0 itemsPrograms & Projects
At CMJ, we work regionally and deeply with key sectors of the movement for racial justice, economic and gender equity, and youth rights to create and implement the communications and media activism strategies they need to reach their organizing and movement building goals. We accomplish this through two long-term initiatives: the Justice Communications Initiative and the Media Justice Movement Building Initiative.
The Justice Communications Initiative
The Justice Communications Initiative is a long-term strategic program designed to increase the communications effectiveness of key sectors justice and change the story on race, the economy, and governance in the United States. Through this strategic communications initiative, CMJ works with alliances and organizations in these key sectors to build the internal strategy, capacity, and coordination necessary to implement winning PR campaigns and conduct effective joint communications work. We also work with journalists and other media and cultural producers to improve coverage of racial and economic justice policy issues, build relationships between journalists and organizers, and expand reliable community journalism.
KEY FRAMEWORKS
Participatory Communications
Participatory communications is a framework for conducting change communications and media advocacy that engages people at all levels of movement leadership. Strategic communications doesn’t have to and should not be the job of experts only. Everyone in a community organizing group or campaign has a role to play in communicating the core messages, values, demands, and vision of the advocacy effort, and should be given the tools, training, and opportunity to participate in the process.
Justice Framing
The right has spent decades developing frames that highlight personal responsibility, conceal structural inequity, and replace government- and community-based policy with privatization and corporate solutions to social problems. Justice framing is a methodology that exposes structural inequity, emphasizes social responsibility and corporate accountability, and highlights the role of government and policy. Justice framing uses news coverage, policy, entertainment media, and all forms of communications to move public conversations toward a collective vision of progressive structural change.
MAJOR PROJECTS
Racial Justice Framing Project
CMJ works with the grassroots alliances to transform public debate on structural racism and racial justice across issue area and geography. Through this strategy project, movement leaders work together and with academic partners to develop and tailor shared racial justice frames and core messages, conduct presswork and publishing that elevates these frames in the service of shared policy goals, and increase media coordination throughout the racial justice sector. Through this project, CMJ offers:
• Issue-based media monitoring and content analysis
• Alliance-based assessments and capacity building
• An on- and offline learning community on strategic communications
• Framing and messaging labs
• Messaging, framing, and storytelling technical assistance and training
• A national distribution network for stories and press releases
Change the Story PR Project
Through this 12-month project, six regional organizations working in major media markets on critical campaigns for racial, economic, and media justice apply and are selected to work with PR experts to develop and implement compelling, high-profile media campaigns that amplify their public voice in coverage of the justice issues they work on—and win campaign and policy victories. Through facilitated PR planning, events, pitching, story placement, and relationship brokering with journalists, CMJ will elevate the issues and campaigns of regional grassroots organizations to the national stage. In some cases, groups may be eligible to receive mini-grants for specific PR events and strategies.
Special Projects
CMJ is participating in the Communities Creating Healthy Environments (CCHE) Initiative, a strategic and capacity-building project led by the Washington, D.C.–based Praxis Project to expose structural racism and elevate community-based racial justice solutions in health and land use policy. As part of CCHE, from 2008 to 2011 CMJ will provide communications technical assistance and training to ten grassroots organizations working to eliminate racial disparities in health care and to end childhood obesity in communities of color.
The Media Justice Movement Building Initiative
Through this long-term strategic project, the Center for Media Justice provides grassroots social justice, media activist, and media production organizations with training, technical assistance, and infrastructure to increase the effectiveness, coordination, and impact of community organizing for communications power and cultural rights. From media access and digital inclusion to public media and low-power FM, CMJ conducts leadership development, alliance building, and national campaigns to win media policy change that improves media conditions for people of color, youth, women, poor folks, queer communities, and other disenfranchised groups.
KEY FRAMEWORKS
Media Justice
Media justice is a framework for envisioning and creating institutional media change. The vision of media justice is one of a media system that is primarily owned and contributed to by the public, is regulated by the government, is held to a high standard of fairness and accuracy by the courts, and serves the interests of justice and democratic engagement. A media justice approach centers community organizing, community-based media production, human rights protections, and policy change, and seeks to elevate the leadership of regional and grassroots organizations and constituencies.
MAJOR PROJECTS
The Media Action Grassroots Network
A project of CMJ, MAG-Net is a local-to-local network of social justice, media, and cultural organizations working together to shift power relations for social change, through the critical use and transformation of media and communications systems.
Initially founded in 2004 in the wake of a landmark 2002 gathering at Highlander Research and Education Center, this national network is anchored by the Media Mobilizing Project, Main Street Project, Texas Media Empowerment Project, Reclaim the Media, Manhattan Neighborhood Network, Esperanza Center for Peace and Justice, New Mexico Media Literacy Project, Media Alliance, and Minneapolis Media Empowerment Project.
MAG-Net’s goals are to:
• Build a wide base of social justice, media activist, cultural production, and journalism organizations with the will and capacity to advocate for media accountability and policy change
• Develop, connect, and elevate underrepresented and regional leadership and organizations in the media justice and reform sector
• Advance a media justice movement building agenda grounded in regional community organizing strategies to achieve national impact