This weekend I attended that Allied Media Conference in Detroit, MI. While there, I met people who are incredibly involved in their communities and looking outwards, working to change their blocks, their states, America, and the world. As a blogger, I try and work with as many people as I can. However, most of my interactions take place solely online, within the confines of email, Instant Messenger, and my web browser, and so it is all too easy for me to look at my work in an overly detached way. I write about national issues, issues that I will probably never have the capacity to directly change. I’m not saying the work of bloggers isn’t valuable, however it is nice to work outside of the Internet every once in a while.

So, it was incredibly refreshing to be around so many involved, committed people. The projects represented ran the gamut from independent local newspapers to hip hop collectives using the prinicples of cooperative economics to help their communities. The panels and discussions I participated in renewed my sense that I am not alone in what I do. It is wonderful to sit in a room with forty other people, young and old, rich and poor, of all races and religions, and discuss issues of education, media access, public interest, and inner city violence. It is wonderful to see so many people educated, involved, energized, and working in some way to tackle these issues. The people there were involved in every aspect of political life, and I’d like to highlight a few projects here, if only to enlighten readers as to what kinds of things are happening inside their communities all over the United States.

The Live Arts Media Project is composed of a group of Detroit Public High School students that focuses on exploring the issue of Detroit’s astronomical high school dropout rate from a youth perspective. They encourage kids to confront the issues of the Detroit Public School System using whatever means make sense to them. So far, this has produced a CD with various forms of music and sound collage addressing the issue and sparked the beginnings of a dialogue between administrators, parents, and students, as well as reporting and commenting on the student protests, strikes, and walkouts that have occurred. It was inspiring to see students who are usually marginalized taking charge of their education in a fresh way. With the dropout rate in Detroit at over 70%, students deserve a voice in a system that has clearly been mishandled. Instead of parents and teachers telling students what they should do and how they should succeed, groups like LAMP and others around the country are asking students to assess how schooling fits into their conception of education, and how they can best be served by the public school process.

The Bay Unity Music Project, or BUMP, is a youth-run hip hop record label that is trying to transform the typical economics of the hip hop industry. Specifically, instead of aggressively recruiting artists and working towards commercial success, BUMP teaches Oakland, CA area kids how to create their own music, market themselves, and put on live shows. They focus on uniting the musical talent in the Bay Area so everyone can take advantage of an increased fan base, efficient promotion, and their focus on giving back to the community. Using these principles of cooperative economics and shunning major label distribution, BUMP avoids the classic pitfalls of typical hip hop success. This is a subject near and dear to my heart, and as I’ve discussed before, hip hop musicians should be focused on building unity and cohesive music scenes in order to revitalize hip hop as an artistic medium. Take a listen to some of BUMP’s tracks on the homepage, it’s better than 90% of the crap on your radio, trust me.

The Digital Expansion Initiative, a project created by the People’s Production House, is a group of people working to educate New York City’s public on issues of municipal wireless and net neutrality. Their work is so important because oftentimes, public initiatives to create a municipal broadband network in a city are created without the people’s input. On top of that, the people who this network will serve are often not educated with respect to the ins and outs of Internet infrastructure, meaning that they cannot ask meaningful questions and effectively shape the service they will eventually be using. As taxpayer money gets spent on municipal broadband projects, the Digital Expansion Initiative is making sure that the public can not only ask their government for city funded Internet access, but can ask questions about how fast the system will be, where and how it will be accessed, what if any corporations will run it, how it will be implemented, and how much it will cost. These questions may be obvious to any self-respecting techy, but they are completely non-evident and opaque to someone using the Internet for the first time.

This is just a small sample of the organized people who attended the Allied Media Conference. These are people fighting to make a difference in their communities, however they define them. So, while it is tempting to think that all your fellow Americans are lazy and apethetic, there are plenty of people out there who are dedicated and working for what they believe in. It is exciting to think of America as a place of strong communities and activists working to create movements for change. More importantly, it got my head out of the headlines for a weekend and reconnected me with grassroots groups who are making a difference on the ground in their communities.

So, what kinds of groups are making a difference in your community? Is it a community crime watch program? Or is it a group of concerned citizens that lobbies city council for more open spaces? The travesties Bush is wreaking on this country can wait for a couple days; tell me about some projects taking place in your neighborhood.

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