Rising Voices

Rising Voices microgrants provide citizen media training projects in the developing world with just enough funding to get off the ground. Many of these projects, however, have become so successful that they are now attracting the interest of more local community members who want to learn how to communicate effectively online. In order to continue their training workshops and outreach activities, they have had to come up with creative strategies for financial sustainability.

The sixth annual Interdependence Day in Brussels brought about 20 youth from around the world to discuss issues of global interconnectedness and interdependence. Rahool Goswami from the Neighbourhood Diaries project in India and Patricia Rakotomalala from Foko Project in Kolkata represented Rising Voices at the four-day forum.

Many of the same Calcutta-based youth who were trained as citizen journalists in the Neighbourhood Diaries project are also featured in the most recent issue of Kalam’s annual anthology of poetry, “Open Box“, which as been made available here as an eBook.

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.

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.

On the first anniversary of the Nari Jibon Blog we have asked the people behind Nari Jibon of Bangladesh, its educators and a participant about the challenges of the citizen media outreach project so far. We wanted to know what they have learned, how the blog has helped them, what the frustrations have been and what were their happiest moments. Read all about these in this week’s feature.

The Neighborhood Diaries project of Kolkata resumed after two month long break. The project faces new challenges; reconnecting with the young citizen journalists from marginalized communities, making them computer literate and so on. Learn more about the developments of this project.

Last time we featured the Neighborhood Diaries project, participants from Kolkata’s slums were learning more about their neighborhood. In this week’s feature we read their profiles of local characters and find out more about their daily lives. The weekly workshop also got more interesting with enactments of skits regarding their neighborhood’s problems and the brainstorming of solutions.

We have witnessed an incredibly sense of community take place among the participants of each of the first five Rising Voices projects. They have become more than just bloggers. In fact, through their weblogs, they have become much better friends. Over the next six months hopefully those friendships will extend from one project to the next, over borders, differing cultures and languages.

Wishing a happy new year to the readers and followers of the Rising Voices. This week we will highlight the updates of the neighborhood diaries project which is growing citizen journalists from underprivileged youths living in Kolkata’s (India) slums.