What will 150 people armed with video cameras and trained in documentation, storytelling and video journalism be doing, from 29 September through 4 October in Goa?

Attending the VV National Meet, of course!

All of us at Video Volunteers are so excited to be welcoming our Community Correspondents -- and an amazing array of well-known change-makers who are generously coming to train them & learn about how we work—in our beautiful idyllic coastal state of Goa!

This is the first time our entire network has been able to come together in three years, and in that time, we’ve grown from about 80 to 215, and have earned a lot of reasons to celebrate.

If you are based in Goa – or excited enough about the community movement in India to travel from far to see it up close – we invite you to come join the fun.

So drop in any time for some chai and inspiration. Or come to one of our three ‘official’ events at the National Meet venue, the Alor Grande Resort in Candolim, North Goa.

There’s a press conference at 12 noon on Friday, October 2, 2015, followed by lunch.

A few hours later that same day there is a gathering for activists in Goa to talk about strategies specifically related to Goa’s challenges like garbage and illegal developments. Please contact Radhika@videovolunteers.org for info about this.

We also invite you to return on the closing evening on Sunday, October 4th to meet Actor Abhay Deol, Video Volunteers’ wonderfully eloquent Ambassador who is attending his third VV event. (our CC’s are so excited he is coming!)

All the events are at the Alor Grande in Candolim. Directions are here.

We very much hope to see you there!

Love,
The Video Volunteers Goa staff

There are 25 of us.  Click here if you want to know more about us and why we are putting in so many sleepless nights to make this event a success.

Read on for more details:

What’s the National Meet all about?

More than 150 Community Correspondents from all across India will be coming. We will be celebrating the significant achievements of Video Volunteers (VV), one of the world's largest video4change networks, whose Community Correspondents (CCs) have, for the past nine years, produced more than 3000 ground reports in remote and neglected rural areas on topics ranging from caste discrimination to displacement to missing health facilities.  Our CCs continue to upload stories, all imbued with a passionate call for change on key issues such as caste, conflict, identity and education, to our website and our Youtube page, every single day.

The National Meet will focus on improving our ground reports and using them to create change in our communities and on the advocacy issues we are most passionate about. In particular, our CCs will learn to produce stories that generate the powerful conversations we need to have on gender, as part of our newly-launched campaign challenging patriarchy.  They will recap the year gone by and project into the one ahead. There will be deliberations on the exciting possibilities that community reporting holds for both the national and international mainstream media. We will brainstorm on how best to employ data and the powerful medium of the Internet, to disseminate information from India's remotest hamlets even more effectively and quickly, to the nation and the world.

About Video Volunteers:

Over the years, VV has partnered with more than 100 NGOs, foundations, media companies and documentary projects and grown in strength. Yet, so much more needs to be done.

Picture this: a tribal woman reports on how displacement is hindering children's rights to education in central India; a Dalit man discusses political representation at local elections for his marginalized community, a woman in labour is turned away at a dilapidated health center and has to trek 3 kilometers to the next hospital to deliver her baby. IndiaUnheard – VV’s flagship community media program which broadcasts on Doordarshan - throws light on such perspectives, making it the first program of its kind.

Video Volunteers attempts to bridge the vast chasm that exists between rural India and urban populations, between tiny hamlets and global audiences in an effort to bring about change and development to every forgotten citizen of this country.

India is the world's largest democracy. And yet, most Indians receive no information about policies that are ostensibly for their benefit. Most don't even know their fundamental rights. Some of that fault lies with us, both ordinary citizens and the media. We neither demand, nor report such stories, often because such developmental problems occur in areas that are hard to reach.

In many cases, IndiaUnheard has had a direct and positive impact.  Many of our video reports have inspired the community itself, motivated officials and viewers to take action and address specific problems such as the lack of healthcare, livelihood opportunities and petty corruption in local governance. Currently, one in five videos that we produce manages to solve the problem it addresses. We call such success stories 'Impact', and you can watch those and more on our website.