MNN 2008 Grants:
Training and Production (6 Organizations)
The Training and Production Grant is designed to provide organizations with the resources to develop a self-sufficient media production capability. The grant provides for a trainer/mentor to work directly with an organization. The grant also places video production and post-production equipment at the organizations facility. The grant is designed to encourage the integration of media within the overall framework of the organization, develop a level of sustainable media capacity and produce programming for playback on MNN’s public access channels and other venues.
Children's Art Carnival
The Carnival provides at-risk and underserved children and youth with skills and opportunities that enable them to realize their potential for becoming positive, creative and productive adults through the use of the visual and communication arts. "Living Treasures of Harlem,” will use oral history techniques to document three cultural institutions in Harlem: The Apollo, Classical Theatre of Harlem and Dance Theatre of Harlem as well as the lives of long time residents of Harlem.
Coalition of Institutionalized, Aged and Disabled (CIAD)
The Coalition of Institutionalized Aged and Disabled (CIAD) is a non-profit consumer-led advocacy organization dedicated to protecting the rights of New York’s adult home and nursing home residents. The project will establish an accessible editing station on site and allow participants to produce theme-based videos on CIAD agenda issues, residents’ rights training videos as well as collaborate on covering events and workshops with allied housing and treatment reform organizations.
Esperanza del Barrio
Esperanza del Barrio is a membership-led community organization based in East Harlem that supports and promotes the self-empowerment of low-income Latina immigrants and their families through leadership development, political and legal education, and grassroots organizing. The organization was founded by a group of Latina women who were fed up with police abuse and anti-immigrant restrictions on the street vendor license application process. Esperanza del Barrio is expanding its outreach capabilities to New York City’s Spanish-speaking immigrant communities by training and equipping 20 of its members to produce a monthly program on MNN documenting its street vendor rights campaign and educational workshops.
Vision Urbana
Vision Urbana (VU) is located in Manhattan’s Community Board #3, and serves its neediest neighborhoods. Although CB#3 encompasses the Lower East Side of Manhattan below 14th Street (the East Village/Lower East Side, Two Bridges, and Chinatown), VU primarily targets the East Village (Loisaida), down to Two Bridges, south along the East River to the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. This area holds one of the largest concentrations of public housing in the city and accounts for the highest unemployment, and numbers of at-risk youth in CB#3. VU was created in 1993 as an unincorporated faith-based initiative of the Primitive Christian Church, a local Hispanic congregation with a history of 55 years of community service.
People's Production House
People's Production House is a comprehensive media justice organization serving New York City and Washington DC. Their work combines media creation, media education and media activism, building a new generation of journalists that can both create and demand a media that works in their interest. Through their unique mix of community organizing, education on media policy, and intensive journalism trainings, PPH is transforming the face of the press corps and the media landscape. They believe a diverse, ethical, and independent media is an essential element of social change and they believe that historically excluded communities must be protagonists in media democracy.
Families for Freedom
Founded in September 2002, Families for Freedom (FFF) is a multi-ethnic defense network by and for immigrants facing deportation, and an organizing support center for targeted communities. FFF members are all current and former detainees, loved ones of people being deported or individuals at-risk of deportation. They are primarily low-income immigrants from the Caribbean, Latin America, and South Asia. They seek to repeal the laws that are tearing apart our homes and neighborhoods; and to build the power of immigrant communities – as communities of color – to provide a guiding voice in the growing movement for immigrant rights as human rights.
