Rising Voices

In the city of Câmpulung Moldovenesc, in North Eastern Romania, the Orizonturi Foundation will be creating a Blogging Club in the upcoming months in hopes of changing their community’s perceptions of those with mental health problems. Their project, “Blogging the Dream,” is one of the six new health-focused citizen media outreach projects that were announced in June by Rising Voices and Open Society Institute’s Health Media Initiative.

We have some updates from the Rising Voices grantee REPACTED. In the last week of July REPACTED had a workshop on report writing and blogging in their project office in Nakuru, Kenya.

Neighbourhood Diaries, a pilot project of the local NGO Kalam, is training marginalized youth in Calcutta’s working class neighborhoods how to become citizen journalists. Through their poems and interviews we discover both the depressing and the delicious in Calcutta’s Bowbazar neighbourhood.

In this post we will experience Bangladesh through the eyes of Nari Jibon bloggers, learn more about some of the people behind Nari Jibon and learn how the project is making a difference with its blogging activities.

The FOKO Madagascar team is progressing with a lot of zeal and enthusiasm in arranging blog outreach workshops for the youths in Madagascar to make their dream come true.

Within 2009, all children and teachers of primary and public schools in Uruguay will have their own laptops (OLPC) donated by the State. With the help of a Rising Voices Micro grant, Pablo Flores of Ceibal Plan will organize two workshops for the young laptop-toting students to show them how to set up a blog and take advantage of other social media tools.

Voces Bolivianas has recently started its outreach workshop in Trinidad city of Beni, a remote district in the Amazon region. 19 participants were taught the basics of blogs and they opened their own blogs.

Diana Chamia, an 18-year-old journalism student who was taught how to blog in a Foko workshop in Mahajanga, first met one-year-old baby Kamba when she accidentally missed her busstop and was forced to walk. Over the next few months she and her blog would play an integral role in helping Kamba grow up to lead a normal life.

We hear the term ‘citizen journalism’ almost everywhere. But to be precise, what is it? Why do we need to embrace citizen journalism? What effects does it have on a society and how can it give a voice to the people who are under reported in the mainstream media?

We will find the answer to those questions in this feature and learn how the Rising Voices projects are embracing citizen journalism.

The ConVerGentes project of HiperBarrio made their way from Medellín to the capital city, Bogotá, at the end of June to attend Campus Party, one of the Spanish-speaking world’s largest technology conferences. Organizing the trip required the participation of all involved, but as we see, it was well worth it.