO staff. However, it was the local staff that allowed us to deepen our understanding of the community, enabling us to be more affective. And it was they that would keep the project alive once we had returned to the UK. They successfully set up local and national screenings with policy makers, media and others, inspiring new conversations, leading to new actions.

Living Lens has come to see our role as PV practitioners as being twofold; we facilitate a process that enables a group to produce a video reflecting their experiences and we also create a project team that can inform the process from the beginning, ensuring that the participants are supported and that their video is used to good affect. In Madagascar, working in the local language, the local staff were able to be our ears and eyes. They also ensured the community’s videos had an impact at a local and national level. Their first hand experience of the project increased their understanding and motivated them to make the project a success.

Through our projects we aim to be successful in facilitating groups to produce videos that represent their experiences. While we want this process to be led by the participants, we also want to create a project team that supports us in the process. The project team can provide experience that allows us to deepen our work with the participants. The team also provides access that allows the videos to reach key audiences and have a real impact.

About Us

Living Lens has been using video as a creative tool with groups in the UK and other countries for over eight years. The foundation of what we bring to every project is expressed in our values:

• Contribution: knowing everyone can contribute
• Adventure: exploring new opportunities
• Passion: igniting the creative drive
• Durability: what matters endures.

Our values are at the heart of our approach and reflect the working ethos of our team of experienced facilitators. We use video as a tool to mobilise groups and individuals to explore the issues that bring them together. The camera acts as a shared lens through which to look at the world and gives permission for the group to ask questions of each other and the wider community, that they might otherwise feel embarrassed or inhibited to ask. Our approach builds confidence and develops skills. Project participants produce a finished film of quality and experience the satisfaction of seeing a creative project through from start to finish.

Amy and Rose, founders and directors of Living Lens, have known each other for many years. It was quite by chance that we discovered we had a shared passion in participatory approaches to change. Through our work in development (Amy) and human rights (Rose) we saw how problems arose and persisted due to breakdowns in communication. Using video as a tool to build communication, we found participants were able to go beyond the ‘them’ and ‘us’ mentality that had them stuck in the problem. Living Lens started off with local projects and now run national and international projects. We have a radical approach to facilitation that allows us to love the challenge of working with people who believe change isn’t possible.