The idea of the protests against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, known as the FARC, was born less than a month ago on the
social networking Web site Facebook, and more than 100,000 people in
165 cities around the world confirmed their participation.

A
New Weave of Power, People & Politics:

The
Action Guide for Advocacy and Citizen Participation

by
Lisa VeneKlasen with Valerie Miller

A New Weave of Power,
People & Politics provides
a well-tested approach for building people’s participation and
collective power that goes beyond influencing policy and politics to
transforming public decision-making altogether. Based on 25 years of
participatory research, community development, neighborhood organizing,
legal rights education, and large-scale campaign advocacy experiences
worldwide, A New Weave combines concrete and practical action
“steps” with a sound theoretical foundation to help users understand
the process of people-centered politics from  planning to action.
Published in 2002 and reprinted in 2007, the guide is unique in its
emphasis on power and constituency-building discussed through the lens
of gender/race/class and based on the concrete experiences of social
change in dozens of countries worldwide.

Read reviews of the book in Popular Education News, by John Ruthrauff, for InterAction, and other praise.

Translations of A New Weave are available in Spanish, Russian, Bahasa Indonesia, and (soon) French. (more)

This pdf excerpt from, "A New Weave of Power, People and Politics: The Action Guide for Advocacy and Citizen Participation," outlines arenas of activity (government, private sector, civil society, political space and culture and changes as individuals), and provides an approach for evaluating advocacy action and impact.

Rising Voices proudly announces the first in a series of outreach guides meant to explain the fundamentals of citizen media to a non-technical readership.

The first guide, An Introduction to Citizen Media, offers
context and case studies which show how everyday citizens across the
world are increasingly using blogs, podcasts, online video, and digital
photography to engage in an unmediated conversation which transcends
borders, cultures, and differing languages. From the introduction:

A change is taking place in how we communicate.

Just ten years ago we all learned about the world around us from
newspapers, the television, and radio. Professional journalists would
go to faraway places and bring back stories, photographs and videos of
the situations they witnessed and the people they met.

Sometimes at dinner we talk about these stories with our friends and
family. But ten years ago we rarely, if ever, communicated directly
with the journalists themselves. Leading members of society wrote
editorials expressing their opinions about various issues, but the rest
of us could only share our opinions and thoughts with a small group of
friends.

Over the last few years everything has changed. Thanks to new tools
like weblogs, it is now possible to easily publish to the Internet.
From Turkey to Kenya to Bolivia, everyday people like you and me are
starting to share their stories and opinions with the rest of the world.

While this new form of communication is now freely available to
anyone, most of the people participating still live in the wealthy
neighborhoods of urban cities.

The purpose of this guide is to show that anyone with an internet
connection can participate in the emerging global conversation. Our
understanding of the world is now shaped not just by the newspapers and
television, but also by each other.

This first edition of An Introduction to Citizen Media is available in English, Spanish, and Bengali. Future editions will also be available in Swahili, Malagasy, and Aymara.

This edited collection explains the importance of community empowerment
in advancing public policy, and gives examples of how professionals
have successfully mobilized the public in the past. Written primarily
for students, academics, and lawyers, this book also attempts to bridge
the widely publicized gap between professional advocates and grassroots
organizations. The authors hope to demonstrate two basic principles:
that the democratization of research and specialized practice enables
the production of new insights; and that professionals' participation
in the process of empowerment of low-income communities is
transformative in ways that are enriching both professionally and
personally.

[excerpt] It is one week after the historic first United States Social Forum. 
Both a living monument to a living justice movement inside the most
violent nation in the world, and testimony to the complexities of
sharing power across the lines of race, class, and gender- the USSF
brought tears of joy and frustration to my eyes.  This first attempt on
the part of organizers, activists, artists, academics, the grassroots,
the lobbyists, the policy wonks and the students, the native people,
the immigrants, the queer folk, the Africans in America, the poor, the
struggling working class, the lawyers, the dreamers, the haters, the
survivors of private and public wars, the women, the children- was a
resounding success.  Together we spit a new frame- that another world
is possible, but only through the redefining of the role of the United
States in that brave and beautiful new planet....

P. O.O.R. .

.Scholaz til we die

The Revolution begins with I

QUEENNANDI 2007

excerpt...

The sounds of survival, thrival and subsistence brushed past
the 21 determined faces of poverty, race, disability, inmigrante and
youth scholars from POOR Magazine (and repping the SF Bayview
Newspaper) about to embark on a revolutionary journey to the US Social
Forum in Atlanta. Residue of past and present domestic violence, low
wage jobs, gentrification and homelessness clung to our bodies as we
piled into our rented van, greyhound buses and friends cars .. This was
the first trip our organization had ever taken anywhere, and the first
trip many of us personally had ever taken, which was not a result of a
poverty crime, a crisis, an incarceration or deportation.

We were in pursuit of a dream. A realization of a vision of
cooperative, non-competitive media justice and media production at the
Ida B Wells Media Justice Center at the US Social Forum. A dream we had
launched, worked on and struggled to attain for the last year.

The first conversation

" Have you heard about the US Social Forum? " almost a year ago when Gretchen Hildebran, filmmaker and alumni of POOR Magazine ´ s Race, Poverty and Media Justice Institute
asked me about POOR possibly doing some media for the forum, I
immediately reflected on other social forums that POOR Magazine never
had the financial resources to attend much less make media on.

I had heard about how media centers were structured at these
forums, how they are often completely inaccessible spaces for disabled
media producers, poor folks who are stuck in the crevasses of the
digital divide and folks who haven´t mastered the dominant (oppressors)
language due to global, local poverty, institutional racism and
classism, colonization and border fascism. In other words
notwithstanding the radical goals and objectives of the Forums held all
over the world, the media production is led by the same folks who
always make media, who always have the channels of access and privelege

" Well, why don ´ t we propose a new vision for media
production, you know, based on the model of POOR Magazine ´ s
indigenous media production. "

Gretchen being one of Mama Dee ´ s best students and a truly
creative and radical thinker responded quickly, " that would be great.
" ...

Carlsen and Kohlstedt discuss challenges and successes of the first U.S. Social Forum.

Another world is possible. But we won’t get there without another
media - a free and diverse media that embodies and sustains
democratic values of justice, respect, and community.

Organizing for media justice means confronting and
transforming the structural racism and corporate control in our media
system. Through regional action and national alliance building, the Media Action Grassroots Network
(MAG-Net) is working to create
a vibrant, independent, and publicly accountable media system that
serves our communities' needs and protects our communications and
cultural rights.