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.

ACM conferences are a great time to connect with your peers. The recently held ACM-NE Spring 09 Conference in Burlington VT put a new spin on this connection. Not only were we talking in the vendors' area and meeting up in the hallways, we were checking our phones for tweets and looking at just completed sessions on blip.tv, while uploading our status on Facebook and sending photos to Flickr.