Alliance for Community Media Northeast Region

If you feed the roots, the grass will grow. Every year, the National ACM awards a grassroots scholarship to the Northeast Region. Having served for several years as the scholarship committee chair, I have seen first-hand how these scholarships benefit the ACM by bringing people who work out in the field into direct contact with the National organization and sending information about the ACM, our philosophies, technical training, and vision back with them to their communities.

The ACM is a grassroots organization. We have a local chapter here in Massachusetts where I live that is very active. We reach out to producers and access center members, staff and management of centers, town and state officials in our state. Mass Access is the Alliance’s only point of contact for many of these people. We reach the ones that might never attend a conference more than 25 miles from their home or center. For some, it’s the only chance they ever get to expand their knowledge of how access works beyond the boundaries of their own community, their own access center. It can be an eye-opening experience, particularly for access producers and staff that have been isolated by the structure or politics of their center.

The Northeast Region expands the chapters’ reach beyond their local boundaries. I’ve studied the structure of the ACM a bit over the past couple of years, and it seems to me that the region’s purpose is to help glue the chapters together and provide support, not so much on specific legislative issues because each state has its own issues, priorities and concerns, but more to provide general tactics for approaching legislative problems, training workshops, resources for information about equipment and management practices, and leadership mentoring to staff and management of access centers. The region’s two-day conferences every spring are a terrific venue for staff development, and an opportunity to talk to other people who are doing the same job in another town or state about how they do what they do. And the video festivals in the fall give us a chance to spotlight the work that we do and compare it to the work others are doing in our region.

The National ACM exists to provide a giant umbrella for all access centers. It is there to protect access from damaging National legislation and FCC rulings, and to provide support to cities and towns with far-reaching legal problems that the chapters and regions are not equipped to handle. And once a year, the ACM throws a huge conference somewhere in the US, invites everyone in the ACM to attend, and around 600 people come. It’s an extravaganza, and for some people, a once-in-a-career opportunity to rub elbows with people from all over the country. But for others, attending the conference is so far out of their center’s budget that they’ll never get a chance to go. This is unfortunate for those access centers that would most benefit from having one of their people attend the great workshops and meet with colleagues from all over the place, but it’s also a loss to the entire access community because we don’t get the chance to talk with these people and learn from them.

Why do we need grassroots scholarships? I believe that grassroots scholarships are about communicating and networking - an opportunity for everyone in the organization to learn. With them we initiate a two-way exchange of ideas and information that we might never have without the scholarship opportunities, and to grow our organization from the grassroots up. When we don’t get the benefit of their experiences and perspectives, we can quickly lose sight of what makes access and the ACM important, not only to the big centers, large cities, and heavily populated areas with big budgets, but also to the small towns, rural areas, and parts of the country that have little or no access funding or resources.

The Northeast Region also award scholarships for the Spring Regional Conference, this year to be held in New Brunswick, NJ. If you would like more information about any of our scholarships, please contact me at nrichard@pactv.org. It’s all about feeding the roots.