This past June, our Education and Outreach Director Desiree Evans traveled to Detroit for the Allied Media Conference as part of a delegation of Gulf Coast activists and media makers. The Allied Media Conference takes place every June in Detroit, and brings community-based and social justice-oriented media makers, artists, and activists together to share tools and tactics for using media to transform our communities.
Through a generous outpouring of support, the delegation that Desiree helped to organize was able to raise all the money they needed for travel and lodging. They received grants from the Allied Media Conference and the Gulf Coast Fund for Community Renewal and Ecological Health, and raised almost $1,200 on the crowd-funding platform Indiegogo from community donations alone. The delegation joined other groups from New Orleans in Detroit, including BreakOUT!, Kids ReThink New Orleans Schools, and the Vietnamese American Young Leaders Association (VAYLA).
As Desiree wrote in her report-back reflections on the conference:
“The road to Detroit for us involved seven of us piling into a mini-van, sans air conditioner, and driving 19 hours across several states for what many of us had spent months fundraising for, organizing for, and looking forward to. The South Louisiana delegation was an eclectic group of Gulf Coast media-makers, artists, and organizers whose work is rooted in the rural and urban communities we live in. For us, the AMC was more than just a conference. It was a powerful space for creativity, transformation, and movement-building. We came home with concrete skills, insights, connections, and plans for collaborative media justice work in Louisiana, the Gulf Coast, and beyond.
More than anything, the AMC was an opportunity for us to share our experiences of life in a region of the country experiencing mass incarceration, environmental degradation, and disaster – both micro-disasters and macro-disasters. How do we respond to disaster as artists, activists, and media-makers? How do we create art and media that gives voice to the communities most impacted?
For me personally, the work I do in the South has always been about sharing stories of survival in the face of systemic exploitation. My home-state of Louisiana is haunted by these kind of stories – stories of struggle, of survival, of resilience. For me, storytelling is about healing my home, as well as about creating and sustaining spaces for voices that have so long been kept out. The Allied Media Conference for me is one such space: a place where stories can come to be centered in our movement work; a place for sharing the power of story itself and the power of cross-community resistance and movement-building. Every moment at the AMC was a moment where I saw story come alive – whether just walking around the campus and seeing the faces of people from around the country, whether attending panels on radical editing, emergent strategy, or oral history. I learned from the people here, and I offered my voice in discussion, in community, in song, and in power. The AMC is a conference that defines how I do the work that I do in the world.”
At the AMC, the South Louisiana delegation had the opportunity to put together their own session – and used the time to present a deep dialogue on post-disaster media making in Detroit and New Orleans. Desiree was on the panel, and you can listen to the entire conversation and read the transcript at Bridge the Gulf.
Back in New Orleans, Desiree plans to bring home the lessons she learned in Detroit to her work here at WWAV. As she said, “More than anything, I am using what I learned in Detroit this summer to think more about creating the spaces and vehicles to share the stories of our communities. How can we at WWAV continue to bring the stories of the marginalized women and families we work with to the center of the conversation about social change and the rebuilding of our city? What would it look like if the women in our communities had the tools to amplify the stories of their lives?”