Rising Voices

( Story from www.ngopost.org)

Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, is now accepting project proposals for microgrant funding of up to $5,000 for new media outreach projects. Ideal applicants will present innovative and detailed proposals to teach citizen media techniques to communities that are poorly positioned to discover and take advantage of tools like blogging, video-blogging, and podcasting on their own.

As the internet becomes more accessible to more people, including mobile phone users, the so-called digital divide seems to be narrowing. In its place, however, we see a participation gap in which the vast majority of blogs, podcasts, and online video are being produced in middle-class neighborhoods in major cities around the world.

Rising Voices aims to help bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the conversational web, by providing resources and funding to local groups reaching out to underrepresented communities in the developing world. Please visit our current list of grantees for project examples.

The sky is the limit, but unfortunately funding is not. Rising Voices outreach grants will range from $2,000 to $5,000. Please be as thoughtful, specific, and realistic as possible when drafting your budgets.

Successful projects will be prominently featured on Global Voices. Grantees are expected to host regular workshops to train participants how to start and maintain a weblog, upload and share digital photographs, and produce basic videos. Grantees are also required to post regular project evaluations and updates to the Rising Voices website.

Completed applications will be accepted no later than Sunday, January 18. Please submit your completed application on the Rising Voices apply page.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments section below or by sending an email to outreach@globalvoicesonline.org.

Let the world change you and you can change the world

Spend your time this summer doing something meaningful in India.

InSPIRE College (India Summer Program Inspiring Reflective Exploration) is a 5-week long summer program in India for South Asians between the ages of 18 and 24, who are genuinely interested in exploring themselves and India.

Program Dates:    June 26 to August 2, 2009

It is a travel, study-abroad, volunteer, self-discovery, and immersion program all rolled into one!

See video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIZj9BNrn90&feature=channel_page

Applications are due March 9 and are available on the website for download!

The InSPIRE team consists of young Indian-Americans and young Indians who live in India . We have all spent significant time traveling in, serving in, exploring, and learning from India.

For more information, please email at info@summerinindia.org.

Or check : www.SummerInIndia.org

Digital Study Hall

Digital StudyHall (DSH) seeks to improve education for the poor children in slum and rural schools in India. In a nutshell, think of its technical approach as the educational equivalent of Netflix + YouTube + Kazaa.

We digitally record live classes by the best grassroots teachers, transmit them on the “Postmanet” (effected by DVDs sent in the postal system), collect them in a large distributed database, and distribute them on DVDs to poor rural and slum schools. Education experts and teachers use the system to explore pedagogical approaches involving local teachers actively “mediating” the video lessons. By harvesting a “viral phenomenon” of community participation, DSH aims to help train teachers and deliver quality instruction to underprivileged children

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Wildscreen Festival in India

Wildscreen is the world’s largest and most prestigious wildlife and
environmental film festival. The festival is coming to India in
February 2009. The programme will comprise of master classes on
various aspects of filmmaking and film screenings. Nine filmmakers
from the UK will be coming for the festival.

Festival Dates
9 – 10 February – Delhi and Bangalore
12 – 13 February – Guwahati and Mumbai

Participation is by prior registration, for programme schedule and
online registration please visit www.britishcouncil.org.in/wildscreen

MAM Project Report 2007-08

Dear Friends, family and well wishers

With great enthusiasm we would like to share MAM project report of its activities till date. It’s a summary of the work we have accomplished together. Hope we continue in our efforts to create many more projects with great love.

Please download it from MAM Movies homepage

In the spirit of service

Together with MAM Team, Madhusudan :)

Mass Journalism

NGO Post is the people’s platform for sharing and discussing various social welfare initiatives. You contribute to NGO Post by sharing new insightful stories, highlighting the best ones from all submissions, and sharing your ideas in follow-up discussions. And, NGO Post helps you in keeping up to date with the latest developments, finding quality information about topics of your interest and establish collaborations with other knowledgeable people around the globe. click here for more info and participation: http://ngopost.org/

Do gooder TV

DoGooderTV enables nonprofit organizations to present new videos and existing media assets to new audiences. Once site visitors see the compelling stories of nonprofits, DoGooderTV gives them a direct way to donate to the organization, join, volunteer or simply find out more information.

In addition to direct donations, site visitors can also create community around issues that are important to them, develop a giving circle, and easily connect their friends with the organizations they care about.

small actions x lots of people = big change

Mother Teresa said some thing very beautiful: I believe in small acts with great love. Like our favorite organization Charity focus , which abides and lives with this saying in their daily lives, here’s another very interesting organization with the name “we are what we do”. It is a new kind of social networking website with list of simple, everyday actions you can do to help change the world (and have fun while you’re doing it). It could be doing something for the community like shopping locally, something for the environment like avoiding plastic bags, or something for you, like learning to paint, sing or speak Spanish…

Click here to start your little actions…

Virtual Theaters For Documentaries

Thousands of feature-length documentary films are produced every year, but almost nobody gets a chance to see them. A few dozen are shown to small audiences at major film festivals, and a handful make it into theaters. For every blockbuster like “An Inconvenient Truth,” there are hundreds of documentaries that never find an audience.

Starting Thursday, however, there will be a new online service that aims to change all that. The service, called SnagFilms, allows anyone with a blog, a Web site, or even a page on a social-networking site, to open a virtual movie theater and show these documentaries, free. The virtual theater is a small widget that contains the film, and that can be embedded easily and quickly in a wide variety of popular social-networking services and blog platforms. No technical knowledge is needed.

Click here for complete article

Voices of innovation

 

We are happy to share with you, a link to an article and video in Businessweek, New York, featuring Dr. Nachiket Mor. This article is part of the ‘Voices of Innovation’ series.The series celebrates 10 individuals from across the world and from very different worlds, including finance but also from medicine, digital networking and design, architecture, and technology. Voices of Innovation nominees challenge the status quo and represent the true optimistic spirit of innovation.

: When Nachiket Mor was an undergrad studying physics in Mumbai, he spent his vacations working with nonprofits. The obligation to help others, he recalls, grew from his years at Brockwood Park, a boarding school founded by philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti outside London to teach, among other things, the value of community. Today, after a career in finance, the 44-year-old banker has made philanthropy his full-time occupation. In the process, he may alter financial services in rural India.

Last fall, Mor stepped down as deputy managing director of India’s largest private-sector bank, ICICI Group (IBN), to become president of the new nonprofit organization he had helped it begin, ICICI Foundation for Inclusive Growth. The foundation’s mission: to underwrite other nonprofit groups so they can provide microloans, insurance, and other banking and business services to the estimated 600 million Indians in the so-called bottom of the pyramid, enabling more to join India’s economic boom.

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