2019 ANNUAL REPORT

OAKLAND — With newsrooms shrinking nationwide, youth in our communities have begun to tell their own stories.

GlobalGirl Media, a nonprofit organization that teaches teenage girls digital storytelling skills, was cofounded by award-winning filmmakers Amie Williams and Meena Nanji in Los Angeles in 2010. Williams, the organization’s executive director, eventually moved to Oakland, where she started a chapter in 2014, partnering with Youth UpRising and forming an advisory board of media professionals including actor Danny Glover.

“In the process of giving girls a voice, you introduce an alternative narrative, and you change the existing narrative,” Glover said in a GlobalGirl Media interview at their launch party in Oakland in 2014.

The organization now operates out of United Roots’ Youth Impact HUB on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland’s Koreatown Northgate neighborhood. They are truly global, with chapters in South Africa, Morocco, Kosovo, Chicago and Los Angeles. Girls in the program use Skype to bond with each other and discuss topics and issues that they face in their communities.

“We share a lot of similar ideas, and we’re all feminists, and we all have something in common that we want to strive to do,” said GGM summer academy participant Kasie Gonzalez, 17, of Berkeley.

The girls use a documentary journalistic approach to tackle controversial subjects that are relevant to them, such as teen depression and self-harm, teen pregnancy, sex-trafficking, and Black Lives Matter and other protests in Oakland. They can also choose to write and blog.

“When the camera’s in my hands, I feel invincible,” said Cheyenne Grisez, 14, of Oakland. “It just makes me feel happy. It makes me feel like I can do anything.”

Grisez was one of eight young women who took part in this summer’s academy.

“Living in Oakland is really hard. It’s a great place, a beautiful city, but just the things that are going down with all of the violence …” Grisez says before trailing off.

On the final day of the summer academy, Williams worked with Grisez, Gonzalez and Camila Prado, 15, of Berkeley, on a short film about Prado’s battle with bulimia. In the film, Prado bravely interviewed her parents and sister about how she was able to overcome her depression and eating disorder. They also went out on the streets of Oakland and asked women to rate their bodies. This film and others the girls made were shown to parents and friends on the last day of the academy at the end of July, as their hard work was celebrated.

“It’s their story, and nobody knows how to tell it better than they do,” Williams said.

Williams is passionate about the program and about telling important stories that are not being told in the mainstream media. Her own documentary work for television, nonprofits, citizen groups and political campaigns has won numerous awards, and her films have appeared on the Discovery Channel, PBS, BBC and many more outlets. She is clearly excited to share her knowledge with the girls, not only in Oakland, but across the globe.

“These girls are from really difficult, tough backgrounds. They feel trapped sometimes, they feel alone, they feel there’s no one they can talk to,” Williams said. “The camera gives them a lens to reframe their world and a vehicle to get out of that feeling of being trapped.”

Girls in the program practice their skills and build confidence by going out in the community and interviewing people for the short films, which are generally less than 10 minutes. Many of them had no prior experience, but found they had succinct storytelling skills.

“You give these girls the opportunity to not only tell their stories, they’re going to tell the stories of the community, they’re going to tell the stories that matter to them and their peer group,” said GlobalGirl Media summer academy project director Heather Faison.

Faison began her career as a copy editor, reporter and designer, and also did similar work with the Youth Advocacy Network in Cameroon, Africa, teaching girls to tell their stories through digital media.

“I work with these girls, and every day I leave inspired, I leave just completely consumed in gratitude, because I know, due to the work we’re doing with them, things will be better,” Faison said.

For more information, go to: https://globalgirlmedia.org/ and their YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UCD4J0ngDDbyB7-KQ6ZdjL_Q.

The ICTforWomanity interview series focuses this week on video production. To cover this area, we are meeting with Amie Williams, an award winning producer/director specializing in documentary film and video for television. Amie  is the Executive Director & Co-Founder of GlobalGirl Media (GGM), an organization that develops the voice and media literacy of teenage girls and young women, ages 14-22, in under-served communities, by teaching them to create and share digital journalism designed to improve scholastic achievement, ignite community activism and spark social change.

Servane Mouazan – Womanity: Amie, what should the world specifically know about GlobalGirl Media?

Amie Williams – GlobalGirl Media: By arming girls with cameras in low income urban areas, the invisible girl is transformed into an agent of visibility, with the power to disrupt the silence surrounding gender-based violence, reproductive rights, poverty, racism, sexism and many critical issues facing adolescent girls today.

SM: What is it that you are doing differently, compared to other citizen media innovations? 

AW: GGM harnesses the power of new digital media to empower young women to bring their often-overlooked perspectives onto the global media stage.

GGM offers an immersive, interactive educational curriculum, which features both soft and hard media skills, with a focus on entrepreneurship: our training prepares young women to be competitive in an increasingly challenging job market. We also connect girls across borders and boundaries, via Skype and social media. Since we are global, we encourage girls to think about citizen media as a global movement.

We give girls cameras and challenge them to take on the untold story, the one that matters, because it matters to them.

SM: What type of technology do you use at Global Girls Media and how does it make a difference?

AW: We focus on video production and blogging. Research has shown girls’ relationships, self-esteem and school performance are negatively impacted by the more time they spend online. Both traditional and social media is dumbing girls down, consistently negatively impacting their body image, sexuality, self-esteem and ability to succeed. When statistic after statistic tells us how under-represented women are in media, and when the male perspective dominates most of this media, it unconsciously reinforces the invisibility and silencing of women.

Global Girl Media has the solution: hand the tools of authoring this media over to girls. We give girls cameras and challenge them to take on the untold story, the one that matters, because it matters to them. We believe that by empowering girls to tell their own stories and teaching them that their lives matter, a systemic change begins to take form in family, school and community. Media plays such a central and powerful role in girls’ lives that being authors of that media is critical in helping them navigate a world seemingly daunting because the white, male perspective dominates it. What we are really doing is advocating for a girl-driven “global citizenship” where young women connect using new media and share their experience, strength and hope with each other from places that are under-reported, marginalized, stereotyped or silenced.

SM: What questions do people never ask you, you wished they did?

AW: It is this question:

“How is the work you are doing impacting the actual heart and soul of individual girls?”

As opposed to outward metrics like academic performance, numbers of girls trained and scalability of program, what about the individual journey each girl begins once they start our program? It is very difficult to gauge soft outcomes like the rise in a girl’s self-esteem or links to decisions made or feelings developed as a result of learning to tell one’s own story or focus on positive storytelling in negative environments.

A report by AWID (Association of Women in International Development) in 2010 questioned current M&E practices in its report, “Capturing Change in Women’s Realities”,” and discusses this need for more creative and thorough approaches to assessing the success of girls and women’s rights programs, and the inherent challenge in measuring social change within the gender context.

A quote from this report really helped me:

“When you work for women’s interests, it’s two steps forward – if you’re really smart and very lucky! – And at least one-step back. In fact, it’s often two or three steps back! And those steps back are, ironically, often evidence of your effectiveness; because they represent the threat you have posed to the power structure and its attempt to push you back. Sometimes, even your ‘success stories’ are nothing more than ways the power structure is trying to accommodate and contain the threat of more fundamental change by making small concessions.”

SM: What was an unexpected suggestion or commend by one your program participants that opened up new perspectives?

AW: Basically the one message (which comes in all sorts of ways) from our girl reporters is “don’t give up on this program, no matter how hard it is to keep it funded and keep it going… we need this!”

I get messages on Facebook, I hear it when during a training, a girl who had submitted her master’s thesis, that day told me: “I could not have gotten this far without GlobalGirl Media, it really turned my life around…” It’s thanks to moments like this that I realize just how powerful and far-reaching our program is.

SM: Can you share a story of success that your venture triggered?

AW: I would like to share two stories.

The first one is of Sthokozo Mabaso, a young HIV-positive woman from South Africa who left rural Transvaal with no money or hope, ended up as a housemaid for a cruel Aunt in Soweto, found out about our program, really excelled, and we invited her to cover the World AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C., where she was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, ABC News, blogged for Huffington Post, and returned to South Africa to a full scholarship at a private film school and is now working in the professional film industry, most recently on the Hollywood film MATRIX.

The other huge success story is one of our reporters, Rocio Ortega, graduate of our very first program in Los Angeles, born and raised in East L.A., first in family to attend university, who took our program and as a result got introduced and interested in political training for leadership. She not only won a full scholarship to Wellesley, but she was also selected as the National Spokesperson for the UN Program Girl Up! – the only girl of color- and introduced First Lady Michelle Obama at the last GirlUP! Convention. She also won the MTV/HALO award for teen leaders, which came with a $10K contribution to GGM and to her education. She wants to run for political office and be the youngest Latina to run for Governor of California.

SM: What was a pivotal moment in/around your programme?

AW: I think the groundswell of awareness around the overall gender imbalance in media, movies or news and recently in particular the EEOC investigations here in the U.S. as to gender discrimination in Hollywood. We have been at this five years, and in those five years I have seen a palpable shift in the awareness, but not so much the financial support behind the work to see tangible progress.

Lately I have really been inspired by our Moroccan group of GlobalGirls who took on the leadership of the entire organization themselves. They are now registered in Morocco as an association and are fully running the organization, training more girls, getting paid work as journalists and videographers, and growing their vision of how media should represent girls and women in Morocco!

Connect to GlobalGirl Media on line:

Web: www.globalgirlmedia.org

Facebook: www.facebook.com/globalgirlmedia

Twitter: @globalgirlmedia

Instagram: global_girl_media