VVC - Summary of Method

"Video is a highly flexible and immediate medium. What other recording medium captures art, poetry, drama, music, personal testimony, or story telling with that direct human dimension – face-to-face contact?"

—Chris Lunch, Insight

Summary of Method

VideoVoice is a health advocacy and research method that works to turn documentary film on its head. Through this method, we put digital video cameras in the hands of those who know their communities best and assist them in communicating their ideas and visions. VideoVoice is inherently participatory, and projects are undertaken by collaborative partnerships that are built of community members, academic researchers, and filmmakers. Forming a partnership among these disparate groups is a community-building process that results in collective envisioning, filming, editing, and dissemination of films. The fundamental goals of VideoVoice are to achieve community capacity-building, empowerment, and social justice advocacy. By providing people in the community with digital cameras, VideoVoice facilitates:

Research and documentation on a community's strengths and challenges,
Discussion of issues of importance in groups to promote critical consciousness and empowerment,
Communication across communities and with policy-makers and decision-makers, institutional leaders, and program planners, and
Mobilization and action on social justice issues.





"Video is a highly flexible and immediate medium. What other recording medium captures art, poetry, drama, music, personal testimony, or story telling with that direct human dimension – face-to-face contact?" —Chris Lunch, Insight		Summary of Method VideoVoice is a health advocacy and research method that works to turn documentary film on its head. Through this method, we put digital video cameras in the hands of those who know their communities best and assist them in communicating their ideas and visions. VideoVoice is inherently participatory, and projects are undertaken by collaborative partnerships that are built of community members, academic researchers, and filmmakers. Forming a partnership among these disparate groups is a community-building process that results in collective envisioning, filming, editing, and dissemination of films. The fundamental goals of VideoVoice are to achieve community capacity-building, empowerment, and social justice advocacy. By providing people in the community with digital cameras, VideoVoice facilitates: Research and documentation on a community's strengths and challenges, Discussion of issues of importance in groups to promote critical consciousness and empowerment, Communication across communities and with policy-makers and decision-makers, institutional leaders, and program planners, and Mobilization and action on social justice issues.