Matt: What about funding – wasn’t funding the biggest challenge?

Miriam: That would have been part of my job – actually finding the fucking money! That was really hard, so it didn’t ever really pan out the way I wanted it to.

Matt: Can you describe some of the challenges you met? I was around when you were researching grants and that was really -

Miriam:

It’s hard because there’s no specific – In French, I’d say the word ‘volet’ – but I don’t know what you’d say in English. There’s no specific funding channel for things like community learning projects, or community media projects, which I would say would fall under community learning. There’s also the dossiers for youth that deal with things like youth employment, or they deal with education, but they don’t really deal with the civic life of a young person. When you’re looking for money – and especially also the fact that the library I was working from is a private library, and was not funded by the government – there were so many different cracks we fell into, but there is never ever a place that we landed and thought, “this is a place where we could get some money”.

We could write grants that would have addressed the idea of media training and youth empowerment; we could grants that could address the idea of pre-employability; we could write grants that would address the idea of literacy, but in each of those categories there would be something about our identity as an organization that meant we couldn’t get the money.

That was really annoying. Also, there was this thing where a lot of the money was being released to youth organizations that had a mandate to social services, and the Atwater Library was not a recognized youth organization with the mandate of social services, so right now we didn’t get any money.

Matt: Quebec's weird though.

Miriam:

Well, the whole thing is weird, because really, who is going to be in charge of community media? If that’s something that should be a priority, and I think many communities think that it is, and if it does help the community – and I think that it does – under what heading does that fall? Is it social justice; is it violence prevention? Is it personal development? Is it pre-employability? These are all things that have been used.

I mean, I think on it’s own sake it’s important, so it would be great if there was just community development money period, and you didn’t have to tie it into some social outcome. You could say, “this doesn’t have to have a social outcome – it’s good on it’s own”. You don’t have to prove that we made a movie of gun violence and guess what – there’s less gun violence. We could say that we made a movie about gun violence, and there’s still gun violence, but the people who made the movie feel way more comfortable about themselves within the context of living in a community where there’s gun violence. They’re not so scared and upset anymore, and they’ve articulated some of their emotions.

Does it have to get further than that? Is it not a good enough event? Come on Matt, I’m asking you!

Matt: I don’t know. I know that they’re trying to implement media literacy in some of the high schools.

Miriam: Yes, but do you think that’s a good idea?

Matt: No, I think it’s a terrible idea.

Miriam: Why not in high schools?

Matt: Because I guess I’m biased. I don’t think high schools is the right venue to be learning this.

Miriam: You’ve got to learn it on the street, with your peeps?

Matt: No! I don’t think that high school teachers have the right training to be able to teach kids media literacy.

Miriam: Well what if they had the training?

Matt: Then great. If they would hire people like you – maybe not to be the teacher, but implement the program. If it’s implemented by a bunch of education bureaucrats, you know -

Miriam: My feeling is always that -

Matt: No, I don’t think it’s a good idea. I think that they’re going to bastardize whatever they come up with.