Relationships

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.

A lot of our time here is spent learning and listening.  Sometimes I like to think of it as a study in social movements - they are so vibrant and resilient here, and there is much to learn.  Lately, we have been spending time with a community based, horizontal organization in El Salto called Un Salto de Vida (A Leap of Life).  From running a community recycling program to facilitating a medical study on the health of children in the community, their grassroots collective is inspiring and creative.  We visited the office the other day and were really moved by the expressive art on the walls inside and outside of the building. It left me thinking about what art's role is in social movements.  It is so important, yet manifests in so many ways that is difficult to pinpoint.  Click read more to check out all the good stuff they've come up with.

In search of

Interviewing is a challenging and rewarding process. Until recently, I didn't fully enjoy conducting interviews because it was exhaustingly demanding and somewhat daunting, particularly in Spanish. However, and this may seem obvious, so many people have so much to share if you simply ask the right questions. There are morsels that pop up in interviews that may never arise in a day to day conversation and those tidbits are beautiful, raw pieces of humanity to witness and learn from. While interviews may be nerve biting and awkward, interviews are also SO COOL. (Keep reading!  Click 'read more' below)

...be sure to set up a photo exhibition!   We put this video together to share with the kids of La
Huizachera who shot and selected all the photos for their exhibition, "Con los Ojos de Niñas y Niños.

We had lots of fun and received wonderful support and feedback during our trip to San Francisco. Thank you all who came out to support the project at our two events and thank you Treat St. for hosting a wonderful fundraiser! Now we have two months to finish filming our documentary and organize two community cinemas to share the videos from the video workshops. It is going to be a busy two months.

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 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.

Hello Wonderful Readers,

Steve reporting here: My week was full of integrating and learning. It included meeting IMDEC folks, going to Juanacátlan to facilitate social media workshops, and eating bacon. Juanacátlan is my focus. I've met wonderful people there, including lifelong residents who told me of the glorious history of this laid-back, lovely pueblito.

In the spirit of community and communication, we made an introduction video for Steve to meet IMDEC.  Let me just say, we had a lot of fun with it.  We have been playing around with our Flip Cameras and iMovie to prepare for our workshops in Juanacátlan, so we made the video with those tools.  Tomorrow we have our second video workshop with a group of high schoolers and we look forward to seeing the footage they have taken and introducing storytelling and editing techniques.  We are designing the workshop to be popular education based, and look forward to its co-evolution w

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.

<== Check out our new logo!!! Infinite thanks to the very talented and hardworking Jon Doyle of Jon Doyle Design.

After feedback, constructive criticism and more time on the ground, we've decided to amend our mission statement. Without further ado: