Key Factors for Successful Community Media Initiatives

The ongoing need for community media programs has much to do with the dearth of diverse voices and representation within mainstream media outlets. Immigrants, communities of color, and other marginalized groups are thus limited in their ability to address local community concerns, to tell their stories, and ultimately create a "communication infrastructure that can foster effective community."1 Nevertheless, there are communities throughout the United States that have been successful at developing and sustaining local media projects: community media centers, local newspapers, internet-based tools, television and radio stations. In the ongoing effort to bolster established as well as newly established community media projects, it is important to highlight and share these projects' experiences, insights, and lessons learned between and among practitioners in the field.

LESSONS LEARNED

Below are factors that practitioners have described as essential to the success of community media projects.

• Community participation and ownership are the core building blocks of successful community media projects. Without active involvement from actual members of a particular community - from content creation to media production - the media produced is no longer community-based and therefore fails to achieve its intended goals. Community participation ensures that the stories, issues and concerns, which are of greatest importance to a specific community, are addressed and disseminated through local media programming.
  • The Benton Foundation's Community Media Scan: "Community media are created primarily with and by residents of a specific geographic place. They explore local issues. They help define the places where we live and how we relate to one another. They reflect local values and culture. By definition...community media 'can't be outsourced.'"
    "...there was a hunger for what we could bring once people began to see that youth making their own media had some really beneficial by-products. One is it turned the kids on that were making the media and empowered them... But, then it also has this really beautiful parallel by-product of bringing authentic, positive attention to authentic, community-based stories."
  • Jeff McCarter of Free Spirit Media: "...there was a hunger for what we could bring once people began to see that youth making their own media had some really beneficial by-products. One is it turned the kids on that were making the media and empowered them and gave them a sense of purpose and a sense of efficacy and stimulated them onto a productive path of being a good student, wanting to go to college, and in some cases wanting to get into the media field. But, then it also has this really beautiful parallel by-product of bringing authentic, positive attention to authentic, community-based stories."
  • Cecilia Garcia of Benton: "...if the content is authentic, then the community will respond. In order for content to be authentic it has to come from the community."
  • Thom Clark of Community Media Workshop: "...we make better use of media when we have a keener sense of self, where we're coming from and what story it is we're trying to tell others... if we don't have a sense of that narrative and how we're using it to engage others, we tend to end up talking as pointed-headed, know-it-alls with 5-point plans to save the world, and after we get finished loading people with facts about that 5-point plan, wonder why they're not listening anymore..."
  • Beth Mastin of New Routes to Community Health & Sound Partners for Community Health: "That's what we're really looking for with the immigrant media project is for the immigrants themselves to be directing the kinds of content that's produced, not in the technological sense of being a "director," but deciding what the stories are of importance to them and how they want to capture them. And then working with media makers to have that happen."
  • InterNews' Community Media Guide: "Community ownership operates at both a practical level and at the level of community perception...most sustainable where there is actual community ownership and a strong sense of community ownership... Meaningful participation happens at all levels of community media, and will involve many activities, including ownership, consultation on topics and formats, training, production and distribution of messages, audience research, and finance. Participatory processes generate a strong sense of community ownership; media are demystified, and by participating, communities learn valuable communications and media literacy skills and understandings."
• Leadership development, as both a formal and informal process, is critical to the inception as well as the sustainability of community media projects. In other words, leaders must evolve organically from the community itself - with a vision and purpose, whereas community media organizations must integrate leadership development training into their organizational operations.
  • Beth Mastin of New Routes to Community Health & Sound Partners for Community Health: "The key sense that we have from our current project - New Routes to Community Health - is that the community development happens by way of leadership development and using community media, using the actual tools of media, framing messages, figuring out how you're going to engage your community with the concepts you've created is really the key piece. It's how leaders are developed, and we have several strong projects where we have strong new leaders who have come out of the project individually.
  • Cecilia Garcia of Benton: "...leadership development across the board, not only in management and fundraising, but in the use of technology and how it helps do their work is pretty critical in successful projects."
  • Brenda Gonzalez of New Routes to Community Health: "Here [in Madison], at least in the beginning, it was kind of disorganized, but you could see that there were some leaders surfacing, community leaders and some others that weren't necessarily leaders, but that they had certain expertise that was part of that leadership group. All of a sudden you have a formal group of volunteers that formed the Latino Support Network, then you have 20 people that were getting together on a regular basis to talk about what's happening in the community. From there it developed into, 'you 3 work in healthcare' and there was the formation of another informal group that was well organized - the Latino Health Council. Then community health organizations took notice and asked, 'what can we do to be a part of that?' Because of the increasing number of engaged community members, organizations began to ask, 'how can we better serve this community?'
• Partnerships and collaborations between local media producers and community-based organizations provide the resources and expertise necessary for projects to run effectively and efficiently, they strengthen a community's values and voice, and ultimately impact policy.
  • The Metamorphosis Project's White Paper #1: "One of the many practical implications of our findings is the benefit of strong connections between local media and community organizations. The activities created by community organizations are often good stories because they concern social, health, labor, legal, political, and economic issues that are important to residents...It is possible to strengthen community by strengthening the communication infrastructure in an area. This happens by improving the integration of the community's storytelling system - the residents, local media, and community organizations - and by creating communication environments that help residents come together into a "storytelling neighborhood.'"
  • Partners in Public Service's Digital Alliances - Partnerships in Public Service for Collaborations: "Authentic alliances between local media and community organizations represent the yet-to-be realized future of effective community-centered, community-driven programming."
  • Brenda Gonzalez of New Routes to Community Health: "...what has made it [partnerships & collaborations] very successful is the fact that they're using a participatory process, so it's not just the managing partners who manage the actual grant and the communication with us... They're not the ones who are saying, "this is what this particular community needs in this area. It's more of this is what we believe we have, this is the community we are working with and we need to listen to what will be the best way to provide information about the issues that they care for... we wanted immigrant-created media, they had to take the lead on their projects... you usually have vulnerable populations and everyone else knows what they need without asking what the real concerns are in the community."
  • Sound Partners for Community Health's Local Voices: "These partnerships benefit broadcasters, local organizations and the community as a whole by leveraging media and community resources to inform and energize public dialogue and informing policymakers."
    "I am a proponent of partnerships. Sometimes they're difficult to manage, but that's the reality that needs to be recognized in order to work together... it's really important to have an agreement in place - how are you going to work together, what are the mutual goals?"
  • Sylvia Rivera of Vocalo & formerly of Radio Arte: "I am a proponent of partnerships. Sometimes they're difficult to manage, but that's the reality that needs to be recognized in order to work together... it's really important to have an agreement in place - how are you going to work together, what are the mutual goals? And also recognize that you don't want to have an uneven partnership, where one organization has power over the other. How do you create partnerships that are based on a sense of mutual respect and you're both gaining from the experience?"
• Capacity building and training ensure that those engaged in a particular media project hone the organizational and technical skills required to fulfill their project's intended outcomes over time. For example, community media practitioners are required to select content, write news articles or scripts, operate media equipment, conduct research, and create assessment tools. Skills training and capacity building - in each of these areas and beyond - must be provided, either from within the media organization itself or from a partnering organization.
  • Sound Partners for Community Health's Local Voices: "Many Sound Partners projects have left a legacy of organizational change and growth for stations and community organizations... Michigan Radio [conducted] media workshops at a series of regional training sessions for our constituent organizations. Representatives from the station offered their technical expertise and gave participants useful skills for developing story ideas and approaching the media."
  • Brenda Gonzalez of New Routes to Community Health: "...one of the ideas is to have the collaborations to foster - between the managing partner and the media maker - capacity building for the immigrant community organization. For example, how to work with media... Now, immigrant community organizations have a better idea of how to work with an organization that could help to bring more grants to the organization, for example, or actually be a lead on those grants that before those organizations were always supporting rather than taking the lead and the same with the media..."
  • Cecilia Garcia of Benton: "...it's those projects where the use of technology was learned by the leadership of these organizations and so they didn't have to rely on outside technology experts parachuting in..."
• Project management expertise is a key factor that should be considered as separate from leadership development and capacity building, although there may be some overlap. The day-to-day management of a media project entails financial and organizational management skills that are distinct from the creative or technical competencies.
  • Beth Mastin of New Routes to Community Health & Sound Partners for Community Health: "The idea of the managing partner - which is interesting because it hasn't quite worked out the way we had envisioned it - but the idea behind the managing partner was that it would lift the administrative burden from the media maker and the immigrant organization, and also providing a pathway to being more involved with some of the more established nonprofit entities..."
  • Karen Menichelli of New Routes to Community Health & Sound Partners for Community Health: "...I have seen in the projects that I've worked on how essential having a good project manager is to the overall sense of any kind of partnership. While you all come to the table as peers, having someone that is taking care of the minutia is essential to the success of these kinds of projects."

MEASURING SUCCESS: THE WAY FORWARD

The question remains as to whether it is possible to construct universal metrics that will measure the success of community media projects throughout the nation. The previously outlined "lessons learned" identify key ingredients for successful initiatives. The reality, however, is that there are distinctive goals and operations within each organization that distinguishes one project from another, making it nearly impossible to assess them using a universal metric. More recently, projects receiving funding from grant-making foundations are required to integrate evaluation tools to assess the success and impact of their individual programming. Nonetheless, evaluation of community media as a whole is a relatively new field of inquiry. It will take a concerted effort on the part of researchers to uncover any universal metrics, if they do in fact exist.

1 Community Storytelling, Storytelling Community: Paths to Belonging in Diverse Los Angeles Residential Areas. The Metamorphosis Project.