2025 Preserving and Archiving Community Media Fellowship
Do you have many materials documenting community stories, cultural work, or activism that need to be digitized and preserved? Have you been documenting your group or organization’s history for a long time but are not sure how to preserve it? Are you interested in learning more about the ins and outs of archiving and preserving and how to make your materials accessible to your communities in ways that are just and empowering? The People’s Media Record invites you to join us for Preserving and Archiving Community Media (PACME), a nine-month fellowship to build archiving and preservation skills in community, planning alongside a group of your peers for the long-term care and activation of local neighborhood, community, and movement histories. We know that people trying to preserve community media–materials created by communities to communicate about their experiences, cultures, histories, struggles, and desires–face many barriers. We offer this fellowship to you because we believe that you and the communities you work with deserve to be supported and empowered in this practice. From March to December of 2025, you will meet with a small group of fellows to engage in archiving and preservation learning and connect it to the specific needs of your collection and communities. We will be offering a monthly stipend of $1,000.00 over the nine months to be awarded to each fellow ($9,000.00 total).
Applications will open on October 7th, and are due on November 15th, 2024. Interviews with a selected group of applicants be held in December and selected fellows will be notified of acceptance by mid January, 2024. Applications will be selected by a committee made up of staff, advisory board, and community members.
Program Goals:
By the end of this program fellows will have:
1. Gained proficiency in preservation and archiving best practices and how they may be used to ensure the long-term viability and accessibility of their materials according to their communities’ needs. Topics that will be covered include digitization, digital preservation, metadata and cataloging, copyright, activation, and resource mobilization.
2. Gained skills and knowledge in advocating for the importance of community media preservation, especially for historically oppressed groups.
3. Learned how to navigate limited funding and resources collectively to ensure the sustainability of their projects at the grassroots level.
4. Developed relationships with other community media practitioners while fostering cooperation and knowledge exchange.
5. Organized an event with their communities that facilitates the activation of their materials and collective reflection around these stories, their long-term care, and how they can lead to building community power.
Program Expectations:
Fellows are expected to participate in online and in-person workshops, which require active participation and the capacity to build on their planning and ongoing work around their collections. These sessions will require the fellows’ active participation, building on their planning and work around their collections. For the fellowship to be successful, fellows will have to dedicate a minimum of ten hours per month to working with their materials, a process that they will document and share with us and the other fellows. Every month, there will be individual check-ins between the fellows and our staff to clarify any questions or issues that are coming up and provide additional support.
With our financial and logistical support, fellows are also expected to organize at least one community event in which they will put into practice some of the lessons learned throughout the fellowship. The goals of this event are to activate the collections in the context of the communities and spaces they belong to and facilitate connections around storytelling and the long-term care of community stories.
Who is a good fit for this fellowship, and how to apply:
- PMR welcomes applications from people who are responsible for taking care of a substantial collection of community media. By substantial, we mean a collection that is large in volume, has been created over a period of time, and holds importance for Philly’s communities. Community media is wide-ranging: it can include the production of community media centers like PhillyCAM and Scribe Video Center, community newspapers like Philadelphia Gay News, the recording of performance and open mic series, and even podcasts.
- PMR especially welcomes applications from people whose collections focus on at least one of the following formats: analog audio, analog video, digital audio, digital video, print, and digital photographs.
- PMR especially welcomes people with limited formal expertise and training in archiving and preservation, and those who experience individual, organizational, or structural marginalization from educational opportunities.
- PMR especially welcomes applications from people working within groups or organizations that either do not have funding for, or which have limited funding for, archiving and preserving their media content.
