Our Principles
One of the reasons we created the People’s Media Camp is the relative absence of grassroots spaces where people can come together to collaborate and cooperate with each other in preserving memory work on their own terms. We hope that Camp represents a place not only of learning but of empowerment for folks who are doing this kind of work.
Our organization is committed to being an archival and educational hub that practices cooperation, raises critical awareness, and builds collective agency through local workshops, fellowships, and programs centered on the creation, documentation, preservation, archiving, and analysis of community media.
Mission
People’s Media Record’s mission is to build power and capacity for Philadelphians to save and share their stories on their own terms.
Our organization is committed to being an archival and educational hub that practices cooperation, raises critical awareness, and builds collective agency through local workshops, fellowships, and programs centered on the creation, documentation, preservation, archiving, and analysis of community media.
Vision
We envision a sustainable support system for the long-term stewardship of community media in Philadelphia that honors radical lineages of community media organizing, reckons with the past, and uplifts the lived experiences of historically oppressed Philadelphians in service of building strong communities and a livable future together.
Values
Cooperation
- Our work is inspired by traditions of cooperative thought and practice rooted in shared responsibility, reciprocity, and solidarity within community organizing.
- We aim to facilitate the redistribution of resources, time, and capacity away from normative institutions like state and university archives and between people stewarding community media collections individually and collectively in the greater Philadelphia area.
Critical Consciousness
- Our work seeks to cultivate critical consciousness through processes of collective learning and critique at the intersection of archival and political education.
- These processes of critical consciousness take place across our workplace and the offerings we create for and with others. In fostering attention to critical themes like context, positionality, ownership, and value in our practice, we aim to recognize and address patterns of extraction, capture, and dominance in the context of community media stewardship in Philly.
Collective Power
- Historically oppressed communities should have access to self-determination of how their stories are created, told, collected, archived, and preserved, and they should be the primary beneficiaries of this work.
- We believe that historically oppressed communities should have access to self-determination when it comes to how their stories are created, told, collected, archived, and preserved. We are committed to developing skills, resources and relationships to support everyone’s ability to preserve their stories as they choose, and that do not reproduce power asymmetries, such as the accumulation of value or the control of access to archived materials.
Theory of Change
None of us is free until we are all free. We believe that cultivating as many ways to recognize and reckon with the past and how it shapes who we are and the places we inhabit is vital to the work of freeing all oppressed people from systems of incarceration, policing, exploitation, dispossession, and displacement that deny a livable future on a global scale. We believe that the memory work is pivotal to building the kinds of people power that can hold us through the processes of transformative change that we need in order to get free.