Empower...

Empower: make (someone) stronger and more confident, especially in controlling their life and claiming their rights.

Empowerment has often been used as a “buzz” word in the health promotion/community development sector. While there is considerable discourse (which I won’t explore extensively in this post) as to whether this is a process of giving power, or whether it’s equipping the power the person already has, the end goal is people becoming stronger and more confident to make changes or take actions to improve the own health and the health of their community. Community media is a powerful tool to make this process happen. 

I was recently training a group of community development students about how community media can be a tool to help build stronger and healthier communities. It’s always rewarding seeing new people engage with media for the first time. It usually starts with hesitancy and nervousness about being recorded, however, after support they usually agree with “I’ll give it a go, but please don’t actually use it on radio.” Once recorded we show how the content can help the community, with participants usually saying, “wow that’s a very powerful piece of audio. You can use it because I want to help my community."

This group chose to produce a radio message about mental health because they saw it as the most important issue that they want to address in their community. To me seeing that journey over just one hour reminds me how powerful community media can be and to me that’s empowerment.

We want to empower more people to use community media to build healthier communities.