media move money mec dougherty

7/30/2019 Media Move Money MEC Dougherty

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Media. Movement & Money by Ariel Dougherty page 1

Media, Movement, and Money:Evolving #femfuture, @MediaEquity Creates #10Gazelle

By Ariel Dougherty April 23, 2013

As the #femfuture hastag lit up on Twitter the 2nd week of April I was attending the Women!sFunding Network!s annual conference, Investing In Women, in Detroit (#WFN13)

For a second year in a row I had been askedto coordinate a session on gender justicemedia. Jenny Lee, a co-director at Allied

Media Project was a natural ally instructuring such a session, which we framedas MORE THAN A VOICE: MEDIA-MAKINGIS MOVEMENT-BUILDING.(http://www.womensfundingnetwork.org/schedule)Allied Media is Detroit-based. They havefifteen years of experience coordinating thebest national annual gathering of grassrootsmedia activists. The fifteenth conference isthis June 20-23 (amc.alliedmedia.org/).Katrin Wilde, Executive Director of Channel

Foundation based in Seattle joined us as apeer of the women!s funding community.They fund only internationally, but media isone of their core areas of interest.

Among the slides I presented in my talkwas the savvy analysis by TressieMcMillan Cottom of feminist blogs in theirresponses of The Onion!s attacks onQuvenzhan Wallis.

Cottom!s pointed questioning (http://tressiemc.com/2013/02/28/did-white-feminists-ignore-attacks-on-quvenzhane-wallis-thats-an-empirical-question/) to white feminists, and superb examination, of thefeminist blogosphere represents a growing development and sophistication among feministmedia, especially among women of color collective blogs, to account for a fuller justicerepresentation in coverage. I see this rise in critiquing within the feminist media communityas a sign of growth, and maturity, that there is expanding self-awareness and a growingsense of responsibility about the community of bloggers! role within a larger justice framing.

Delegations to Allied Media Conference are connected

by shared identity, practice, issue or geography.

Photo: Vanessa Miller

Summary: In context of being at the Women!s Funding Network conference, Dougherty explorespositives and challenges of Courtney Martin & Vanessa Valenti

!s #FemFuture report released April 8th.

FIELD issues start on page 2. DONOR context begins on page 5. #10GAZELLE LEAPS are mapped out

on pages 6-7 to encourage stepped-up gender justice media funding. Page 8 is links to other responses.


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#FemFuture: On-Line Revolution(http://bcrw.barnard.edu/publications/femfuture-online-revolution/) was my airplane read as I headed to Detroit. I mentioned the report in ourworkshop discussion. Still, I had not yet fully digested its 34 pages and its analysis on aparticular on-line community of media producers and activists. Since 2007 at the WomenAction and the Media conference I have actively advocated need for far greater financialsupport of a broad spectrum of women-lead media, on-line and on-the-ground in communitiesacross the US. Via Media Equity solving this conundrum of the women!s movement has beenthe core focus of my work.

THE GENDER JUSTICE MEDIA FIELD

Three things I have learned since 2007:1. The field is very broad and desires media & cultural production thought of simultaneously2. They ask funders to meet them where their NEEDS areand on their own terms3. They are fierce. NEED to fight dominant media is VAST. New groups emerge regularly.

To their great credit Courtney Martin and Vanessa Valenti in their report spot-light thecommunity that nurtured them and that, in turn, they are committed to see grow, the feminist

blogosphere. I heartily agree that feminist blogs provide a rich mixture of feminist content,analysis, and critical forums for discussion on a very broad range of gender issues andconcerns. These blogs combined are a critical process in advancing a broad feminist agendabefore the public. The nimbleness, and wealth of voices, of this community can act fast to postcomments on their sites. Then, a multiplicity of voices can reverberate on the numerous socialmedia platforms. And, yes, effect change. That these many and diverse feminist mediaplatforms that operate solely on the internet need fiscal support is vital. That media creation isan activist tool is equally vital.

Where I depart from a key point in #FemFuture is that the feminist blogosphere is the centralpoint of feminist activism in effecting change. It may be a significant one. Through social media

efforts it may be able to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people, but I think it would be ahuge disservice to other sectors of feminist activismsuch as the political clout of themembership of AAUW as one exampleto label these blogs as sole or major players is allchange. The shift in the report from the feminist media platforms to activism is awkward andconfusing. So, that by page 18 when Martin & Valenti state: no women!s foundations haveinitiatives specifically dedicated to online feminist work, the vagueness of online feministwork leaves me puzzled. Exactly what is the overall thrust of #FemFuture? What is it theydesire funded? Hellraiser (http://hellraiser-blog.tumblr.com/post/47817750008/some-more-thoughts-on-femfuture ) states it succinctly:

.. some of this nervousness about!corporate-sponsored feminism

", is aroundactivism being a profession. I agree that it shouldn"t beit should be a rite

of citizenship.[bold emphasis mine]

The overall underlining problem for women-lead, gender justice media is that for four decadesrunning it!s purpose within feminism, and thereby the public as well as funders, has been littleunderstood. Most significantly, it has been severely under-funded. There!s a history here!

The failure to support women-conscious media over two generations has been a catastrophe


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for the women!s movement and to the issues we hold dear. (Think North Dakota, that VAWApassed but is not funded, or women elected officials 24.1%(state);18.3%(federal) of ourlegislators). In the report Martin and Valenti provide no context of this historic problem aboutthe lack of sustained support for women!s media. Like they mis-stated, though have nowcorrected, that feminist blogging originated as if by accident (1), I believe someunderstanding that the feminist blogosphere funding problem is also not new, but anoutgrowth of the persistent problem within the larger framing of women-lead media would havebeen exceedingly helpful. In fact, as numerous people point out #FemFuture repeatedly tries toframe itself in the context of new. In particular, in her highly detailed critique Jessica MarieJohnson underscores in #FemFuture, History & Loving Each Other Harder(http://diasporahypertext.com/2013/04/12/femfuture-history-loving-each-other-harder/ ) :

There is a dangerous ignorance in assuming #FemFuture is a first, a start,or new. [bold emphasis mine]

Or, as Meagan E. Ortiz frames her concern in Why We Can !t Ignore Being Ignored or Accusedof Sniping at her blog LaMamitaMala (http://www.lamamitamala.com/blog/?p=1138 ):

The future has been here all along. Choosing to ignore that, not cite it is toerase our precious energy that is our very being. And we will not allow it.

Martin and Valenti, as I have often myself, call feminist media blogs [etc] thecommunications arm of the movement.(p3) The internet is a delivery system---a new anddynamic one, at that. Yes, one in which potentially many, many more people can be reached.

But it is still the content,and intentof a feministsite, the shape of thosewords and vision that is

at the heart of thecommunicationsprocess be it a radioshow, a TV program, asong or a blog. 600women's communitybased newspaperspublished monthlyacross the US in the1970s into the 1980s

(2). off our backs, thelast of thesenewspapers publishedits final hard-copypaper, a great issue onPeacein 2008.

Now, as with all the others, it too has faded to become largely a passive website. It ispossible, however, that these monthly publications had greater geographic reach than

Media Equity contends that the severe lack of independent womens voices/media in many

regions of the US has enabled state legislatures to pass draconian laws restricting womens

reproductive rights. Further the absence of womens voices impacts womens leadership

successes. No womens media; no womens progress Donna Allen, 1977.


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feminist media of today.

I winched with pain at the list of 21 bloggers who participated in the #femfutureconvening at Barnard. Almost everyone critiquing the report has made reference to this NewYorkcentric view, and raised other critical issues of exclusion from ageism to careerism.Maybe, on one level this can be caulked up to a money issue? The lack of a public callrepresents serious lack of field accountability. Further, it presents a huge long-termchallenge to feminist, womanist media makers. Especially, in light of one of Martin andValenti!s solutions: an annual #FemFuture meeting of 100 on-line and on-the-groundorganizers, philanthropists....... (p 29). The variety of reactions have been a real eye-opener, even to me, who has advocated some kind of stakeholders meeting(s) to moveforward donor support of feminist media.

The post #femfuture by Melissa McEwan Thursday, April 11, 2013 athttp://www.shakesville.com/2013/04/femfuture.html a, blog that gets almost a million pageviews a month is worthy of note:

.....it doesn't resonate with me. It doesn't speak to my needs, or my experience.

......But trickle-down feminism [H/T Tressie] doesn't work, for precisely thereason that the external presumptions about a universal feminism, even amongprivileged members of the group, don't work. Because other shit matters, too,like whether you live in Brooklyn or next to an endless soybean field.

Further, the 31 reader comments on McEwan!s analysis are telling. A woman in a wheel chairexplains how hard it is for her to travel. Or, this comment from TheDeviantE:

I find it VERY interesting/ironic that something convened to discuss online

feminism.......holds that face to face meetings have special value.What's that phrase? Think Global, Act Local? It seems like the conveners got

that one mixed up: "think local, act (as if it's) global."

McEwan adds to the commentary postings:

......I would like to not be disappeared as a presence in online feminist activismjust because both my present and my future look very different from where I'm

sitting.

The agency of media amplification here is deeply evocative as McEwan recounts thisexperience:

.........I have had producers realize I'm too far away from a studio to appear asa guest. These things have colored my perception, broadened and diversifiedmy online connections, given me natural allies forged in shared experienceirrespective of identity, challenged my creativity, limited my opportunities, and

shaped me in innumerable other ways.

Two critical challenges are before us. One, how do we radically alter the center points fromwhich our media emerge and (re)validated within the busy media stream of (re)amplification


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that relies HEAVILY on a few major urban media hubs? How do we make the public squareadjacent to the endless soybean field have equal weight and legitimacy as Times Square?

Second, we need to build mechanisms of trust in order to build any kind of forward movementprocess. The large and diverse field of gender justice mediaespecially in flyover countryhistorically has had so very, very little face-to-face contact. How do we harness or imagine thetechnology to bridge our geographic/ spiritual/ ideological/ economic/ privileged (or lack of) etcseparations?

BACK TO THE DONORS

In contrast, the donor communities have had gobs of meeting occasions and have built sizablenetworks, and structures, which, in turn, now, also need financial feedings. There is also aleadership vacuum as Tracy Gary often reiterates. She did again at #WFN13.

Women Donors' Network has funded an organizing project and a media project that cross dualissues raised in #femfuture. Might it be important to discuss publicly the effects of the use ofthose sizeable $1million grants for each of those two initiatives? Intention and success need to

be measured. Further, most importantly, it might be possible to learn some very significantlessons between the dynamics of donors! perceptions of need (or their desire?) and the on-the-ground realities and perspectives of a field of activists. These are some lessons, andchallenges, I learned in Inspiring Bigger Bolder Giving, a presentation by Women MovingMillions at #WFN13, where it was underscored that donors alone decide and direct where theirfunds go. (Sometimes after they have dismissed their financial advisers! : ) )

Most of all I would like to encourage the larger feminist philanthropy community across allnetworks (individuals, Women Donors' Network, Women Moving Millions, member funds ofWomen's Funding Network, etc) that it is CRITICAL time to support a broad range ofwomen-led, women-conscious, gender justice media. First, if gender justice media is not your

primary concern, make it your second center of support. At WFN#13 I urged one of threepossible funding vehicles for women's media: 1) Formation of a new fund with GroundswellFoundation as a primary model; 2) Each existing woman's fund devote 5% of is funding togender justice media (theoretically this could bring $3.25 million into feminist media making)and/or 3) creation of a mix of regional mentoring and development networks spliced from thelikes of INCITE Women Of Color Against Violence and Chicken and Egg Pictures with awomen!s crowdfunding interface.

In Day 2 at #WFN13, at the Action Lab, lead by Cristi Hegranes, Founder and Director ofGlobal Press Institute, she suggested each woman's fund support one women's media

organization. It took me a full 24 hours to see a problem, hence this counter-suggestion: thateach fund support two women's media groups. At least one of these fundees shouldspecifically have to be a WOC group or disability media outlet or LGBT media entity. The point,to ensure that a broad spectrum of feminist media is supported and that each fund is aware ofthe challenges, needs and experiences among a variety of different media making groups andthe unique contributions many different gender-identified people can make to deepening andbroadening feminist media making.

The conference-wide presentation: Deconstructing the Digital Divide: Building a Healthy Digital


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Ecology on the final morning of #WFN13 crystallized for many in the room the significance inthe challenges posed between new technologies and social justice media for poor and workingwomen. Cristi Hegranes framed the problem that was then discussed by Virginia Eubanks,Popular Technology Workshops and Our Knowledge, Our Power, and Diana Nucera, AlliedMedia Projects and Detroit Digital Justice Coalition. The room rocked as these womenpresented best practices for empowering communities to build a just digital ecology.

CONCLUSIONS

Courtney Martin and VanessaValenti have bravely sparkeda firestorm with #femfuture.They and their ten funders

five foundations and five individuals are to be congratulated for their giraffe natures to stickout their necks and maybe a bit of kangaroo nature, too, with their pockets books to stimulatethese national/international women!s movement/women!s media/blog discussions. While nofirm commitments emerged from the WFN community, I know from my Twitter exchanges with

WFN!s development director, media justice is firmly on their minds. Here are ten concrete

suggestions on what might encourage a gigantic gazelle leap forward:

Becausewe need a cleansing from past missteps, the Ms. Foundation for Women mightconsider formally repudiating the policy it created at its early start in the 1970s, thatit would not fund media or culture.

Becausethe Ms. Foundation is a leading fund, and the only one that supports projects acrossthe nation, such a change in policy could make new inroads into supporting gender justicemedia and culture making.

Becausea policy change alone, however, will not create the support necessary, donors,investors and foundations across networks should establish a special Media Action Fund(maybe within Ms. Foundation. This might be forerunner to establishing a new fund??)

Becausefeminist media practitioners are best equipped to see and know issues in theircommunity, a broad range of different producers on a rotating basis should be the majority ofthe decision makers in how funds are distributed by the Media Action Fund to the field.

Becausewomen!s (& other) organizations can greatly benefit from greater use of independentgender justice media, and traditional media outlets have failed to tell women!s stories

sufficiently or accurately, new funding via the Media Action Fund should first start to stabilizedexisting gender justice media to do its work on its own terms.

Becausegender justice media does not exist more robustly in red states and othergeographies, special initiatives lead by media activists and local activists should devise modelnew projects to activate women and girls voices in more corners of the country.

Becausewomen!s leadership is central to turn the tide, independent feminist media voices/outlets in strategic congressional and state districts should be a focus of network development.


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BecauseSERIOUS legal/political/economic concerns exist regarding organizationaldevelopment within patriarchal/corporate frameworks a special series of technical assistance,organizational models/frameworks can deepen field examination and experimentation alongthe lines of Self Employed Women!s Association (www.sewa.org) of India and cooperativeworker or customer owned business models (In Italy and Spain are some other examples.)

Becauseexemplary work and development has been done by many women!s mediaorganizations: QWOCMAP (teaching, outreach engagement, etc); Global Press Institute(international reach, income models, growing earned income); Women Make Movies (shiftingpriorities; 90% self-sufficiency); more TBA: a series of Technical Assistance Programs canprovide valuable support to new and emerging groups to strengthen their work.

Becausethe women!s movement is global a sizable delegation of media justice makers needbe supported to attend AWID International Forum in 2015. Leadership from a number of fundsshould work to ensure a strong US delegation and an equally vibrant international delegation.

In New Mexico, I live close to the endless soybean fields, though here it is chili. Since 1976, I

have lived rurally. From where I sit, Reproductive Justice is reframing and re-energizing thewomen's movement in a way, maybe, we do not yet fully see. I felt that wind blowing fromNorman, Oklahoma when I attended the Take Root conference in February as young womenespecially rose up to claim their voices to craft a Reproductive Justice frame in Red States.Pamela Merritt, blogger at AngryBlackBitch, underscored on a media panel how she uses theinternet to organize people to organize off-line. At #WFN13 one of the final sessions usedReproductive Justice as a touchstone to examine what is happening globally for women!shealth needs. So, we all have much to learn. But let us all step up to support our own women-made mediaonline and offthat plays the central, and hopefully paid, role that it can tokeep us informed about all this new energy and evolving feminisms. Communications,that's our right under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Through Media Equity, Ariel Dougherty has lead a national effort to create a more sustainable feministmedia community. From co-founder of Women Make Movies (1969) to Development Director atWomens Studio Workshop (1979-1986) she holds vast knowledge on evolutions within the feministmedia / cultural communities. That clarity, stretched over time, makes her a savvy media strategist.

[email protected] @MediaEquity

Media Equity Collaborative is a fiscal sponsored project of International Media Project, Inc. # 94-3239511While these are all the funders of MECs work since 2008. The past two years support has been mighty scant::Social Science Research Council regrant support from the Ford Foundation, Anonymous, Ms. Foundation forWomen, Tracy Gary/ Inspired Legacies, Jacquelyn and Gregory Zehner Foundation, Third Wave Foundation, On the

Issues magazine, Michael Meyers,, Women Make Movies, and Free Press.

FOOTNOTES

(1) Veronica Arreola emphatically states: None of this was an accident.dispelling the Martin/Valenti

misrepresentation in her blog, VivaLaFeminista.com (http://www.vivalafeminista.com/2013/04/back-to-femfuture.html )Tuesday, April 16, 2013

(2) Documented in Martha Allen!s Ph.D. dissertation, "The Development of Communication Networks Among

Women, 1963-1983" (1988)


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A special thank you to Mary Celeste Kearney. Her Feminist. Media. Criticism. Is. address at Console-ingPassions conference (http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2012/12/10/feminist-media-criticism-is-part-1/ )inspiredthe Because framing. And, of course, to Binkini Kill #2 Manifesto, in 1992,that re-kindled the same impulsesof feminists of 20 years earlier to create their own media :

because we must take over the means of production in order to create our own meaning.....

references / more sources:

It is not a good #femfuture http://blackamazon.tumblr.com/post/47755512536/it-is-not-a-good-femfuture

Back to the #femfuture by Veronica Arreola Tuesday, April 16, 2013http://www.vivalafeminista.com/2013/04/back-to-femfuture.html

#femfuture by Stacey Nguyen April 18, 2013, Berkeley Politcal Review http://bpr.berkeley.edu/2013/04/femfuture/

The future of #FemFuture By Caperton on April 12, 2013http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2013/04/12/the-future-of-femfuture/

#FemFuture: The Feminist Revolution Will Be Online Elizabeth Plank in Millennials, Feminismhttp://www.policymic.com/articles/33841/femfuture-the-feminist-revolution-will-be-online

Lauren Rankin offers a number of interesting views at visions of the #femfuture at The 4th Wave musings from afeminist in a post-feminist climate http://4thwavefeminism.blogspot.com/2013/04/visions-of-femfuture.html

The most hilariuos thing about this #femfuture mess? http://karnythia.tumblr.com/post/47837142907/the-most-hilariuos-thing-about-this-femfuture-mess

http://blackamazon.tumblr.com/post/47667617614/iinventedeverything-i-am-absolutely-appalled

Natalie Reed @nataliereed84 10th April 2013 from TwitLonger http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1rjmng9

(Other) Suggested Reading [from Jessica Marie Johnson's post of April 12, 2013]

Polyphonic Feminisms: Acting in Concert | S&F Online | Polyphonic Feminisms http://bit.ly/1230G9d

Moya Bailey and Alexis Pauline Gumbs | We Are the Ones We !ve Been Waiting For | Ms. Magazine (Winter 2010)(no link available)

BCRW hosts #femfuture conversation on online feminism | crunkfeminists | file://localhost/Storifyhttp/::bit.ly:10NbbL5

Jessica Luther | #femfuture Storify | http://bit.ly/ZhjGg1

US Centrism and inhabiting a non space in #femfuture | Red Light Politics http://bit.ly/10TdRW2

illegal plum pudding i am absolutely *appalled* at the #FemFuture http://bit.ly/ZHhCns

Online Feminism #Femfuture and the Dirty Money Problem | Fake Pretty http://bit.ly/10UJgdc

Why We Can!t Ignore Being Ignored or Accused of Sniping | Mamita Mala :One Bad Mami bloghttp://bit.ly/ZRd0eC

The #FemFuture Report Bundle | curated by @jmjohnsophd | http://bitly.com/bundles/o_5h4obm5uq7/i

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