Videoactive Girls
Videoactive Girls
Project for the Global Fund for Children
In the year 2009, Video Volunteers partnered with Global Fund for Children(GFC) in a pilot project called Videoactive Girls. Under the project, which was a learning initiative of The Nike Foundation’s Brain Trust of Practitioners, VV developed a toolkit on how community-based organizations and the adolescent girls they serve can harness, produce and use the power of the visual media to amplify their voices and tell their stories.
The training imparted by Video Volunteers to the young girls was focused on these three factors:
- How to learn the art of digital storytelling.
- Developing video production and video-sharing skills.
- How to instill and cultivate greater self confidence and self-empowerment in each participant through the learning process.
The project was located in two places: Kolkata where the girls trained came from a local NGO called Sanved and in Hyderabad where the participants were associated with the NGO Mahita.
In both cases the girls had come from a difficult socio-economic background and had experienced several personal tragedies and traumas. It was a tough challenge for the Video Volunteers’ trainer to train these girls the intricacies of video production and prepare them to venture outdoor with cameras and shoot news videos.
However, a specially designed training module was capable of helping restore the girls’s self -confidence. So, despite the difficult situations and challenges, these girls made several videos on issues like child marriage, gender bias, the problems of working women, etc. At the completion of the project the participants said, “Our fear is gone now!”
The project at Kolkatta Sanved, which involved formerly trafficked girls, Video Volunteers developed youth media models specifically targeting the needs of underprivileged girls in the developing world. Through Video Volunteers training and the use of video, the girls learned self-expression.
Video Volunteers has also created a toolkit for the Girl Powered Video project, which will be distributed widely this year by the Global Fund for Children and the Nike Foundation-the two organizations promoting the GFC program. The toolkit includes videos, training guides, and documentation of lessons learned from the entire project. We hope this will benefit other organizations in future and inspire the creation of many other youth media projects. To read and download the toolkit, click here.
To watch the films made by the video active girls trained by Video Volunteers, click here.