Coastal watch
Coastal Watch January 2020
Coastal Watch December 2019
Coastal Watch November 2019
Coastal Watch October 2019
Coastal Watch September 2019
Coastal Watch August 2019
Coastal Watch July 2019
Community Journalism
DHAN (Development of Humane Action) Foundation with the support of Internews and Earth Journalism Network implementing the pilot project titled “Voice of Vulnerable”. The project duration is for one year with the objective of “Enabling the most vulnerable community and organization in the Coastal districts of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha of India to bring out stories on their life and living; analyze the gaps in policy and livelihood practices along with other stakeholders and disseminate the ground realities and future sustainable strategies for conserved coastal ecosystem and resilience against climate change.
DHAN Foundation has already established community organizations with Community Resource Centers along coast of the Bay of Bengal. Now it is important to inculcate skills of journalism, concept and importance of local journalism in volunteers of these community organizations.
Community volunteers will be trained for developing their skills on local journalism, photography, video editing, image processing, documentary, etc. The objectives of these trainings are to produce community journalists, radio and video jockeys (RJs, VJs), community reporters, and editors. Local communities will be the beneficiaries by bringing out their voice to global platform.
A full-fledged journalism team is being established in each region which will be part of existing community organization. Researches, students, scholars from background of journalism, visual media and mass communication will be encouraged to do internships in these localities closely with community volunteers. These interns will help the community volunteers to practice their training skills in ground and bring out quality outcomes. At the same time interns will get exposed to the local ground realities. This understanding will help them in getting insights on ‘grassroot journalism’.
‘Life of Bay’, documentaries on best practices, key issues, conservation of coastal ecosystem are being developed. ‘Voice of Vulnerable’, audio episodes through Community Radio Station are also being developed. ‘Coastal Watch’, a monthly magazine in regional language is being published.
It is proposed to organize a policy seminar to pool the existing policy gaps that affect coastal livelihood, coastal and marine ecosystem and resilience towards climate change. Multiple stakeholders such as government departments, policy makers, academicians, community leaders will participate in this policy seminar. The policy seminar will come out with ‘Policy Brief’ that highlights key policy interventions to be implemented for the sustainable coastal and marine ecosystem and livelihoods. This policy brief will push the policy makers for implementation.
It is also proposed to organize knowledge building workshop on coastal – marine practices, which will bring out best practices, worst practices, resilience against climate change, community led conservation activities existing among communities in Bay of Bengal. This will pool the existing indigenous knowledge among coastal communities, highlight knowledge gap in current practices with help of ‘subject matter specialists’ to exhibit current industrial and market scenario for holistic sustainable development in Bay of Bengal. This workshop will benefit the communities for better life, livelihood and ecosystem.
