Join PMR’s Grassroots Giving campaign!

At People’s Media Record, we understand that “resource” means so much more than money. This is a call to action to pledge your skills, knowledge, and labor, to support the preservation efforts of PMR’s 2025 Preserving and Archiving Community Media (PACME) fellows, even after the fellowship officially ends in December. From assistance with digitizing Hi8 tapes, to assistance with exhibit installation, to consulting for website development, our fellows have specific needs that we know we can meet as a community of people dedicated to this work.

But that’s not all! If you do have money that you can afford to redistribute, we ask that you consider donating them to support 2025’s Preserving and Archiving Community Media (PACME) fellows in being able to continue their important preservation and archiving work. This year we have 7 PACME fellows, and our goal is to raise $7,000.00 in a collective pot that will be divided among them. Please donate, spread the word, and thank you in advance!

Thank you, thank you, thank you! Continue reading for a message from Director of Resource Mobilization, Winter Schneider, on why this campaign is meaningful to them.

This is a family memory. This is a grassroots history. This is a call to action.

I spent this summer clearing out mildewed boxes of my mother’s possessions with my sister. Within these boxes, which had been stored in our stepfather’s garage and attic in New Jersey after our mother’s death in 2019, was a family collection of journals, letters photographs, tax returns, artwork, CDs, cassette, and VHS tapes: over a century of media that we had no idea existed and tells the stories of the people we come from, their lives, and their experiences. Among a litter of wooden pipes, cigar cutters, and love notes, we found a cassette tape from an old Record-a-Call 675 answering machine, labeled “Alan on message” in my mother’s handwriting. Alan, our father, had died of cancer in 1992 when I was four years old.

The existence of this tape and the opportunity to hear my father’s voice, of which I had no memory, lit a fire in me. I rushed back to Philly, thanking my stars that, through the People’s Media Record, I am connected to a brilliant network of grassroots and community media preservationists. A month-long saga ensued that ended on a Saturday in late August when Morgan Morel, returning digitization instructor for PMR, opened up the cassette, cut the tape out, spliced and gently spooled it back onto a standard cassette. I got the tape home, gently rewound it with a number 2 pencil, inserted it into a cheap deck I had bought for the occasion, and pressed play.

Morgan Morel in the middle of splicing the tape from one cassette onto another. Photograph by Winter Schneider. 

Within seconds I heard my father’s voice, deeper than I expected, dry, wry, and distinctly Brooklynite, say “Hello,” followed by a brief message and the loud beep of the answering machine. The 20 seconds of his voice went right through the core of my body the first time I heard it. A recognition, subtle but insistent. I ejected the tape, rewound it again, and played it again, and again, washed with feelings ranging from gratitude and anger to grief. He was here and yet gone, apart from me, and yet somehow after thirty-three years, connected.

I wasn’t the only person who was reconnected to their history on that day in August. Morgan was visiting in order to give a digitization workshop that PMR co-hosted with Scribe Video Center for members of our Preserving and Archiving Community Media (PACME) fellowship and for participants in Scribe’s Precious Places project. PACME 2025 fellows Anula Shetty and Brujo de la Mancha were able to digitize and transfer decades-old interviews with immigrants to Philly and Aztec dance ceremonies from Hi-8 and VHS tapes, respectively. Arielle Julia Brown, another PACME 2025 fellow, was able to fix cassettes that document her work with Black Spatial Relics so that they can now be digitized and preserved. Like my father’s message, their media is now preserved and ready to be stewarded for future generations.

Grassroots media like this represents the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, where we come from, who we belong to, and what is important to us. This work is not neutral as people’s ability to connect back into who we are and to each other—the connective tissue that can affirm and sustain a flourishing life—is precisely the target of violence and erasure within systems of settler colonialism and white supremacy. The people of the global majority have been the targets of this violence most directly, and today we can see this on a continuum from the displacement of communities from Philly’s neighborhoods, to the attacks on and removal of African Diasporic history from museums and public education, to the Israeli state’s wholesale destruction of the memories and lives of Palestinians in Gaza.

Participants in a “Photo Weaving” workshop offered by Kara Mshinda at the 2025 People’s Media Camp, organized by People’s Media Record. Photograph by Luiza Barreto. 

I believe that our collective liberation depends on the work of remembering who we are, to ourselves and to one another. It depends on people connecting with each other and fighting to save what we need in order to live with dignity and humanity. All the people and groups that PMR works with are fighting to preserve the stories, experiences, and realities that connect us over time.

I ask that you support this work of building power and capacity for Philadelphians to preserve and share their histories on their own terms. It will allow us to reach back together with a little more connection and support, and thrive a little more in our commitment to caring for each other through the work of memory.

Thank you for your support of this campaign! If you have any questions, please reach out to resource@peoplesmediarecord.com

With love, 

Winter

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