Social Change
Social change action with informed and engaged societies
Social Change
After nearly 28 years, The Communication Initiative (The CI) Global is entering a new chapter. Following a period of transition, the global website has been transferred to the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa, where it will be administered by the Social and Behaviour Change Communication Division. Wits' commitment to social change and justice makes it a trusted steward for The CI's legacy and future.
 
Co-founder Victoria Martin is pleased to see this work continue under Wits' leadership. Victoria knows that co-founder Warren Feek (1953–2024) would have felt deep pride in The CI Global's Africa-led direction.
 
We honour the team and partners who sustained The CI for decades. Meanwhile, La Iniciativa de Comunicación (CILA) continues independently at cila.comminitcila.com and is linked with The CI Global site.
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The Drum Beat 660 - Thanking and Seeking CI Associates

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Issue #
660
The Drum BeatThe Drum Beat - 660 - Thanking and Seeking CI Associates
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With this issue of The Drum Beat, we highlight and honour the communication for development (C4D) work of organisations that support The Communication Initiative (The CI) as CI Associates and invite you to join them in keeping The CI processes, including The Drum Beat, flourishing.

The CI is largely supported and sustained by 23 CI Partners, who guide the strategic direction of the organisation. These partners are key to the success of The CI. In addition, The CI is currently bolstered by 16 CI Associates. These organisations provide some level of financial support while also offering additional diversity of perspective, increased network contacts, and more resources of communication for development information and knowledge from which The CI network can draw for serving global and local knowledge sharing.

Here, we acknowledge the generous support of our current CI Associates and provide you with some CI connections related to each organisation/supporter that might resonate with you and/or spark your work in new directions. We welcome you to join this group in helping us support your work. If you have any questions, please contact Warren Feek - wfeek@comminit.com
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From The Communication Initiative Network - where communication and media are central to social and economic development.
Please "Like": The Communication Initiative Network Facebook page
You also have the opportunity to vote "Like" on any of the pages visited from the selections below.
Please "Follow" The CI on Twitter - @warrencomminit
Subscribe to The Drum Beat
Click here to access The Drum Beat archives.
Many thousands of people turn to The CI each year - from major funders to small local organisations to individuals in economically impoverished locales. Staff and others from those agencies: submit knowledge for sharing within the network; access knowledge in support of their work; identify and make contact with people and organisations that they pinpoint as being able to support their work; and express, share, and debate their views and opinions on a range of development challenges. Perhaps you have recently made use of this community of practice yourself.

The CI Associates process is designed to enable organisations and offices that recognise the value of The CI to provide a small level of financial support for that process: from US$100 for very small organisations and individuals to US$5,000 for the larger ones. These amounts are roughly the equivalent of sending a staff member to a training event or conference, producing a small publication, researching an issue, etc.; these trip- and research-related processes are parallel to the connections made through The CI (and you get to stay home and keep working!).

CURRENT CI ASSOCIATES:
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1. We welcome, with thanks, our newest CI Associate, Temple University's School of Media and Communication (SMC)
The mission of SMC, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, is to provide leadership in advancing the role of communication in public life. The mission is pursued through: training students for leadership careers in communication and media, advancing research and creative activity in these fields, and serving the public need for free and open communication.
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2. Breeze FM
Located at Chipata, the provincial headquarters of the Eastern Zambia, this public interest station combines education, information, news, and entertainment. Overall, content is oriented towards community and small business development.
  • For a summary of Breeze FM, please click here.
  • For further community radio content from Soul Beat Africa, click here.
  • To subscribe to Soul Beat's Community Radio "Extra" e-magazine, just send an email to: soulbeat@comminit.com.
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3. Coady International Institute
This Canadian organisation promotes community self-reliance and carries out leadership education around the world.
  • Coady focuses on community-based development. For offerings on The CI website that focus on the strategy of community participation, click here.
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4. Communication and Development Studies, Ohio University
Offering a Master's degree programme that emphasises the use of communication to promote positive social change, this university's students have specialised in areas that include health communication, participatory video, the digital divide, gender and development, conflict resolution, and the political economy of media.
  • The CI has a new Health Communication theme site with an Africa-focused Health Communication theme site here.
  • We also have many resources on the other foci of Communication and Development Studies, Ohio University, such as participatory video and the digital divide. Please head to our home page and search or browse around. If you ever have questions about navigating our search engine or website, just send an email to info@comminit.com
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5. Dr. Kanchan K. Malik
Dr. Kanchan K. Malik is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad, India, and has been teaching post-graduate journalism and mass communication courses for nearly 15 years. One of the areas her work has focused on is community radio.
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6. Early Childhood Development Virtual University, University of Victoria
This Canadian training and capacity building programme uses learning methods including the internet, CD-ROM, and face-to-face seminars.
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7. Equal Access International
This international not-for-profit communication for social change organisation combines the power of media with direct community engagement to address challenges affecting people in the developing world in the areas of youth life skills and livelihoods, women's and girls' empowerment, health, democracy and governance, and human rights.
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HELP SPREAD THE WORD...
The CI network for the benefit of all involved, so we encourage your participation. Did you read a CI summary or a Drum Beat issue that you found particularly helpful or inspiring? Please help us then circulate that summary or e-magazine to your networks by, for example, "liking" or sharing the summary to your Facebook page or by spreading the word through Twitter.
A reminder: The CI Network Facebook page is located here.
...AND SEND US YOUR WORK!
We welcome Associates to send us your strategy documents, evaluations, materials and tools, project description, etc., for summary on The CI site in order to maintain the knowledge sharing that is designed to continue to inform the projects of a growing community of practitioners, theorists, evaluators, and organisations. Just contact info@comminit.com
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8. The Healthy Aboriginal Network
This Canadian organisation develops comic books on health and social issues for youth, testing their draft stories on YouTube by creating rough animations and gathering focus group reaction from youth and professionals.
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9. Health Communication Resources (HCR)
HCR is an Australian-based not-for-profit organisation that specialises in training grassroots community practitioners to utilise the power of community radio for positive social change.
  • If you would like to explore some of The CI's community radio summaries, click here.
  • To subscribe to our bi-monthly mailing covering our most recent health communication postings, just send an email with "subscribe" in the subject line to: health@comminit.com
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10. iMedia Associates
This United Kingdom (UK)-based media development and communications company promotes ways of working with rapidly converging media to tackle communications challenges presented by conflict, fragile governance, and poverty - currently in Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan - using radio, print, and mobile telephony.
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11. International Development Research Centre (IDRC)
Canada's IDRC supports research in developing countries to promote growth and development. IDRC also encourages sharing this knowledge with policymakers, other researchers, and communities around the world.
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12. The Media Studies and Journalism Department of the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB)
The Media Studies and Journalism Department of ULAB believes in an educational approach that is personalised, technologically updated, and centred on active learning. It upholds a curriculum that is flexible, relevant, and balanced in terms of theory and practice - a curriculum that is grounded in both global and local contexts.
  • The CI has a number of summaries about education in general. Click here to learn more. Also, please see #14 below to access and connect with our media development offerings.
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13. Media Voices for Children
This online community works to raise awareness about the state of economically poor children around the world.
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14. Shayna Plaut
Shayna Plaut is a doctoral candidate at the University of British Columbia; her area of focus is on the intersections of journalism, human rights, and social change with people who identify with being transnational. Shayna has designed and taught courses on human rights and human rights reporting to journalists and future producers of culture since 2004.
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15. Strategies for Hope Trust
SFH produces books, films, and training manuals on community-based approaches to HIV prevention, care, and support, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
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16. World Health Communication Associates (WHCA)
WHCA works to help public health advocates and organisations acquire the knowledge, savvy, and resources to enable their messages to stand out and positively shape health choices, behaviours, and perceptions in local, national, and global information marketplaces.
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In recognition of the value that your office or organisation gains from The CI process, please consider joining the people and agencies above by contributing to the growth and sustainability of The CI's social network and knowledge sharing platform. Our present situation involves a very small number of agencies providing the financial support necessary for a process that is utilised by thousands of organisations worldwide. It would be great to share that load in response to the growing demand. We are not proposing Associates contributions at the high revenue levels provided by the Partners (though please do also email Warren Feek at wfeek@comminit.com if your organisation is interested in becoming a Partner); the levels are comparatively small.

We do not require subscriptions for access to The CI/Soul Beat Africa/La Iniciativa de Comunicación - the information (over 36,000 summaries with links to people and resources) is freely available, as are our various e-newsletters: The Drum Beat, The Soul Beat, and Son de Tambor. What we are asking for is a small voluntary contribution to this social enterprise to support its value in the work you undertake on a daily basis.

Suggested annual contribution levels:

US$5,000 per office - For Country, Regional, and HQ offices of major international development organisations

US$2,500 per office - For Country, Regional, and HQ offices for medium-sized international non-governmental organisations (NGOs)

US$2,000 per department - University Departments - OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] Countries

US$750 per department - University Departments - All other Countries

US$100 - Small, local NGOs/community-based organisations

US$100-200 - Individual

OR...click here to enter your own Associates payment level.

The more we can share the financial load of The CI processes, including The Drum Beat, across a larger number of organisations and offices using this process, the greater our chance of maintaining and growing - in all sorts of exciting ways - this open-to-all, 24-hour-per-day, comprehensive sharing and engagement process.

We want to avoid charging for access or restricting some parts of the portal site to those who have paid. In many ways, we would rather close our process than go the route of restricting it. But keeping our site open depends increasingly on finding new revenue to meet growing demand and shrinking resources.

If you do value The CI processes for your work, we'd so appreciate you considering becoming a CI Associate.

For more information about becoming a CI Associate, please click here or contact Warren Feek at wfeek@comminit.com

Thank you.

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This issue of The Drum Beat was written by Kier Olsen DeVries.
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The Drum Beat is the email and web network of The Communication Initiative Partnership - Partners: ANDI, BBC Media Action, Bernard van Leer Foundation, Breakthrough, Calandria, DFID, FAO, Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (FNPI), Inter-American Development Bank, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communication Programs, MISA, Oxfam Novib, PAHO, The Panos Institute, Puntos de Encuentro, The Rockefeller Foundation, SAfAIDS, Sesame Workshop, Soul City, STEPS International, UNAIDS, UNDP, UNICEF, USAID, The Wellcome Trust, World Health Organization (WHO), W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

The Drum Beat seeks to cover the full range of communication for development activities. Inclusion of an item does not imply endorsement or support by The Partners.

Chair of the Partners Group: Garth Japhet, Founder, Soul City garth@heartlines.org.za

Executive Director: Warren Feek wfeek@comminit.com
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The Editor of The Drum Beat is Kier Olsen DeVries.
Please send additional project, evaluation, strategic thinking, and materials information on communication for development at any time. Send to drumbeat@comminit.com

The Drum Beat seeks to cover the full range of communication for development activities. Inclusion of an item does not imply endorsement or support by The Partners.

To reproduce any portion of The Drum Beat, click here for our policy.

To subscribe, click here.

To unsubscribe, please send an email to drumbeat@comminit.com with "Unsubscribe" in the subject line.
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