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

Anna Colom is a journalist and filmmaker who we met at EsoDoc. She has an MSc in Development Studies from SOAS and has written a fascinating thesis on participatory video. Here are her thoughts on...

Participatory Video empowers!

Participatory Video is a tool with great potential to empower individuals, groups and communities. It can create a space for the group within the social system, from where the participants can have a voice and influence policymakers and other social, political and economic players who generally exercise their power over these communities.

Concepts like 'participation' and 'empowerment' have often been misused in the practice of development. Indeed, just giving some cameras to a group and teaching the participants some filming skills is not what Participatory Video is about. There are some important elements that need to be taken into account for PV to be truly empowering and participatory.

First of all, the potential and benefits of PV lay not so much on the final product (the video) but on the process that the participants have undertaken to do the video. This process involves different stages of empowerment. Firstly, the participants need to decide what they want their message to be in the video and who should see it and this means that they are identifying or reflecting on the obstacles to their development, or the causes of their oppression (on more 'Freirean' terms). Secondly, reflecting on these issues with the rest of the participants and with the community reasserts their demands and increases the confidence of the community to raise its voice in order to claim its rights. Thirdly, this process involves the identification of potential solutions to the issues that the group is raising, since it would be part of the video to explore the possible solutions and ways forward, especially because the videos aim at raising awareness amongst society and influence policymakers. Finally, the last stage involves the necessary collective action to communicate the message.

This process of empowerment has many parallels with the process of critical consciousness involved in Paulo Freire's 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed', which has also inspired the use of theatre plays in participatory development.

A second element to take into account for PV to be truly empowering involves power relations. This is a very debated issue in any participatory approach to development. PV will empower if the participants are those most disadvantaged in the power dynamics of their social and political context. From gender to clans, castes, and classes, it is important that the voice is truly given to those who benefit least in the power structure. This means that the facilitator of the workshop, the organizations involved in the project and the donors need to prioritise a deep understanding of the local context.

Very connected to these two elements lies a third point: the role of the facilitator in the PV workshop. The facilitator needs to be a co-learner of the process, flexible, sensitive and someone who, rather than dictating it, accompanies the participants during the process of empowerment described.

Video has some specific advantages that distinguish it from other participatory tools. It breaks the illiteracy barrier, the sound and visuals can adapt to the local ways of cultural representation, the message can be transferred without being altered, and policymakers seem to be more ready to listen when there is a video involved.

This just a brief introduction to a deeper academic analysis that can be read in the paper 'Participatory Video and Empowerment: the role of Participatory Video in enhancing the political capability of grassroots communities in participatory development'.

If you are interested in the paper, you can contact the author Anna Colom at coloms@gmail.com.

Creating New Futures

In Peterborough there was rising tension between the host community and newly settled refugees and asylum seekers. We were brought in to work with young people from both communities to build communication and understanding.

On the focUS project the two groups worked separately at first, with each group producing films about their experiences in the city. These films acted as the first point of contact between them, providing an insight into each other’s lives. Watching the films allowed sensitive questions and controversial views to be aired and discussed in a safe environment before the groups met.

The film they went on to make as a single group ‘premiered’, alongside their other films, at the Town Hall allowing friends, family and what we call ‘stake holders’ (those working in the community - youth service, social services, housing, health, refugee organisations, local education) to attend. As a result we’ve had requests for the films to be shown in other settings: schools; youth groups and even open-air screenings in public spaces.

‘You learn, and at the same time contribute to others. They’re learning from you and you’re learning from them. We’re all helpful to each other. It’s like a body – all the parts of a body are very important so if one of it is affected, the whole body is affected.’ Faith, 17 years old

What is participatory video?

Participatory video is one of those phrases that is used frequently and really says nothing at all about the kind of projects that are run under its banner. So what’s it all about? At Living Lens we are committed to making video a tool for active learning. We work with a variety of groups, and often with people who wouldn’t normally work together - in Peterborough, a group of young refugees came together with young people from the host community, in the Gambia teenagers from East London worked with a peer group from the Gambia, and Trinidad saw teenagers from the North and South of the island come together to produce films.

While video acts as a tool to focus a groups’ energy, it is the process they experience while working together that we recognise as being more important than the technical production skills they learn in producing a video.

The duration of all our projects varies, and we always develop new group activities to meet the needs of individual groups. Our intention is to provide an active learning experience so that people can learn about an issue first hand, explore different points of view and devise creative ways of presenting these to an audience. We strive to find the right balance between process and product, ensuring the process is participatory and the finished product is not only something the participants are proud of, but also something that others are interested to watch. Having films broadcast is not a priority as we seek to liberate people’s notion of film and take it out of the box in their living rooms and into shared spaces within their communities.

In short our projects look like this:

process of collaboration to produce the video > unique video expressing the groups' views and experiences > process of collaboration to distribute the video to relevant audiences to bring about positive change

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.