Northwest Institute for Social Change: The Blog

Portland: Love

Hey people!

So I have been thinking about the nine of us as a group… Plus Phil and Ashly. Considering our small numbers, things could have gone wrong. We  all could have hated one another, or liked each other a little too much, if you know what I mean , or we could have been a group of losers, or a group of meanies.. But you know what? We work. And I don’t dislike anyone… In fact I really like everyone! (I would say I love everyone, but I don’t want to freak people out). My point is, I think we really lucked out – we are all reasonable, hard-working, fun, cool people; and, for the most part, we get along. You are probably all rolling your eyes right now thinking, “Speak for yourself Caroline… you are in no way reasonable or cool, or whatever..” Okay, okay, I know I’m not reasonable… But I like to think I’m somewhat cool? Maybe not.

Nonetheless, I am inspired by each and every one of my fellow NWISC-ers in one way or another. This summer I have had more than a few moments of sadness or anger, yet when in the presence of my peers, I am constantly feeling inspired, intellectually  stimulated, supported, hopeful and excited. Moreover, I am having fun! It’s pretty cool to be constantly surrounded by such sweet people – thanks guys.

On another note, my life is being overtaken by chickens. As are Rachel’s and Colin’s – last night, Rachel had three dreams about chickens. Hm. Today, we payed a visit to the Urban Farm Store and saw hundreds of baby chicks. They looked like the ones below:

They were adorable. I hope I have dreams about them tonight in which I play with their furry little selves for hours on end. I wanted to do so today, but had to refrain in order to appear “professional.” Maybe I am on the wrong life-track? Should I be breeding chicks instead of making documentaries? I’ll keep you updated.

- Caroline

Portland: getting around

Who knew that after just three-ish weeks of the NWISC Summer Program that I would know the public transportation of Portland, Oregon so well.  It seems that everyday one of us is at least riding the bus to get somewhere. I ride the bus and MAX everyday and I am really learning how much I appreciate it.  I’ve also learned enough about Street Cars from Sara and Caroline’s radio documentary to write a paper about them.  Being able to zip around Portland whenever we need to go somewhere whether it be to KBOO or Voodoo Too is so simple.  Well pretty much.  Sometimes the bus won’t show up for awhile or it will shut off after midnight but we make it work.

Everyone transports themselves to each class or work session differently, effectively, and environmental conservation-ly.  It’s amazing to see everyone one get from SW to NE or SE to NW or Vancouver to Portland so efficiently.  Whether we use public transportation, ride bikes, or walk we all manage to get to class on time while still saving the planet (I think…).

Thank you Portland for your means of transportation and making everything semi-accessible to reach.  All of us NWISCer’s really appreciate it.

-Madeline

Portland: feel like a million bucks

As Rachel mentioned in her last blog post, we all just finished the radio documentary portion of the NWISC summer documentary program. My post here is a “making of”, behind the scenes, of an audio piece made by Madeline and me.

My project partner Madeline and I joked around saying that last week was one long Monday. The days blended into each other, and the week flew by. Monday we began making our radio documentary.

We journeyed to a remote part of Portland, Oregon for an immersive journalism experience at a summer camp. Not just any camp, but a Rock ‘N’ Roll for Girls camp where young girls form bands, write songs, and perform for an audience—all in 1 week. With audio recorders in hand listening through white ear-bud headphones, we meandered through narrow hallways and squeezed into rooms crammed with drum sets and electric guitars, recording every twist and turn of girls rock camp. Off-key guitar strumming, cowbells, girls chatter, and interviews with people at camp, we recorded it all. Posters of Joan Jett and murals of female singers covered the walls. And every feeling of the camp filtered through us. Six hours later, we left with our own batteries drained, and those of our recording devices too.

Meticulous sound editing at 1:30am, holding a microphone up to Madeline’s face under a blanket in a hot dorm room to get the best quality sound, and listening to interview quotes again (and again) are snapshots of our post-production process. But even in the moments when we were tired, or when everything seemed so jumbled and far from being done, there was this deep underlying sense of- being happy. Each part of the audio documentary process was thrilling, and I learned an incredible amount from each parcel of the process, from scheduling interviews to mixing audio clips.

And by Friday, we had a final product that we were proud of. If I had to choose one word for the week, it would be fulfilling. Hard work, teamwork, setting a goal, and reaching it made me feel like a million bucks.

-Amy

Portland: Radio Milestone

Our radio documentaries are finally done!  We haven’t even had a full two weeks of classes in Portland yet and already we’ve completed our first big project.  As Emily mentioned yesterday, we did our radio documentary on the Community Energy Project which is a program in Portland that provides free workshops and kits to low income families so that they can weatherize their homes to save money on their utility bills and also conserve energy.

The hardest part of the documentary was cutting out important parts of the program to stay within our time constraints.  After all the interviews and chats with the directors and volunteers in the program, I wanted to include everything.  Everything the program does is so important and makes such a difference to people in the community- I just wanted to include all of it.  The directors of the program shared many personal stories and experiences about working at the Community Energy Project and when we first began editing I wasn’t willing to cut out any of these stories.  Emily and I had so much trouble “killing our babies” -basically cutting parts of the documentary to which we had become attached.  Many of our conversations went like this,

“Well I just killed my favorite baby, so it’s your turn to kill one.”

“But this isn’t a baby.  It’s integral to our story.”

“It’s a baby- kill it!”

We did manage to trim the documentary down enough but it wasn’t easy.  I also really valued working with a partner on the project.  I’ve learned that group members often see important aspects of the project that I might overlook.  I’ve also learned to work through the frustration of my partner not seeing my “brilliant” idea for the piece that in a few hours doesn’t really seem so amazing.

My highlight of the week was taking a bus out to the Home Depot in Beaverton, OR to record sound for our radio piece.  We wanted hammering and construction noise so we walked around Home Depot for half an hour with a hammer banging on surfaces.  The whole project was really fun and I really did learn a lot about the process.  Now when I listen to radio pieces on NPR I will really appreciate all the time they spend on them.

-Rachel

Portland: That’s not out of my league at all

On the eve of our audio documentary final deadline (1pm tomorrow, but in all practicality, 10:20am, since we’re taking a tour of city hall that will consume the rest of the morning), and with our documentary choppy-sounding and still a minute and a half too long (which is, believe it or not, a triumph in of itself – we had 20 minutes of interview clips when we started work this morning), I was feeling rather resentful for the early part of today.

“What? We have to talk with the producer of Live Wire! [ local live radio variety show]…What?? we have to go to her house? Urgh, it’s so far away! And I have no cash for the bus …and then we have that city hall tour all day tomorrow??? What are they doing to us, don’t they know we need that time to work?” (I like to think that I sound less whiny and melodramatic in real life.)

I honestly sounded like the quote that my project partner Rachel and I have been trying to edit:

“Gosh I have so much going on, I work how many hours a week, I’m a single mom, I don’t have time for this!!”

It’s funny to look at my opinions of this morning now after having spoken with Kate Sokoloff, co-creator and co-producer of Live Wire! and Courtenay Hameister, associate producer/head writer/host at Kate’s house over in the Northeast. The visit with them turned out to be exactly the opposite of a waste of time. We left her house feeling so inspired by the discussion that we had had about public radio funding problems, how it’s possible to manipulate the system and make artistic pieces about subjects that we ordinarily might feel compromise our values (for example, working with commercials) and work around systematic rules, what are good ways to elicit interesting information from interviewees, etc. As I walked down her steps and gushed, “Wowwww that was sooo goooood!!!!” Rachel turned to me and said, “I never thought I wanted to do this kind of thing, but I really want to do a college radio show! This really motivated me to do something with it.” And I felt the same way. It was so great to get to know these people a little and talk with them about interesting and useful topics, but it also just made me feel like “Wow! I really want to work for them on their show! And now I know them, so maybe someday I will.”

Here’s surrounding context of the quote that Rachel and I have been editing. I look at it now in a completely different light.

“It just might be that they didn’t connect that dot or know that they already had the skills, they just thought maybe because (31:44) ‘Gosh I have so much going on, I work how many hours a week, I’m a single mom, I don’t have time for this…After going to the workshop, they get empowered with (31:58) “Oh, I can do that! That was simple, not out of my league at all. And so, it usually just turns them on and empowers them…”

And…that’s why we’re here.

-Emily

Portland: Too cool for school?

Our program assistant Ashly recently asked us students to write out our goals for and the skills we offered to NWISC.

This next sentence is going to make my colleagues want to slap me, or at least stop reading—but give me a chance. Here goes: Caught up in two weeks of classes, assignments and others’ technical difficulties, I started to wonder why I came.

I’m Sara. That’s right, Sara. Not Sarah, as my username might lead you to believe. Blame the wife of Abraham for popularizing the latter (less cool) spelling, or something. I’ve been in journalism for four years. I’ve had plenty of arguments over ethics—dealing with student deaths, bomb threats, headlines that say “fuck!” and columns advocating student-professor relationships. I’ve conducted more interviews than I’d like. I’m quite familiar with every aspect of print. I host a radio show. I work in a multimedia lab (shown below) where using two screens to edit with Audacity or Final Cut Pro is the norm. I’ve been using WordPress for a year. At school, I’m often late to class when I get too involved in troubleshooting computer problems for other students.

When I first heard of NWISC over a year and a half ago, I knew it was an ideal opportunity. But in these two weeks, I started to forget why. I began to think, maybe I didn’t have as much to learn as I thought I did?

Boy, was I wrong.

While working on my resume this weekend, I recalled that which I was forgetting—a crucial aspect of this program. First, I certainly don’t know everything there is to know about the tech world. I was kindly reminded of that by my cocky former manager from the aforementioned tech lab, when I sought out his resume an example for my own. (It was awesome.)

But second, and more importantly, just because I have journo skills and tech skills, it doesn’t mean I have anything to do with them. I see a lot of passion in my fellow students, which clearly translates into their words and behaviors. But for me, knowing the keyboard shortcuts in Audacity doesn’t compel me to do anything positive for the world around me. I’d like to, but I just don’t.

And that’s why I’m here this summer: To learn from my peers, who have taken action without necessarily having the “skills” to do so, to start looking for ways to put my own “skills” to good use, and to strike a resonant balance between the two.

— Sara

Portland: Mohpster City

While I’ve visited Portland on a few other occasions, my timings have consistently correlated with thirty foot walls of snow lining the road around Government Camp on the way to Hood. In the summer, the scene shifts, with people escaping the confines of their dwellings early in the morning and only returning to their bike-lane rich residential streets later on.

However, despite the transition from rainy to dry season (it’s like India, without humidity and cows in the streets or anywhere for that matter, since I’m pretty sure the vegans recently pushed a beef ban through the Council last March), it’s evident to me, an outsider, that seasonal affective disorder in the Northwest has been running a tight race with its brother, the Nordic version, in pursuit of the World Mopey Cup. While some may argue that the Sami of Norway are shed hundreds of fewer hours of sunlight than Portlanders, I would argue that the indigenous Norski can’t quite compete with the 1980’s road bikes and indie rock bands that Portland’s Mohpsters are so proud of–of course celebrated quietly in honorable Nordic fashion. Remember, they too are decendents of the great vikings of the North Sea. “What’s a Mohpster” you still may be wondering? . . . Smudge together ‘Mopey’ and ‘Hipster’ and you get ‘Mohpster’. If you don’t know what I’m talking about yet, you’ve either never been to Portland or you’ve got some cognitive challenges ahead of you.

Not relevant to Nwisc, eh? On the contraire. The Mohpster mentality which seeps through many aspects of Portland culture has in fact incubated a nearly perfect environment for myself and other Nwiscers to thrive in. We’re here to learn about print, radio, film, and their impact on society, and the city is oozing with resources. Everywhere. What else do you plan on doing when it’s 47 degrees and raining 7 months of the year? Naturally, writing, reading, and incubating whacky ideas, and of course with the help of our good ol’ friend seasonal affective disorder (the Northwest kind, not it’s brother). Try naming more than a handful of great writers, artists, or activists who led a peachy, trouble-free, brilliantly happy life? The rain helps. Trust me.

We Nwiscers didn’t venture to Portland for July and half of August to feel good about ourselves, make life-long friends, or get a tan. No. While we certainly came for different reasons, learning/honing technical skills and framing them through affective media choices and ascetics have dominated our experiences in the two weeks since we began our journeys at the Institute. And we’ve managed to do it all with an uncanny ability to avoid the Mohpster plague. I guess you just have to visit in the summer.

Love from North Portland,

Colin

In honor of the Mohpsters, I’ve exercised my editorial capacity and omitted any pictures or color. simply black. and white.

MC Northwest

Three women from Bhutan are growing vegetables in SE Portland through a partnership with Mercy Corps Northwest. Photo credit: Juan Carlos-Delgado

Out here in Portland, we are in full-swing with our radio documentaries. I am still orienting myself to the city, both to the outlay of the streets and to the general sensibilities afloat in this progressive hub. In ways, it reminds me of Vermont, my home-state, and yet, with the population of Portland the same as the entire state of Vermont, there is more power, resources, and momentum behind initiatives here, whether it be the light-rail trains or Project Clean Slate, which gives people a chance to clear minor crimes off their records through community service.

Speaking of power and resources for social change, yesterday Colin and I met up with John Haines, the executive director of Mercy Corps Northwest. Mercy Corps works all across the world, but at MC Northwest, the focus is on micro-financing and education efforts to support small business owners in the community. I wish I had the time to cover everything they do—like their New American Agricultural Project, which helps recent immigrants establish sustainable farm businesses, and their LIFE Project, where they support incarcerated individuals with the tools and education they need in order to make a successful transition back into society. These programs are particularly impressive as I think about their similarity to the programs I witnessed last summer in Bangladesh while working for BRAC (Building Resources Across Communities), the world-renowned NGO that takes a systematic, holistic approach poverty alleviation. The mission of BRAC and MC Northwest is strikingly parallel, and it’s so exciting to see trace the similarities of their action. At the same time, it’s also exciting to examine how the execution of their vision is shaped to their respective communities.

Most memorable quote of our time with John: “What applies in Gaza and Pakistan right now is not what might apply directly here, but the foundation is the same, and that is to build just, productive and secure communities.” Yeah, I feel that.
-Katherine

Portland: Ideals to action

Four hundred and ninety-two days ago I was sitting in my first class of spring semester of my sophomore year of college. The course was called “Ideals to action: Cultivating social change,” and, as you may have surmised, the curriculum emphasized strategies for acting upon your ideals in the context of facilitating social change.

Fast-forward a year and a half and I’m still entrenched in the process of learning how to put my ideals to action. During day-two of the NWISC Summer Documentary Program, I posed the question that constantly undermines my personal ambitions with doubt and skepticism: “What is the most effective method for photography to facilitate social change?” As an aspiring photographer, I was initially captivated by the role-model set by contemporary conflict photographers (see: McCullin, Zoriah, the Bang-Bang Club, or pretty much anyone from the VII Photo Agency), yet as I’ve begun to comprehend the importance of empowerment, sustainability, and community engagement, I’ve also begun to question the profession of war photojournalism as an efficient vehicle for social change.

My question remains unanswered as I begin my radio documentary project. On Friday, I interviewed Zan Gibbs, the adult programs coordinator for the Community Cycling Center. The story of their Create-a-Commuter program has served as a powerful reminder of the positive impact responsible, thoroughly-researched, and community-led endeavors can have on creating social change. The CCC has gone to great lengths to survey local community’s needs, identify the barriers to bicycle commuting faced by their members, and design a program that takes into account social work, education, and empowerment to create an enduring change.

As I continue questioning the case for photography and social change this summer, Zan’s served as a positive reminder of how people create their own approach to social change. Thirty-three days remain in the Summer Documentary Program, and I challenge myself and my fellows at NWISC to put our ideals to action.

-Ben

Portland: Interviewing – the don’ts

We have quickly been thrown into our radio documentaries – meaning we are busy scrambling for ideas, interviews, and “ambient noises.” Sara and I are working on a radio documentary about the benefits of the streetcar in Portland; currently they are expanding the streetcar route and there is a lot of hype about it around town.

Luckily, we have been able to land some interviews with some pretty key people: the President of United Streetcar (the only company that builds streetcars in the United States), Chris Smith (former chair of Portland Streetcar committee, currently on the board for Portland Streetcar, member of the streetcar system plan, and a well-known “citizen activist” around Portland), as well as many loyal streetcar passengers.

We are satisfied with our interviews thus far, but the process has been astoundingly difficult.

Yesterday we had our first interview, with Chris Smith. We took the streetcar to meet him, (we barely made it on time), made sure all the equipment was working, and began the interview. Chris had a lot of good information and we left with smiles on our faces. As we sat on the streetcar, heading back to PSU, we began to listen to it. This is what we heard: buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz for fifteen minutes and fifty-six seconds. The mic had malfunctioned. But all was not lost, we called him back, apologized profusely, and rescheduled the interview. We re-did it today, and came out with even better material.

Our second interview was this morning at 9:30, in Clackamas, with the president of the streetcar company (Oregon Iron Works). I picked Sara up at nine and we were right on schedule to get there on time. However, after a few wrong turns, we found ourselves among strip malls and Mcdonalds’ – panickly searching for our destination. The receptionist of Oregon Iron Works helped us find the place – but sadly, we ended up arriving thirty minutes late. OOPS. (In our defense – it was actually incredibly confusing!). Luckily, our interviewee was very nice and gave us useful information before running off to meet with Joe Biden!

We sped all the way back to PSU and barely made it in time for our skype conference with Julie Shapiro.

This afternoon, Sara and I hopped on the streetcar and rode it back and forth in fareless square, interviewing people. It went fairly smoothly. We ended when I realized that on this 100 degree day, I had drunk only one glass of water.  I started breaking out in cold sweats, getting dizzy, feeling faint – all the classic signs of dehydration. So we hopped off the streetcar and called it a day.

Despite the obstacles we have faced, I am greatly enjoying the interview portion of this radio documentary. Furthermore, I have learned to test equipment TONS of times, to bring lots of directions, to leave extra early and  to remember that even when there is a lot going on, drinking water is the most important thing!

-Caroline