The Revolution Will Be Digitized

The Media Mobilizing Project works to bring grassroots organization into the 21st century.

by Doron Taussig

A cab driver, a janitor, a maintenance man, a nurse and several other mostly blue-collar workers are seated around a square of tables. The room they're in is a converted truck garage — one of the walls is just an enormous door — and the neighborhood is Brewerytown, a pocket at the edge of lower North Philly where the contrast between the developing city (in the form of new Westrum townhouses) and the decrepit city (the shells of old row homes) has reached almost caricatural proportions. It's Sunday. They've come here to learn how to make a documentary.

In the arbitrary front of the makeshift classroom, three young white women guide a discussion. "What stories do we hear in the media?" they ask. The class answers: politics, celebrities, new development, crime, sports, drugs (there's a long tangent about Barry Bonds). Then the teachers ask what stories the students would like to tell. "Unsafe schools," says the maintenance man. "Murders and robberies of cab drivers," says the cabbie. "The impact of language as a barrier," a health-center worker from Haiti chimes in. "Job competition from immigrants," offers the janitor.

Just outside the classroom door, next to a loud, on-its-last-legs coffeemaker, a satisfied-looking man named Todd Wolfson stands, discoursing about the rationale behind a class likes this. He talks about "Ford-ism," and how there was a time when workers used the physical proximity of the factory to organize into collective bargaining units. That doesn't work as well in a service economy — cabbies, for instance, are rarely all in one place at one time. But, Wolfson points out, there are other ways for workers to talk to each other.

"New media also organizes, because it's a decentralized communications form," he says.

Wolfson, 35, is of average build, with long hair and a beard that combine to form a kind of mane. A middle-class white guy with hard-left politics, he once spent three years living in Namibia and Kenya before deciding he "didn't want to be a white male anthropologist who studies in Africa." He came to Philly to pursue a Ph.D. at Penn, chose as his dissertation subject the Philadelphia Independent Media Center (IMC), and became preoccupied with the role of communications in organizing. In 2006, he joined with four other local activists to found the Media Mobilizing Project (MMP), an organization that seeks to bring 21st-century media technologies to the grassroots.

Since then, MMP has taken a toehold in the Philadelphia activism community. This class, an uncommon effort to carry high technology down the socioeconomic ladder, is the result of a recent $150,000 grant the group won from the Knight Foundation. But the organization's fingerprints can also be found on the campaigns of many of Philly's nascent unions and community groups. And everything MMP touches, it seems, becomes more significant — not because its campaigns always work, but because, in the realm of progressive activism, where so many try to emulate the strategies of successes past, MMP is looking forward, trying to think of ways to make grassroots organizing a viable modern-day practice.

Wolfson is still talking about new media when the class breaks for lunch. The maintenance man, Amendu Evans, walks over to a low-budget spread and makes himself a turkey sandwich with heavy mayo. In the afternoon, the teachers had said, they'd get into some more technical material, like backlighting and imagery. Evans is looking forward to using these new skills in support of his union, the Service Employees International.

"[If companies are] making members work straight through with no break, or making them do more work without paying them for it ... we go rally to get them to comply [with their contract]," he says. "I'm out there with a bullhorn, giving fliers to the tenants." Often, the bosses just wait out the rally, figuring the union members will have someplace else to be. But if they can show up with a camera, and put the video on the Internet ...

"That's gonna give us a whole 'nother advantage," Evans predicts. "They might not take that so lightly."

The fish that crawled out of the water to become MMP was, rather appropriately, a campaign against the modern Ford: Wal-Mart. It was 2005, and Wolfson was living in Philly, working on his dissertation, when he met Shivaani Selvaraj, a woman who'd graduated from Penn and spent years working on homeless and housing issues (the names and acronyms of the groups Selvaraj worked with changed so frequently that it would take a while to recount them). The two activists discovered that, in addition to sharing some ideological convictions, they had been running headlong into a similar problem: As organizers of poor and low-income people, they were at a competitive disadvantage when it came to communications. Selvaraj, for example, thought that the media's coverage of housing issues was insufficiently urgent, proportionate to the scope of the problem.

The activists attributed this dilemma, broadly, to two phenomena:

Dor the past three decades, but especially since the Telecommunications Act of 1996, ownership of major media outlets in the U.S. has fallen into the hands of fewer and fewer companies (within a few years of the Act, Clearchannel Communications had gone from owning 40 radio stations to more than 1,200). Both Wolfson and Selvaraj felt that these media empires were unwilling to tell stories that might upset advertisers and compromise the bottom line; as a result, they believed, corporate malfeasance and the problems of poor people got left out of the national conversation. Whether or not content producers were compromised, though, there was a case to be made that consolidation produced that effect by reducing local resources. "There's a shrinking of space in commercial media for community groups to get coverage," says Dorothy Kidd, a media studies professor at the University of California —San Francisco with whom Wolfson has worked. This development could be partly mitigated by the proliferation of available news sources on the Internet, but for ...

Though the situation is improving, according to Jan Fernback, associate professor of mass media and communications at Temple University, it is still the case that poorer, less educated people have neither enough access to nor enough familiarity with new media to broadcast their stories on their own. To Wolfson and Selvaraj, the much-vaunted "netroots" were great, but pretty much a middle-class thing; even IMC, which Wolfson had been studying and held in high esteem, was a forum produced largely by and for, as he says, "disaffected middle-class white folks."

At the time, Selvaraj was preparing to head up a campaign against Wal-Mart on behalf of the local chapter of the pro-labor group Jobs with Justice (JWJ): Rallies were to be held outside the big store on South Columbus Boulevard, and a concerted effort made to spotlight the company's business practices. To this plan, Selvaraj and Wolfson (who was working as a representative of IMC) decided to add another component: documentation. Over the course of the three-week action, they would go into the store and discreetly invite employees to join them outside during breaks. There, they'd huddle down in cars and conduct interviews.

Though a few of the Wal-Mart workers reported them to supervisors, and they were eventually banned from the store, Selvaraj and Wolfson succeeded in doing this about 20 times. They got some good material, too: Employees talked, for instance, about what it was like to work full time but be unable to pay to keep the lights on. Then the activists spliced the audio with video to make Public Service Announcements, which they played at the campaign's culminating event, a screening of the documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, for an audience of various labor constituencies — Teamsters, janitors, hotel maids. It was a revelation. There was a time when all those workers might have labored in the same factory; here was a different way for them to connect.

"That started ringing this bell in our minds," says Selvaraj, "about the way communications congeals."

That winter, Selvaraj took a trip to the Gulf Coast, to do post-Katrina relief work; there, she connected with three other local activists — Nijmie Dzurinko of the Philadelphia Student Union, Mica Root of the American Friends Service Committee, and Phil Wider, a longtime homeless advocate she'd worked with previously — all of whom had taken an interest in the potential that communications held for grassroots organizing. When the group returned, they gathered for dinner at Wolfson's house, and over a side of beef (and salmon for the pescatarians), began to talk about what a media-centered grassroots organization might look like.

Mark Stehle THE TECH TEAM : Mica Root, Nijmie Dzurinko, Phil Wider and Shivaani Selvaraj, four of the five founding members of MMP. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

The best way to describe the MMP model is to say that the organization is a hired gun, except it doesn't charge for its services, and it tries to teach its clients how to shoot.

Say you're a grassroots activist group — security guards at the University of Pennsylvania trying to form a union, for instance. You link up with MMP, and it produces media for your campaign: It interviews guards on camera, then makes a Public Service Announcement about working conditions; it comes to your rallies and films them; maybe it helps you start a blog.

You can then use this content to reach both internal and external audiences. Internally, you can use it as a recruiting tool: Because security guards are stationed all over campus and work different shifts, it can be hard to find time to go sit down and make your pro-union pitch to all of them; now, you can just hand them a DVD. Externally, you can use it to drum up support. You can put your video on YouTube, or on local Web sites; maybe a Daily News reporter will stumble across it, and decide to do a story on you. But even if one doesn't, you can reach other activist groups, and some portion of the public.

"We need to be able to document ourselves, and be able to frame ourselves," says Dzurinko, who, like Selvaraj, has not always felt that what she calls the "quote-unquote mainstream media" has treated her causes justly.

In its approximately two years of existence, MMP has provided its services to numerous local "economic justice" groups (it prefers these to "green" groups because, the core members believe, environmental activists are already fairly well-funded and tech-savvy), and has done so for free, supporting itself with volunteer hours and grants. For Casino-Free Philadelphia, it's made an informational video about gaming, and distributed 300 DVDs in the neighborhoods surrounding the proposed SugarHouse site. For the Taxi Workers Alliance, an advocacy organization for taxi drivers, it's made YouTube videos and informational CDs, which drivers can listen to in their cars. For neighborhoods fighting eminent domain and gentrification, it's established a blog, "All for the Taking." And of course, the organization runs its classes, trying to teach the populations it works with to make this media on their own.

One of the most talked-about MMP projects thus far has been what the group casually refers to as the "Head Start Video." In 2006, with the federally funded preschool program up for reauthorization, supporters of Head Start were worried that a Republican Congress was planning to cut the program's funding and, significantly, eliminate the parent "Policy Councils" (each Head Start program is overseen by a council of parents with children in the program, which has actual power — the program dates back to the War on Poverty, when such ideas were entertained).

Blair Hyatt, executive director of the Pennsylvania Head Start Association, an advocacy group for Head Start families, says that before teaming up with MMP, his group was trying to fight the impending changes to Head Start by having parents make calls and write e-mails to their representatives — "a standard attempt to do grassroots organizing." He met MMP's Wider through a mutual acquaintance. Wider, a soft-spoken longtime activist who, in the early '90s, founded the homeless-advocacy group "Empty the Shelters," felt that "we could use a video as an organizing and educational tool." He also strongly believed that low-income people like Head Start parents didn't get a fair shake in the media. So, along with Selvaraj, he visited Head Start facilities in Philadelphia, Somerset and Bucks counties, set up a camera, and allowed parents there to make the case for Head Start and the Policy Councils themselves. "They were articulate," Wider says. "They saw themselves as leaders." When shooting was done, he teamed up with some professional editors to cut the footage into a 20-minute film.

The video, called Hope in Hard Times, is solidly if not spectacularly produced, and competently told. There is no narration, only occasional text against a black screen, interspersed with shots of parents talking and children playing. Early on in the film, the parents speak emotionally about Head Start programs and the role they've played in their lives; at about the 13-minute mark, the phrase "A systematic attack has been waged against Head Start" pops onto the screen, and the remaining seven minutes are spent explaining the threat Head Start faces.

On a surface level, the whole thing seems similar to any short documentary or long TV news segment. But as you watch Hope in Hard Times, you realize that there's something incongruous about it. You're used to seeing these production values, sure, but you're not used to seeing them in a film narrated entirely by poor mothers in Philadelphia and rural Somerset County. Nor are you accustomed to this ideological frankness in anything outside of a Michael Moore movie. (A "systematic attack"? Tell us what you really think.) It is, like MMP itself, a fairly unique product, one that takes stories and sentiments normally contained in insular activist and academic circles and packages them for mainstream consumption — whether that "mainstream" is the hundreds of Head Start parents who were shown the video in the hope that they'd mobilize around the issue, or the members of Congress, each and every one of whom the Head Start Association decided to send copies of the DVD.

Mark Stehle THE NETWORK: Members of MMP's partner groups pose outside the Philadelphia Student Union office in West Philly. The idea is for the disparate organizations to support one another in their campaigns. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Of course, all of this begs an obvious question: Does it work?

It's true that MMP's principals, all organizers by trade, have tried to team up with skilled content producers to create MMP's products, and as a result, those products are generally well done. But in today's media environment, with so much for consumers to choose from, it's still an uphill battle for attention. A DVD about casinos may be more substantial than a flier, but did Fishtowners really go home and pop in those PSAs, or did they watch Lost? And how many people will click on a YouTube video about the woes of cab drivers? Most folks spend a finite amount of time on the Web each day; the sites vying for their attention are playing a zero-sum game. Can grassroots activism — not the sexiest subject to begin with — really compete in this environment?

The short answer to this question is: Thus far, there's no way to know. MMP has had a hand in wins, losses and draws; Head Start was ultimately reauthorized and the Parent Councils preserved (a clear win), but with casinos, who knows? In any case, the outcomes of the campaigns MMP has cooperated on just can't be linked causally to MMP's involvement. No one knows what would have happened had MMP not gotten involved.

The longer answer is that MMP is not offering a comprehensive plan to activist groups; it's offering tools. And the groups MMP has worked with seem more than happy to have them.

"Can I prove that [MMP's work] had an influence?" says the Head Start Association's Hyatt. "I don't know." But he believes that, after seeing MMP's video, decision-makers "were really aware that people were watching them, and people were paying attention."

Charmayne Thomas, a Head Start parent who appears in the video, says that for her, seeing herself and other mothers on screen was legitimating.

"What my plight was here in Philly was the same thing as what was happening in the other counties," she says. This made her problems seem less like her problems, and more like a problem.

Taxi Workers Alliance President Ronald Blount says the protests he organized never got any traction until MMP got involved.

"Because MMP covers it first, it sort of forces the mainstream media to cover it," he says. "Once they put it out there on the Web, then the Inquirer calls us, the Daily News calls us. ... "

And Jethro Heiko of Casino-Free Philadelphia says MMP's work "gives you a presence when you're trying to compete with basically no money against these casinos." Normally, he points out, groups like his don't use video. But it makes for a superior communications tool, both because people are accustomed to receiving information in video form, and because it allows a group like Casino-Free to tell a vivid story — about, say, Jethro's 85-year-old neighbor, Charlie — without dragging Charlie from door to door.

"It can bring action to people in a way that can't be, or won't be, captured in writing."

In short, it's a fact that competently produced activist videos and Web sites will sometimes be over-matched in the content wars, either by slickly made professional entertainment, or by grainy, hilarious YouTube videos, or whatever. But it's also a fact that activists will have more success using new media than they will doing anything else. New media has become such a dominant format that you have to compete in its arena; there's no place else to compete.

It's Monday, Feb. 25, and it's a big day for the Taxi Workers Alliance. This morning, the Philadelphia Parking Authority is holding a public board meeting, during which it will issue decisions on two matters of great importance to cabbies: a proposed fare hike, and an already-installed GPS system. The TWA opposes both — it thinks a fare hike will drive away riders, and that the GPS is flawed — and is hoping to exert its influence at the meeting. But it's not sure whether it has any.

The Philadelphia TWA is a young organization. Formed in 2005 to advocate for drivers' interests, it's gone from an initial membership of about 50 (out of a total 3,000 drivers in the city) to 1,200 today, according to Blount, himself a cabbie for 25 years. It's not, however, a legal union, and has no formal power to negotiate with the PPA, which regulates taxis. Any pressure it wants to bring to bear, it has to bring through public outcry.

To that end, the TWA has been teaming with MMP to raise awareness of its causes, both among cab drivers and the public in general. In addition to the aforementioned informational CDs, 100 of which were distributed to drivers, the groups are working on establishing a show for cabbies on a community radio station. And last Sept. 5, when drivers in Philly and New York went on strike for a day, MMP made a video to create buzz about the action.

Another video, about the flaws of the GPS system, was made in anticipation of today's events (it used Bob Marley's "Get Up, Stand Up" as background music); it was posted on various local Web sites and distributed to MMP's network in the hope that people would come out and support the cabbies. And indeed, when the PPA board convenes in its second-floor offices at 31st and Market streets, here is who is in attendance: a handful of cabbies, including some representing a rival aspirant union, "the Brotherhood"; a number of reporters, including a cameraman from Action News; three of MMP's core members and five of their colleagues; Thomas Robinson, a security guard from the University of Pennsylvania; Lawrence Jones-Mahoney, a West Philly High senior and member of the Philadelphia Student Union; Eduardo Soriano from Jobs with Justice; activist photographer Harvey Finkle; Charles Clarke of the union UNITE-HERE; Peter Bloom, of the Mexican social service organization Juntos; and Nicholas Riley from the Penn Student Labor Action Project.

It isn't a huge group, and for each organization represented, the most politically predisposed member — rather than the rank-and-file — is here. But it's a big enough crowd to overfill the medium-size room that the PPA meets in (which seems to have been converted, for this occasion, from a room full of cubicles), and, more strikingly, it's an occupationally diverse crowd. Students and security guards coming out to support cabbies? Who ever heard of such a thing?

When you ask MMP's partner groups about the media MMP produces, they have positive things to say. But the thing they all emphasize, and gush about — almost without exception — is the MMP network. This is what Selvaraj means when she says "communications congeals": that in a world where workers no longer share workspaces or employers, they can still exert collective leverage. Communications can help make that happen.

"I didn't [used to] know what was going on with security guards, and frankly I didn't care," says Blount. "Now, I do care."

The grand vision for MMP is for it to become a hub for these now-disparate groups, a union of pseudo-unions. One day, the principals hope, when cabbies face a fare hike they don't like, the PPA might have to worry about thousands of students walking out of class, rather than one student walking into its meeting. They imagine the key groups forming an MMP board; as for finances, MMP is kicking around the idea of founding a partner nonprofit, which could sell media work to organizations with some money (say, a health care nonprofit), and use the proceeds to support the type of work MMP does now.

Of course, there's a ways to go before that happens, and today, there's bad news to absorb: In front of the MMP-generated crowd, an undaunted PPA board listens to the TWA make its case, then raises taxi fares 20 cents per mile and announces its intention to keep the current GPS system, at least for 60 more days. It's hard to see this as anything but a loss for the TWA, though Blount will try to spin it positively. Still, to focus on today's outcome is to sort of miss the point. The point is not for MMP to win every battle, or most of them. The point is not even for MMP's partners to be on the right side of every issue. The point is that, because of the communications tools at their disposal, when a group of non-unionized, low-paid workers decided to take on the powerful people who make decisions about their lives, they had some chance. It was a fairer fight.

(doron@citypaper.net)