WITNESS was founded in 1992 and uses video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. They empower people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change.
Sam Gregory is a human rights activist, advocacy trainer and video producer. He is currently the Program Director of WITNESS. WITNESS uses video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. It empowers people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change. Recently WITNESS launched the Hub (hub.witness.org), a participatory media site where anyone can upload and share human rights-related video, audio and photos, and engage in action to end human rights abuses.
Sam has worked in collaboration with human rights organizations across the world, and particularly in Burma, including co-producing the recent Shoot on Sight: The Ongoing Military Junta Offensive against Civilians in Eastern Burma (2007). In 2005 he was the lead editor on Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism (Pluto Press) and in 2007 he designed the curriculum for WITNESS first two-week global Video Advocacy Institute. Videos he has co-produced have been screened at the US Congress, UK Houses of Parliament, the United Nations and at film festivals worldwide. He studied at Oxford and as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard. He is a Board Member of the US Campaign for Burma and the Tactical Technology Collective.
Ryan Schlief , Program Coordinator for Asia , is a life-long activist and campaign strategist who first picked up a video camera and began editing in his teens. Ryan has been a local community organizer in the USA on racism and discrimination and worked as a staff person on international issues and immigration for the US progressive political leader, US Senator Paul Wellstone. He received his MA in international law from the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, where he focused on economic, social and cultural rights and the rights of minority populations comparatively in Asia and Africa. He subsequently joined the Asia-Pacific program at the Amnesty International, International Secretariat in London as a campainger and researcher in the India and Southeast Asia teams. In his life, he has worked and studied in the USA, Africa, Europe and Asia. Ryan volunteers as a video producer and editor for community television in New York City.
Violeta Krasnic(Bio coming soon!)
FahamuEstablished in 1997, Fahamu has played a pioneering role in using the new information and communication technologies to support capacity building and networking between civil society and human rights organizations. Fahamu has been building the capacity of human rights and civil society organisations in Africa through strengthening their campaigning, advocacy and organisational skills. Fahamu has developed a range of electronic newsletters on justice in Africa, including Pambazuka News (reaching an estimated 60,000 readers each week), as well as news and information services for health workers and other civil society organisations in Africa.
Hakima Abbas is a human rights defender and social justice activist. She currently works as the Policy Analyst for the AU Monitor initiative of Fahamu. Fahamu supports the struggle for human rights and social justice in Africa by: supporting social justice advocacy through the innovative use of information and communication technologies; stimulating debate, discussion and analysis; distributing news and information; developing training materials and running distance-learning courses. Prior to joining Fahamu, Hakima was the Program Coordinator for Africa and the Middle East at WITNESS, an organisation that uses video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. At WITNESS, She trained human rights defenders from across Africa and the Middle East in the use of video as a tool for advocacy and produced several videos for change - successfully creating change in policy and practice in various contexts.
DrishtiDrishti is a leading human rights and development organization that uses media, communications and the arts to strengthen India's social movements and organizations, in order to extend their reach and to increase the participation of marginalized communities. Drishti aims to integrate a strong media, arts and communications focus into as many human rights, gender and development organizations as possible. At the same time, they enhance the potential of community members themselves to make their own media and cultural products. Drishti has produced over 25 documentary films, four community radio programmes, designed over a dozen rights based campaigns, and conducted over 200 trainings on theatre and audio-visual production.
Stalin K (Bio coming soon!)
BreakthroughBreakthrough is an international human rights organization using innovative, high impact education, media and popular culture to transform attitudes and advance equality, justice, and dignity. Breakthrough works through offices in India and the United States, the world's two largest democracies, on several issues including women's rights, sexuality and HIV/AIDS, racial justice and immigrant rights. Breakthrough's recent work includes the cutting edge use of gaming and Web 2.0. The ICED – I Can End Deportation video game (www.icedgame.com) educated millions about the lack of due process in U.S. immigration policy. In India, Breakthrough's 2007 multimedia campaign, Is This Justice?, educated over 35 million about discrimination faced by women living with HIV/AIDS.
Madhuri Mohindar is a Video Producer at Breakthrough, translating human rights and immigration issues into the production and editing of online documentaries, music videos, PSA's, games and educational tools. Her background is in documentary filmmaking and journalism. She has worked on a number of documentary films featuring diverse subjects, including immigrant experiences, civil liberties, gay rights, and the impact of globalization on Bollywood dancers. Her documentary film, Red Roses, is a sociological portrait of South Asian women in a beauty parlor in New York, and has played at a number of international film festivals, including New York's South Asian International Film Festival, San Francisco Docfest and Globians Documentary Festival in Germany. It has also received substantial press coverage including CNN-IBN, the Asian Age, India Today, India West and the Brooklyn Rail. She has published numerous articles in Inter Press Service, a global news service dedicated to covering developing news features and has worked as an Archiving, Research and Publications Officer at Osian's, an Auction House, Film House and Archiving Centre of Indian fine arts, cinema and architecture.
Her desire to integrate media and social issues emerged after a Postgraduate Diploma in Social Communications Media at Sophia Polytechnic in Mumbai, after which she completed a Masters in Media Studies from the New School in New York.
Chiapas Media Project/Promedios
The Chiapas Media Project (CMP)/Promedios is an award winning, bi-national partnership that provides video equipment, computers and training enabling marginalized indigenous communities in Southern Mexico to create their own media. Since1998, CMP/Promedios instructors have worked in close collaboration with autonomous Zapatista communities. Indigenous youth with little formal education, and often working without reliable electricity, have produced videos on agricultural collectives, fair trade coffee, women’s collectives, autonomous education, traditional healing and the history of their struggle for land.
Alexandra Halkin is an independent documentary video producer and the founding director of the Chiapas Media Project/ Promedios de Comunicación Comunitaria. She has been producing documentaries for the last 25 years. In 1995, she started developing the Chiapas Media Project (CMP)/Promedios, a bi-national partnership that provides video and computer equipment and training for indigenous communities in Southern Mexico. Since 1998, the CMP/Promedios has trained over 200 indigenous men and women in video production in Chiapas and Guerrero, Mexico. CMP/Promedios award winning videos have been broadcast in Mexico, US, Canada, and New Zealand and screened at film and video festivals, universities and museums worldwide. Alexandra has consulted with various organizations such as Witness, the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights, and CLACPI (Latin American Council for Indigenous Film and Communication). In 2004, Alexandra was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the Latin American Indigenous Video Initiative (LAIVI). Most recently in 2007, Alexandra was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for the Indigenous Audiovisual Archive (IAA) in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Aasia (Chicago Office)
Burma IssuesBurma Issues was initially founded in 1990 and acts as a private, non-profit organisation devoted to a peaceful resolution to Burma's struggle for human rights and democratic rule. Burma Issues is non-partisan and does not advocate, campaign for or represent any leaders, political parties or ideologies as solutions to Burma's civil strife. It is now a part of the larger Peaceway Foundation. The Peaceway Foundation is unique in that they focus on the marginalised communities living in the war zones of Burma as the target group for building a peace based on justice for everyone. Their approach is based on concepts of community organising and empowerment of these marginalised communities. They are firmly committed to nonviolent forms of peacemaking and conflict transformation.
Saw is a committed human rights activist and has demonstrated his dedication and passion for ensuring that all human beings have equal rights.
SKP (The Justice and Peace Commission in West Papua)
SKP stands for Sekretariat Keadilan dan Perdamaian or the Office of Justice and Peace, an integral part of the Catholic Diocese of Jayapura. This offices focuses on five priorities including advocacy on the situation on human rights in Papua, research and documentation, inter-faith dialogue, peace and reconciliation and ecological justice.
Budi Hernawan (Bio coming soon!)
Video VolunteersVideo Volunteers is based in New York and Ahmedabad, India, and has partnered with Drishti and a network of innovative Indian NGOs to develop a community media initiative in India that is using video to empower communities to take action around critical issues relevant to development. This “Community Video Unit” initiative is undertaken in partnership with leading NGOs around the world. In the Community Video Unit model, 6-10 community members are trained as full-time, paid Community Video Producers. Every month, they produce a new local-language “Video Magazine” on a different social issue and screen it in slums and villages on widescreen projectors to up to 10,000 people. Their approach bridges the literacy barrier, and communicates to people in the visual medium they like best. Finally, it promotes community-led change, through focused discussions and follow-ups with audiences around a "Call to Action" in community screenings that often reach the majority of a village or slum in ways that development programs cannot.
Jessica Mayberry founded Video Volunteers in September 2003 after spending a year training rural Indian women in filmmaking as a fellow of the American India Foundation. Video Volunteers is working to create a media industry at the base of the pyramid by training local people associated with NGOs to run their own ‘Community Video Units’ in partnership with the Indian NGO Drishti. Prior to that, Jessica worked at Court TV, the Fox News Channel and CNN. She is a fellow of Echoing Green, an organization that supports social entrepreneurs, and is a winner of the Knight Foundation News Challenge, as well as the NYU Stern Business School business plan competition. She also serves on the board of Free the Children, the world’s largest organization of “Children Helping Children” and on the Advisory Council of Counterpart International. She holds a degree in modern history and modern languages from Oxford University, graduating in 1999.
CitizenshiftCitizenShift is the National Film Board of Canada’s participatory Web platform exploring today’s crucial issues through films, photography, articles, blogs and podcasts. This social media network is a space to share media, voice opinions and explore unique content from active citizens, independent filmmakers and multimedia artists. CitizenShift is inspired by Challenge for Change - a 1960s experimental NFB initiative that involved communities in the documentary filmmaking process. Over forty years later, CitizenShift offers a participatory online platform giving users a forum to share their media, debate the issues and encourage social change.
Rana Ghose is currently pursuing doctoral research at the Institute for Development Studies in Brighton, England. Prior to this, he had spent two years freelancing as a filmmaker, video trainer, and photographer for IDRC in a variety of countries, and prior to that, he was involved in full time academic research, first as a graduate student in economics and then as an intern with IDRC. His research interests address genetically modified crops in India and the regulation that surrounds their management, while his experience over the past two years has convinced him of the power of using video as a participatory research tool. Research and the visual medium are, in his opinion, and due to his applied experience in each, forever to be linked in his future work. He takes a lot of pictures.
http://in.youtube.com/user/ranaghose
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