Jan - Jun 2022
Pass the mic!
Expanding media access for underrepresented community members
Project Overview
Affinity organizations provide safe spaces, or spaces of belonging and inclusion to underrepresented, and often unheard, community members who experience challenges living in predominantly white and wealthy environments.
Our team worked with Community Access Television, Inc. (CATV), a local media organization servicing five New Hampshire and Vermont towns that constitute the Upper Valley (UV), to encourage underrepresented community members to take advantage of the media resources that CATV offers.
But, how can we ensure the safety of underrepresented community members who fear retaliation as a result of media visibility?
Timeline
16 Weeks
Project Type
Service design, Curriculum design
Clients
Community Access Television, Inc. (now Junction Arts & Media)
Skills
Teammates
Ronnie Ahlborn - Designer
Alessandra Cassiano-Salinas - Designer
Olivia Nadworny - Designer
Understanding Local Media
Project Discovery & Definition
To begin defining our initial project direction, we first needed to:
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Understand the inner workings of CATV and all their media service offerings
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Define who is underrepresented in the Upper Valley
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Understand the relationship between the underrepresented community members and local media
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Assess how CATV can use this information to fill gaps in media engagement
Shadowing and field visits with CATV familiarized us with the different responsibilities of each team member. We attended CATV facilities, attended the organization’s media workshops, and community events they hosted or helped host, and created our own content through CATV.
CATV staff member in facilities
Touring the Briggs Opera House Location
Considering that CATV hosts media lab workshops, maintains open-access media studios, runs two cable channels and a Youtube, and continues to grow its offerings with only 4 full-time staff members ultimately led us to observe that CATV staff is extremely limited in both resources and time. We sought to understand the many stakeholders involved in media production and consumption at CATV, so we decided to interview CATV staff, general UV community members, UV community members who contribute content to CATV, Upper Valley government leaders who engage with local media, and leaders of the following local affinity organizations. Some of the other things we heard include:
“The Upper Valley is very unique, there’s a level of intimacy here that doesn’t exist in a city.” - CATV Staff Member
“[A BIPOC community member] shared with me that they were starting to feel unsafe in their neighborhood and they may not feel comfortable being featured in my piece […] I want the community to hear their message, but at what cost?” - CATV Staff Member
“One time a resident was willing to be interviewed, but the story was put in a bad context. It focused too much on the crime and gave too much information, making the individual really upset.” - Dismas House Staff Member
“[One of our directors] had a quote taken out of context and we used that article as a way to create a response [...] I think our response got more visibility than the article itself. Sometimes you can use it to leverage your voice.” – Pride Center Vermont Staff Member
Synthesizing Our Findings
To synthesize all the information we gathered, we first used empathy maps to get a better idea of stakeholder behaviors and attitudes toward CATV.
The empathy maps enabled us to be able to track patterns and extract common themes that would form the basis of our ideation.
These patterns led us to the following insights:
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The Upper Valley is characterized by its “tight-knit community” that relies on interpersonal relationships. Those who identify outside of these networks (such as BIPOC and queer folks) are less likely to engage with community-based organizations such as CATV.
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Participating in local media opens up people with marginalized identities in the Upper Valley to a heightened level of exposure and visibility. This can threaten their safety, especially if they are an individual without institutional support.
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People with marginalized identities in the Upper Valley need the scaffolding to build creative confidence in media to have agency over how their stories are told and feel a sense of safety in a historically homogenous community.
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Because CATV works to serve such a vast audience across different mediums, CATV ends up spreading itself too thin, and ultimately compromising how effectively it serves any one group.
Our Focus Audience
The challenge of designing for underrepresented groups pushed us to consider how we can consistently access and engage underrepresented community members, considering how little they are represented. We decided to focus on affinity organizations — or a collective of people who share an identity, lived experience, and/or mission; often manifested as an established organization. The institutional support these organizations provide serve as protective barriers for underrepresented groups in the upper valley.
We created a three-sided matrix that allowed us to clearly identify the factors that contribute to negative interactions between affinity organizations and local media. The matrix also pushed us to learn from the positive experiences and incorporate some of these approaches, while ideating within the boundaries of the affinity organizations’ mission.
Pass the mic!
Throughout our process, we regularly engaged the CATV staff for opinions to ensure that they felt confident continuing the initiative after the design team was no longer involved. Together, we created Pass the Mic!
Pass the Mic! is a new media education program focused on podcasting skill-building and creation for local affinity organizations. Affinity organizations can sign up for a private media workshop with local podcast professional Marion Abrams to equip their team with the tools to begin their podcasting journey. Recognizing that media visibility increases harm exposure for marginalized communities in the Upper Valley, our team decided on podcasting because it preserves anonymity and its technical approachability enables complete media agency for underrepresented community members who don’t have any previous experience with media.
Prototyping the workshop
After landing on the general structure of the initiative, we worked together with Marion to conduct a preliminary intake process and a pilot workshop. We tested this abbreviated version of the workshop with Hartford Dismas House, a local affinity group that helps transition formally incarcerated individuals back into the Upper Valley.
The pilot and intake prototyping helped us workout unclear points in the podcasting curriculum and create an intake form that would help our instructor better tailor the workshops for each individual affinity group.
Deliverables
Keeping in mind that the CATV staff is regularly spread extremely thin, we designed a series of handoff materials that would help the organization transition into complete ownership and responsibility for running the initiative.
Pass the Mic! Workshop Curriculum
We structured the curriculum in four parts: Why podcasting?, covering important information affinity groups should know before deciding to start a podcast, Technical Skills for running a podcast, logistics involved in podcasting, and ‘putting it all together’, where the affinity will then learn to record a mini podcast using CATV’s facilities.
Challenges & Learnings
Originally, our research surrounding CATV’s bandwidth led us to consider an internal solution that would attempt to alleviate tension around time and resources. Interviews with some community members uncovered concerns over CATV outreach response times, which made us slightly concerned about CATV’s bandwidth to service underrepresented community members, who are already in vulnerable positions. However, CATV staff expressed that they were more excited by the potential of engaging underrepresented community members and did not have much energy to invest in internally rearranging their operations.
Although we wanted to pursue a different direction originally, it was crucial for us to acknowledge that CATV would be taking over the project once our team completed the handoff. This made it extremely important for us to develop a solution that we were all equally excited to create and sustain.