Milestones

Our workshop at the 2010 United States Social Forum was a great success!  We've set up another website to facilitate continued communication with our participants and anyone generally interested in digital storytelling - check it out: http://ussf.adaptingtoscarcity.org.

We took some of our own footage of the event, hopefully we can piece together a little clip for you all sometime soon.  Also, we will be publishing all of the footage generated during the workshop to the workshop website.

We spent a week following the Río Santiago from beginning to end, Lake Chapala to the ocean.  We wanted to find out how the water flows, connect with people and movements along its path, and witness dams, new tributaries converging, and where it meets the sea.  Fishing, dams, and the cleansing power of nature were recurring themes on the journey.  

Steve Fisher recently finished his internship with Adapting to Scarcity and he created a short reflection piece on his time and experiences.   His contributions to the project were invaluable and we look forward to seeing the impressive work he accomplishes in the future!  Click "Read More" below to read his parting letter.

We are very excited to announce that adaptingtoscarcity.org just turned 2.0! After months of hard work, design by Jon Doyle and development support by Colingo Labs, LLC, our beautiful new website has officially arrived. In true 2.0 style, there are still some kinks to work out and a few bells and whistles to implement over the next few weeks, but we finally made it :) You can expect a more detailed post about the ins-and-outs of the new site in the next few days - in the meantime, I'm off to celebrate.

Hello Everyone,

I was inspired to review the past two months through photos. Enjoy!

A view of city from the 12th floor of the University of Guadalajara.

Saturday we went on a moving and rich tour of the Ahogado watershed and a portion of the Santiago watershed with two classes of students from Iteso, a Jesuit college located on the outskirts of Guadalajara.  While we are still wrapping up our workshops in Juanacatán and El Salto, we began workshops with approximately 50 students at Iteso in collaboration with the professor and our friend, Étienne.  There are some great photos of the journey, click here to peruse them all.

We are incredibly excited to share the first of many videos created in the popular education workshops we are running in Juanacatlán and Guadalajara.  Karen, Lety, and Cristian live in and around Juanacatlán and are students at the local high school.  Their video is moving and they worked very hard to piece it together.  We are so proud!  Please post the video and share it; they made it with the intention of creating positive change for their communities and we want to help spread the word.

We are really excited to share this short video about the process and participants of our video workshops.  Consider this a trailer for the videos they created which we should be posting soon!  As always, we look forward to feedback and questions.  We plan to publish our video workshop methodology, which is popular education based, once it is more refined.

I made it to Guadalajara! This week was spent adjusting, catching up with my sweet pals Sarah and Arthur. We've known each other for nearly 5 years and are incredibly exicted to finally be collaborating after following each others' work for so long. My name is Steve Fisher and I now coordinate interviews and promote community outreach for A2S (Adapting to Scarcity). I'll be working with them for at least three months. My background is in Latin American politics, anthropology, and popular education. Check out my bio to learn more about me.

Yesterday we went out to Juanacátlan where I saw (and smelled) why we have to use gas masks to film near the river. I also talked with Rodrigo, an incredible community organizer who explained some of the issues they were dealing with in regards to the Rio Santiago. I'll be living in Juanacátlan part-time doing the prep work for workshops and filming.

La Huizachera photo exposition, "Con Ojos de Niños" (Through the Eyes of Children) opens in the municipio of El Salto on Friday!  Photograph titles are being finalized and mounting solutions investigated to easily move the photos among a variety of spaces (schools, central plaza, and cultural center).  Below are the final 26 photos.  As soon as the titles are set in the next day or two, we will post them.