2010 Review

Forward

TV4Change is funded by 'The Big Lottery' to provide communities with FREE local media training and services aimed at enhancing life skills, building stronger more engaged communities, improving access to local information and promoting the values of healthy living.

The project works collaboratively with others to try and help regenerate the innate potential of our region. We also have a shared community vision to assist local unemployed people back to work and to help people communicate their plans of creating more enjoyable places and spaces to live, work and thrive together.

Looking back over the last year, TV4Change stakeholders and strategic partners believe in the same net conclusion, that television and Internet can play a huge role in mobilising change action within our local communities. This is especially true when local citizen and volunteers are engaged in the production process, where they are able to learn new life enhancing skills, co-producing powerful and emotive localised content that captures the imagination of the wider community.

I believe that TV4Change has the unique ability to reach into communities and make a difference where it matters most. I also believe that through our work we are able to harness that reach for even greater impact, utilising visual media to celebrate and recognise the tremendous work of our local people, community groups and third-sector organisations.

TV4Change has worked tirelessly during 2010 to motivate change action within our communities and empower neighbourhood voices to celebrate the varied and inspiring ways that communities have transformed their lives and the lives of others.

Our 2010 Achievements
2010 has been a most enlightening period with regard to the sheer number of community groups we have managed to engage. More and more people in Immingham, East Marsh and beyond are increasingly becoming aware of the projects strengths and ethos. In addition, local citizens are more readily adopting an improved comprehension of what they can achieve with digital media. Using localized media communications is now seen as a valuable, yet accessible communications tool that can actually help to shift the negative effect of communities feeling disadvantaged, cut-off or isolated. The aforementioned statement is easily backed-up by the sheer number of collaborative community productions undertaken by TV4Change over in the last twelve months.

In total TV4Change is responsible for:

> 130 short news bulletins
>        8 special interest community workshops
>        4 thirty minute feature length programmes
> 1000 minutes of community content
>      19 workshop attendees assisted back to work

**It's worth noting that part of the TV4Change three year brief is to assist 10 people back to full employment. So we are more than happy to report that Year 1 workshop activities have assisted no fewer than 18 people back to fulltime employment and 1 person part-time. In addition, an extra 10 people are now actively volunteering with organisations such as the NHS, YMCA etc (Full audit available).

The Social return on investment for assisting people back to work (Based on EIA economic modelling) creates a public purse saving of £9,000/annum for each person. Ninteen people moving off Incapacity benefit and into a job creates a gross saving of approx £171,000 per annum.

Other project outcomes highlight the successful engagement or procurement of:

>    54 collaborations with local community groups
            or localized projects and initiatives
>      8 community Media Workshops
> 135 attracted workshop attendees
>    46 network partners and information gatherers
>    18 health and wellbeing productions

To Summarise
TV4Change is a unique project that utilizes a most creative and innovative model approach towards engaging peoples interests in developing their allround basic communications skills. We want to ensure that nobody is excluded from learning basic digital communications skills, because armed with the right skills and a set of fresh ideas, anyone, anywhere can make an indelible mark upon the world.

We believe that the TV4Change project is an ideal empowerment tool that helps citizens deliver positive change within our neighbourhoods and our developing ‘Big Society’.

Sean O'Toole
TV4Change Project Manager

TV4Change and the Big Society Network
We offer completely FREE to all local citizens, the opportunity and the ability to utilise our professional media services and we're here to help local society to enhance and improve how we all communicate and engage with each other. We want local communities find their voice and we want to make it heard.

There are hundreds of community groups and third sector organisations in North East Lincolnshire and TV4Change is uniquely positioned to help develop and broaden local communication skills.   So it was no surprise that in 2010, TV4Change managed to record over 1000 minutes of local community content. We have also recieved many complementary statements pointing to the way the project has managed to improve local connectivity and links between individuals, society groups and social enterprises. The power of our audio visual content helps people to plan, share ideas and identify useful resources. Most importantly the project complements the local government agenda of improved community health, wealth and wellbeing. We believe that TV4Change can play a massive role in helping the region to realise its Big Society Network aspirations. Over the past 12 months, we have provided communities with the necassary media tools to empower all kinds of citizens and social entrepreneurs to have the confidence to find their voice and invite others to share in their passion, dreams and ideals.

Our vision
TV4Change believes that everyone should have a voice and the opportunity to make their voice heard and this project also attempts
to leverage the necassary knowledge and skills to make this happen. We are solidly focused on developing and enhancing the local communications infrastructure and TV4Change broadcasts their programmes via the Internet and Virgin Cable TV Network (Channel 879) with a potential audience of over 70,000 local cable subscribers. This means communities can well and truly find their voice and be assured we can make that voice heard throughout the North East Lincolnshire Community.

Our Mission
Our mission is to improve life skills, build stronger more engaged communities, improve access to information and promote healthy living. These four principles mesh in the creation of building a strong and vital local public sphere, where citizens are able to access, produce, distribute, and exchange information about issues that matter to them and their communities.

We also believe that if so inspired, everyone has a right to education and self-development, leading to a healthy and good rewarding life.    From the past to the future, not much has changed in a sense of society values, for it was Socrates that once said:    “Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.”
Socrates 469-399, B.C, Ancient Greek ethicist-philosopher.

Describing TV4Change
What is TV4Change? We like to think it’s a project not too dissimilar in makeup to one the American academic Robert Putnam described in the 1990s Harvard debate about the future of community. Putnam popularized the notion that ‘social networks' bind communities together. Putnam also emphasized that the bonding of such networks needs a sociological bridge or activity that cuts across differences of faith, race and class.

We believe that TV4Change workshops help to re-engage peoples interests in personal development. We have also found that the project is a particularly good gateway tool for redirecting the thoughts of unemployed people back towards training or further and higher education. Robert Putnam, American Academic, Harvard University Paper ‘Better Together’ December 2000.

Media Communications - it's Hands-on, interactive, immediate and transferable
Communicating with audio/visual media is a truly hands-on, interactive, immediate and transferable experience. Most of the community people we engage with, acknowledge that communicating information via video recording and playback is a most potent and flexible tool for posting urgent and timely messages. Digital media communication offers a quick, powerful and cost effective means to communicate, more importantly it allows people to engage in a way that suits them and on their own terms.   Lastly, the TV4Change project empowers communication and expression without written word, therefore negating issues around literacy that are more of an issue in some disadvantaged communities.

A Bridging Project that Helps Communities Explore the Benefits of Continued Personal Development

Government research highlights that learning and training does not come high on the agenda of some people and most become quickly disengaged with the very words personal-development. TV4Change approaches personal development from a different angle and uses media as a psychological hook to switch on peoples atttention towards further education and life long learning. Our Media Workshops provide communities with a sociological bridge that helps cut across the stigma of adult learning. Most of all we help individuals to understand the importance of continued personal development, we explore the benefits of social and project interaction and we begin to understand how we can improve our life and the lives of others by volunteering in local place shaping activities.