From the Executive Director

Amidst the current chaos in the world, a world of battlegrounds, at the Alliance we have held on to hope and had a September full of fresh starts and powerful new beginnings.

We just held our first Multimedia Archival Storytelling Lab — a three-session program supporting (and providing stipends for) creative producers and organizations, custodians of media and culture collections, as they grapple with the complexities of who we are as creators and facilitators of valued and valuable media, and learn ways to preserve, digitize, archive, and share those stories in new ways. Which narratives risk fading into obscurity if they are not protected and prioritized? How is this material currently made available, and how might we plan to safely, creatively, and ethically co-create access to it for our communities now and audiences in the future? The Multimedia Archival Storytelling Lab was an opportunity to address these questions and discover ways to give new meaning and create new access to archival media that might be sitting online or on drives somewhere. Jocelyn Arem led the group to consider both creative methodology and technology to reimagine relationships with our own stories and our accountability to our communities. Participants included Educational Video Center, KALW’s UnCuffed, Ninel Nekay, Amber Espinosa Jones, Lede Nola, Magic Box Productions, and many others. We will share out these projects in upcoming eBulletins and on the Alliance website, and we are already planning a second cohort for next year.

Our Unlocking Creativity Community of Practice just had its 1-year anniversary, and we are looking forward to exciting collaborative projects. We deepened relationships with our partners this year — with Hip Hop Education Center, WLCAC and Uncuffed, and some of our Unlocking Creativity folks joined the Community Design Lab for Teaching Artists in Watts at WLCAC. We were also able to turn some of the emergent ideas from the Community of Practice meetings into a successful funding proposal for the California Opportunity Youth Apprenticeship grant program, and we are now in development on an AI-powered community archive platform and an Arts2Work program where currently and formerly incarcerated individuals and justice-impacted youth can be paid to train for careers as digital archivists, curators, and cultural producers — the first registered Apprenticeship for Digital Archivists in the country. This month we were joined, joyfully, by Greg Eskridge, a member of the Uncuffed team. Greg has recently been released from San Quentin prison and has been an inspiration for all of us as we move forward together.

Please stay tuned for new events and programs coming up — a presentation at the NYC Archivists Roundtable (with Martha Diaz and me) on Creating Futures Through Memory Work, a Youth Media showcase during National Apprenticeship Week, a partnership with Tribal Media Center in Ygnacio, Colorado, and so much more.

Please, Join us, Give, Mentor, Reach out. This is your Alliance too.

(HERE IS THE LINK to register as a Mentor for emerging filmmakers in our affiliated programs across the country.)

~ Wendy

wendy@thealliance.media

Notes from the Field

See Borderland | the Line Within Abrazos Tour
Throughout the end of September and through October, the documentary Borderland | The Line Within will be touring the United States, playing 26+ cities. The documentary created by filmmakers Pamela Yates and Paco de Onís chronicles the experiences of asylum seekers attempting to navigate the border-industrial complex, as well as a group of digital humanist efforts to map the web of financial dealings tied to the mass deportation of immigrants. In a recent Democracy Now interview, Gabriela Castaneda, of the Movement of Immigrant Leaders in Pennsylvania and who is featured in the documentary, spoke of the importance of the film’s content for all Americans, stating, “We have one of the most militarized borders in the world […] And we just learned that the 2024 budget to protect the border is $25 billion. This is not an attack only on immigrants; this is an attack on every poor person living in this country […] that money is not being used to improve our schools or infrastructure, public transportation.”

SPEAK MPLS Celebrates 40 Years of Minneapolis Broadcast History
In honor of Minneapolis reaching its 40th year of public access broadcasting, SPEAK MPLS, a community center and current steward of the city’s public broadcasting channels, will be hosting a celebration. This event will feature “cable access legends and luminaries old and new for a timeless celebration and look back on all that Minneapolis public access TV has had to offer.” Join SPEAK MPLS at SPEAK MPLS South Studio at 2429 Nicollet Ave and live on Comcast Xfinity channels 16, 17, and 75 in Minneapolis and streaming at speakmpls.com/watch.