The Dominion - Greg Macdougall

Supporting Independent Media to Grow

taramichelle — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 11:13:01 +0000

Innovative financial models along with public policy support are key

OTTAWA—If independent and alternative media are important to the success of social movements, then finding ways to fund that media is something that needs to be taken seriously.

This is a subject of vital discussion, and there are people in Canada and abroad working on suitable approaches to this problem, both in terms of structural models and also supportive public policy.

Viable media projects are able to sustain themselves over the longer term as well as allowing a more diverse set of media-makers to take part, especially those who aren’t able to pour so much of themselves into a (low-to-no-paying) “labour of love.”

Christine Crowther, a PhD student in Communication Studies at McGill and part-time Journalism lecturer at Concordia in Montreal, sees a need for broad support networks to get involved in advocating for public policy supporting responsible journalism.

“We're talking about people who care about journalism and public policy taking responsibility to put these issues on the public agenda in various circles: in community journalism organizations, in professional journalism organizations, through professional associations, through unions,” Crowther told The Dominion. “There is a history of public policy supporting journalism in this country. It's a matter of making sure that Canadians understand that.”

Along with a need for public policy support, independent media-makers are also confronting immediate funding challenges to keep their media outlets and projects afloat and sustainable.

One inspiring model is led by Tom Stites, Founder and Director of the Banyan Project in the US. The Banyan idea won a Game Changer award from the We Media Conference in 2010, which paved the way for Stites’ fellowship to work on the project at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The project is also backed by the National Cooperative Business Association in the US because it is a co-operative model, something akin to The Dominion/Media Co-op. The Banyan Project seeks to be the first community-level journalism co-operative in the United States.

The first place they will try out this model is Haverhill, Massachusetts, a city of 61,000 that last had its own daily newspaper 14 years ago. The aim is for this model to be used in many different cities experiencing a journalism deficit, across the US and eventually elsewhere.

Stites explains the starting idea was a value proposition to “deliver journalism that people experienced as relevant to their lives, respectful of them as people and worthy of their trust.” The co-operative model was deemed to be the best way to deliver this service even prior to the recent collapsing of traditional journalism business models which didn’t necessarily deliver on those three vital aspects.

The Banyan business model will rely almost entirely on financing from inside the community, not only in the form of regular memberships, but also through community advertising, “extra” memberships specific to businesses or institutions, crowd-sourcing, foundation funding and ancillary sales. Content will be free to view online, but a provisional membership will be required to engage in the interactive portions of the site.

“Think of it as a food co-op,” Stites told The Dominion. “We are operating at the community level where civic engagement happens and the idea is that these news co-ops are going to be generators of civic adhesion and engagement. That's where you get a really rich democracy and...you can have a healthy co-operative.”

There will also be the Banyan Publishing Corporation, a non-profit organization or maybe eventually a co-op of co-ops, to provide the sophisticated software infrastructure for both the journalism and community engagement website features and for what is needed to successfully run and administer a co-operative.

“The Internet culture is changing; for a long time, the idea was start your thing up, get a lot of people engaged in it, and then we'll figure out how to monetize that,” says Stites. “There are not very many [journalism] places where it has worked. So I do think that the kind of deliberate work that my colleagues and I have been doing for three-and-a-half years now seriously, to build this model and shape it and start to test it and do it with real care, is crucial.”

Another person who’s been looking at how different types of media projects can finance themselves is David Skinner, a professor of Communication Studies at York University in Toronto.

He’s co-editor of the newly released book, Alternative Media in Canada (UBC Press, 2012). A few of the book’s chapters look at this issue, including Skinner’s, entitled “Sustaining Independent and Alternative Media.”

He looks at three main alternative media outlets: rabble.ca, The Tyee, and The Dominion/Media Co-op. “[The] people that do run these organizations are very entrepreneurial, so they often cobble together different kinds of financing to keep the organization going,” he told The Dominion in an interview. “They may have some sort of membership dimension, where people provide even a small monthly amount; they may also solicit donations from unions or other kinds of organizations; or look to philanthropists to help support them through different times. Some of them even have different kinds of advertising.”

While Skinner describes the three alternative media outlets as extremely valiant and creative efforts, he also highlights the role of federal policy.

“It's not as though we're talking about these being unsuccessful organizations that need a hand out of some sort, that's not the case at all. Historically in Canada, almost all media fields have had some kind of policy help from the federal government simply because the economics of media production in Canada make it much more difficult to produce media than say in the United States, and as such Canadian media fields simply get filled up with American product,” he says. “It's only at this time, in this historical moment, that really the government is retreating from that role. And it's at a moment where it's particularly important, I think, for them to maintain or even step up that effort.”

Crowther agrees that government has an important role in supporting a strong and healthy media environment. She was the lead co-ordinator of and part of a diverse volunteer team that put on the Journalism Strategies conference in Montreal last spring.

“The framework of the conference was based from the outset in the notion that public policy has a key role to play in journalism in Canada,” she says. She went on to say public policy not only refers to the federal government, but also municipal and provincial governments, as well as educational institutions such as universities.

The conference was meant to generate ongoing networking and discussion around public policy advocacy. Crowther noted that OpenMedia.ca, which does advocacy work on net neutrality in Canada, was featured prominently at the Journalism Strategies conference as an organization to look to and work with on public policy advocacy.

“Community-powered” news organization OpenFile.ca was represented on the conference panel, “Paying the Bills,” by their CEO Wilf Dinnick. “Community-powered” means that users suggest stories they would like to see covered, suggestions get voted on and leading suggestions are added to the “file.” Journalists are assigned to cover the stories that are voted the highest.

Both the cost structure and revenue streams are non-traditional, stemming from the fundamental idea behind the site's concept: “If we started from scratch journalism, like we weren't shifting from a newspaper model to digital, and we were just working in digital, what would we do? And we'd say, 'Well, social media is connecting everyone, why don't we hear from people what they want to see reported, what's important to them?'" Dinnick told The Dominion.

Dinnick explains that there is less overhead to OpenFile than a traditional news organization due to the user-generated portion of the process that doesn't require comprehensive news coverage, but more of a selective approach. There is also a different market to sell the content to; they work with news, media and marketing organizations that pay for some of what the OpenFile journalists produce.

The notion of new or alternate journalism as “social entrepreneurship” is something Tom Stites of the Banyan Project welcomes as a label. He notes that public policy could help journalism, but he’s not waiting for anyone to take up his suggestions: “The most important support government could offer journalism would be to absolutely insist on net neutrality, and then subsidize the net so that broadband access is ubiquitous.”

David Skinner noted that one “self-starting” concept that can help alternative media outlets in becoming more sustainable and successful is the model of The Media Consortium in the US, which provides its member organizations collective public policy advocacy, along with offering up economies of scale for developing and distributing content and support for technical infrastructure. This model of collaboration could also be something that would work in Canada.

There is no shortage of discussion about the many available possibilities for a better future for independent media in this country. Perhaps, as Crowther notes, it is time for people who care about journalism and public policy to put these issues on the public agenda.

Greg Macdougall is a media activist, organizer and learning coach based in Ottawa on Algonquin Territory. More of his work is online at EquitableEducation.ca.

Editor's note: Since this piece was written, OpenFile temporarily suspended publication.

Media Seeks Change

Fertile Soil for Social Change

Martin Lukacs — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 10:22:12 +0000

Kuyek's "Community Organizing" a wise guide for activists

Community Organizing: A Holistic Approach
Joan Kuyek
Fernwood Publishing: Halifax, 2011

The strength of this book comes from Joan Kuyek’s perspective, informed by over 40 years of organizing. Initially intended as an update of Fighting For Hope: Organizing to Realize Our Dreams, which Kuyek wrote in 1990, it has instead become a book that reflects both the changes in the world and Kuyek's learning over the last two decades.

Kuyek’s political experience is rich and deep. It began in the 1960s, when she did research for the federal government’s Company of Young Canadians program. What she learned there quickly transformed her interest towards participatory democracy and community action. She did community organizing in Kingston, where she dedicated herself to the women’s liberation movement and was elected as a city councillor (“alderman”). Later came various organizing in Sudbury, and then national work with the United Church’s “The Church and the Economic Crisis” project and the Urban-Rural Mission with the World Council of Churches. She then went back to Sudbury to work as the founding program coordinator of the Better Beginnings Better Futures community development program, followed by a year with the national Urban Issues Program of the Bronfman Foundation. She then helped found MiningWatch Canada, where she stayed for ten years.

Community Organizing: A Holistic Approach is indeed holistic and comprehensive. Kuyek examines the creation of positive social change based on a coherent and wide-ranging analysis of the context in which the work is done and the principles needed to make it effective. Her concept of a holistic approach draws on Aboriginal ‘medicine wheel’ philosophy, in an effort to bring balance to the various aspects of organizing. She notes, “whole chunks of experience and information are often missing from our work.” She uses stories from her own history of involvement to illustrate the holistic approach, which add much to the principles and analysis contained in the book.

Perhaps the most important part of the book is her perspective on starting points for effecting real change—by which she means changing the societal systems that perpetuate problems, and not just winning piecemeal victories. It is not, as she would have argued earlier in her life, on environmental, social or political questions that we must begin our organizing. Instead, she offers a gardening analogy, of creating fertile soil from which good things can grow.

We need to begin with our own lives and those closest around us. We must generate enthusiasm in those who are willing to get involved, so that they will stay involved and enjoy doing so. This must be so, because we are asking a lot of people: “Asking ourselves and others to take on the work of confronting these systems of domination is asking people to take on a dangerous and difficult task.”

Kukey finds hope and inspiration in First Nations communities, where the maintenance of traditional ways of life has gone hand in hand with improvements in social, political and economic life. Having outlined the many problems with our current culture, she finds it necessary for non-Indigenous people, too, to undertake a radical transformation of our cultures and communities.

And along with this type of coherent vision, she provides many principles and tools: a list of conditions for how to create safe learning environments, "the web of influences" exercise, questions for visioning exercises, activist theatre, media resources, and more.
This book is really a toolbox, a strategy-box, and a vision-box, all in one.

Kuyek clearly illustrates how we can either meet or fail the challenge of class or race, and its impact on our organizing. She’s also able to communicate a valuable understanding of subtleties in discussions on different aspects of power and economics, both of which are often insufficiently or problematically discussed or investigated in activist efforts.

Kuyek has much wisdom to share: frankly acknowledging the problems of fragmentation and disunity in organizing; explaining why developing a sense of “we” based on vision and values is better than organizing based on defining “enemies”; and learning to welcome how synchronicity seems to play a supportive role whenever we’re doing the right work.

For someone interested in getting involved in organizing, this book can serve as a comprehensive and inspiring introduction. For those already committed to this work, it is a valuable resource for reflection and guidance.

An accompanying Resource Guide for Community Organizing is available at www.fernwoodpublishing.ca/community

Greg Macdougall is an educator, activist and writer in Ottawa. More of his writings and work are online at www.EquitableEducation.ca.

Community Organizing

Saving the Land, Saving History

Tim McSorley — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 06:11:25 +0000

Questions of archeological and spiritual significance rally community to protect Beaver Pond Forest

OTTAWA—On the last day of the first month of the UN-declared Year of the Forests, clear-cutting began on the Beaver Pond Forest (BPF), a section of the sacred and ecologically-unique South March Highlands (SMH) in the west end of Ottawa. Since January 31, 2011, 100-year-old trees have been cut, animals have died, and the living legacy of a potentially 10,000-year-old cultural site is being destroyed.

All this is occurring despite broad-based opposition from a coalition of local residents and community associations throughout the city, Algonquin First Nations communities, and several high-profile national organizations like the Sierra Club Canada and the David Suzuki Foundation.

According to Paul Renaud of South March Highlands-Carp River Conservation Inc (SMHCRC), the SMH is “the last wilderness area inside the urban boundary of Ottawa. It’s an area that’s incredibly biodiverse—it is home to 20 documented species-at-risk. If we cannot protect a small forest that’s unique in the world, [one] that has all these strong and compelling reasons to protect it, what hope do we have for all the other places that are vital to the maintenance of the environment that we require?”

The BPF section of the SMH is being cut in order to turn the area into a subdivision built by KNL Developments, a partnership between Urbandale Corporation and Richcraft Homes. Last-ditch efforts, such as two Algonquin warriors chaining themselves to trees, a sit-in at the mayor’s office, and about 20 activists forming a circle around a tree cutting machine, were the latest in a 30-year fight to protect the forest.

“The [BPF] clear-cutting is a violation of Algonquin law,” said Bob Lovelace, former Co-Chief of the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation. Lovelace, along with Daniel Bernard of the Amikwabe (Beaver) Clan, chained themselves to trees in an effort to stop the clearcutting.

“What we did was a natural response [to] the violence that is actually carried out against Algonquin First Nations, but also against the actual living things in there,” said Bernard. “The hundreds of thousands of animals that are actually living there and hibernating, this is their homes.”

The city is required by its Official Plan to acquire and protect environmentally sensitive areas, but says it does not have the money to do so in the case of BPF. Concerned residents of the area came up with a tentative stewardship plan to buy the land, which the outgoing city council considered as an option, but after a fall 2010 municipal election and with the developers not wanting to sell, the new council gave final approval to the development, saving a mere 80-metre-wide wildlife corridor to link natural areas on either side of the subdivision.

Before the cutting began, revered Algonquin elder Grandfather William Commanda declared, “This is a living temple, a place of Manitou, a special place of nature, and that precious reality also demands immediate protection and reverence.”

Spurred by Commanda’s words, Bernard led a one-day sacred fire ceremony at the forest in mid-January 2011, and a few days later, on January 19, he started a sacred fire at an entry point to the forest, a fire that burned for 11 days and was tended around the clock.

Bernard also held a four-day sacred fire at Queen’s Park in February, taking the message to the doorstep of the provincial government, who many felt had the responsibility to issue a stop-work order to allow for further archeological studies of the forest.

An archeological assessment for the developers was done by archeologist Nick Adams in 2003, as part of the approval process for the subdivision.

Between 11,000 and 9,000 years ago, the BPF area was an island, while much of what is now Ottawa was beneath the Champlain Sea.

Dr Robert McGhee, past President of the Canadian Archeological Association and recipient of the Massey Medal of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, conducted a review of Adams's assessment in 2010 and found what he termed a "fatal flaw": in his study, Adams had dismissed any potential for historical, pre-European-contact archeology on the site. Another review, led by a prominent local archeologist Dr Marcel Laliberte, echoed McGhee's concern and called for further study to be done in the area.

In addition, according to Renaud, “In 2005 [archeologist] Ken Swayze published a report showing a significant find adjacent to the KNL property that is estimated to be 10,000 years old.”

The city and province both have legal processes to stop the cutting and order more studies, but neither has acted on any of the post-2004 information, and each states that it is up to the other level of government.

The most recent archeological development is a February 13, 2011, paper from American historian/archeoastronomer William Sullivan, who judges a very high probability that the SMH could be a World Heritage Site, based on its characteristics and an analysis of a circle of stones found in the forest in 2010.

Ottawa is situated on the Kitchissippi (Ottawa) River, which starts over 1,000 kilometres northwest of the city and serves as the Ontario/Quebec provincial border as it flows down to the St Lawrence River. The lower part of the river’s watershed is recognized by many as the unceded and unsurrendered traditional territory of the Algonquin.

The government has a “duty to consult” with the Algonquin under Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution, as well as under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The courts’ interpretation of the constitutional duty is that the government must uphold the honour of the Crown in consulting with Aboriginals—this responsibility does not rest with the developers. The province, on the other hand, has not consulted at all, and the city has only consulted in efforts to foster dialogue between the developers and the “Algonquins of Ontario.”

The “Algonquins of Ontario” (AOO), who are participating in a land claims process, do not represent all Algonquins in Ontario. Five eastern Ontario Algonquin First Nations not part of AOO sent letters to the government, asserting their own right to consultation, but they were ignored. Even Commanda’s letters to the city and province were only met with generic responses, despite his key position among the Algonquin people and the fact that he was awarded the Key to the City of Ottawa in 2006.

The fact that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities are uniting over the protection of BPF makes it similar to other instances of resistance to development projects in eastern and southern Ontario over the past few years. This includes protests against a highway through the Red Hill Valley in Hamilton; a dump (Site 41) in Simcoe County, north of Toronto, that threatened the underground water supply; a business park development in Hanlon Creek, Guelph; and uranium exploration in Robertsville, about an hour east of Ottawa.

Shared characteristics of these battles include efforts over many years at dialogue with government (without much success), followed by direct actions in a final effort to stop imminent environmental destruction.

Mireille Lapointe, who became Co-Chief of the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation midway through the opposition to the uranium exploration in their territory, has come to see a bigger picture at work in these situations. “I think that the new colonialism is corporate colonialism, and we are all under this corporate colonialism," said Lapointe. "Where we [Aboriginal people] have experienced colonialism over a long period of time, I think non-Aboriginal people are now experiencing this colonialism and they’re realizing that the laws that are on the books are not really protecting them nor the environment that they want to protect, and I think that a lot of people are bewildered and wondering how this could happen.”

For more information on the efforts to save the South March Highlands, please see www.ottawasgreatforest.com, www.southmarchhighlands.ca, and www.union-algonquin-union.com.

Greg Macdougall is active in education, decolonization and community/activist infrastructure initiatives in Ottawa. His writings, including a printable Aboriginal Understanding booklet, can be found at www.EquitableEducation.ca.

Feather for Beaver Pond Forest

Beaver Pond Forest Drum Circle

Just Green Jobs

Moira Peters — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 05:40:50 +0000

Transitioning towards an environ-mental economy

OTTAWA—Organizers of the Power Shift Canada 2009 conference are looking to bring hundreds of young activists from across the country to Ottawa, from October 23-26, to discuss climate change in the run-up to the United Nations Climage Change Conference in Copenhagen this December. But along with climate change, the Ottawa conference will also be looking to empower attendees to participate in the transition to green jobs.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Ben Powless, a Power Shift organizer and member of such groups as the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition and the Indigenous Environmental Network. He had just returned from the Green For All Academy in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, where 50 attendees, 49 from the United States and one—Powless himself—from Canada, were coming up with ways to bring green jobs to the forefront of both the environmental and social/economic justice movements.

“We [the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition] started setting up our own working groups [on green jobs], and really not seeing a lot of movement on the ground around green jobs: I mean you can find a few policy documents by some environmental groups, you can find some stuff on their website, but nobody’s out there in the streets talking about it.

“The focus around green jobs is to try and imagine a society and an economy—a way of life—that is environmentally sustainable: to try and imagine the actual jobs and the transition that we would have to go through,” said Powless.

“[Green jobs] are positions from all aspects of the economy, from typically what’s called ‘blue collar’ work right up to ‘white collar’ work, from research to actual design, to manufacturing," said Powless. "As well as things like simply going into houses and fixing them up: construction, manufacturing. So it really focuses on...fundamental aspects of our society, from our energy sources, our food sources, to the way we build things and the way we consume things, and eventually [the way we] have to recycle [those things].”

To transition to a more sustainable way of organizing our society, understanding that we need to reorient our entire workforce toward sustainability—making green work work—will be vital in addressing the global environmental challenges we face.

Granted, the effort is more than understanding what “green work” entails. It is also about coordinating a just transition in implementing these programs, to ensure that we are working toward social, economic, and environmental justice together.

“[The concept of green jobs] tries to address at the same time the fundamental social inequalities in our societies, especially tackling issues of poverty...[and] marginalized communities frequently not having access to most aspects of the environmental movement and not having access to a clean, healthy, safe environment.”

Green jobs are not just about making the world a cleaner place. According to Powless, there is “a human rights basis to it: that people of colour, people from poor communities, have just as much a right—in many cases even more of a right where their communities have been marginalized in the past—to participate in this new economy.

“If we don’t actually make sure that it’s led by communities, it’s not going to be the poorer communities who get access to their own sources of energy, who get access to energy audits.

“And it’s going to be especially immigrant and poorer communities who don’t have access to education and training [and] who are not going to be able to get those jobs, and are not going to be able to be involved in setting up any of those programs.”

To break the cycle of marginalization of poor and immigrant communities as the green jobs movement expands, Powless says it’s crucial for the green jobs movement “to make sure that...these communities are able to be there at the table as some of the main initiators of this discussion. And I think that’s why...we have to really start getting these people involved now.”

Another key aspect of the transition is keeping a local focus. “Remodelling a house, doing energy audits, installing renewable energy systems...local community agriculture, community gardens—these are all fundamentally local processes, and it can be replicated on a wide scale in most urban and even semi-urban centres across North America, and in a lot of other places.

“And these are the kind of things that can’t be outsourced, and [they] provide secure employment for people.”

Greg Macdougall is a member of Common Cause, an Ontario anarchist organization. He is also active with the Organizing For Justice conference in Ottawa (October 15-18), the Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement Ottawa and Equitable Education.

Green Jobs Ashley Chee

Green Jobs Youth March