Giving Youth a Free Space to Learn at Media Lab

Dear friends, donors and supporters,

We are glad to inform you all that our Media Lab has now become a functioning enterprise. With our dedicated team at BCMD and youth involved in the lab activities, the media lab is successfully running activities and continues to inspire people from all walks of life. This is a result of all the support we have received from you and we take this opportunity to thank each and everyone who have supported to our cause.

What have we been up to? Here is a glimpse of few activities we have led at the lab in this quarter:

Reading music through Media Lab: As Bhutan celebrates National Reading Year, we produced a music video that promotes reading habits among Bhutanese people. We have dedicated the video on the joyous occasion of the 60th birth anniversary of His Majesty the Fourth Druk Gyalpo Jigme Singye Wangchuck.

In the video, an Atsara goes around different places in Thimphu town carrying books and distributing to the public for free. The atsara represents a Buddhist master who has mastered Buddhism and therefore seeks to challenge the conventional wisdom of society. The word 'atsara' is derived from the Sanskrit word acharya which means 'the accomplished one'.

The music video is shared on our Facebook, YouTube and also screened at public events. It has been much appreciated and loved by both the elderly and the young.

Stories for Change: There are many individuals and civil society organisations that lead meaningful initiatives to bring positive change in our communities. However, most of us lack resources and the skills required to tell our stories using different media outlets. So, oftentimes these activities are not known to the people.

With our on-going project titled 'Stories for Change,' we hope to bring together a cohort of like-minded people and organisations and train them in multimedia skills to create short advocacy films on concerning social issues. We are also taking this opportunity to bring together all of our previous participants who have attended photography and multimedia training at our lab and get them to work on more videos themed stories for change.

One of the participants of the workshop, Phuntsho, said “the program was very informative and quite challenging but I learned a lot about video and photography which I could use in the future for more useful activities.”

Here are the videos- 

Stories for Change- Bhutan Kidney Foundation

Stories for Change- Bhutan Animal Rescue and Care

Open Mic Nights: Open mic nights at our media lab are in full swing. The space is always packed with young people, civil society organisations and social workers.

In October we led two open mic nights. The first one themed Oral history ‘Linking Generations’ was a follow up activity after a total of 14 out-of-school youth gathered life stories from different elderly people by interviewing them in their communities. During the event, participants discussed the importance of our age old customs and traditions.The participants shared their views on the different life styles that the youth live today and the ones that our parents lived, which gave them a contrast of different societal challenges and how best to overcome the challenges.

The second open mic night was themed ‘Art Therapy,’ which explores the idea of using art to express and understand our emotions and thoughts. We began with a mask painting activity, where participants created a mask to express their inner emotions, and then they were welcome to share their mask. The results were amazing. Each youth volunteered to share their mask and what it meant to them. This created discussion in the group where they talked about some of the issues the youth of Bhutan face today like depression, understanding your emotions, as well as the stigma against seeking help or discussing personal issues. This brought forth solutions to these issues, some mentioned tools such as journaling and art to reflect on your emotions, some talked about places to get help or emotional support when it's needed, like talking to close friends, seeking out therapy, or coming to express themselves in a welcoming environment such as the BCMD open mic.

Overall, our open mic nights are enabling our youth coordinators to practice their facilitation skills and giving a platform for other youth to practice public speaking.

Social Media Conversation at Samtse College of Education (SCE): We have around 12 media clubs that we support and fund across the country. These media clubs serve as a platform for young people in Bhutan to learn useful media skills like photography and multimedia storytelling. The media club members also learn useful knowledge such as media literacy. In addition, the media clubs also serve as centres that we can use to outsource and replicate our activities.

In September we visited our media club in the sourthern region of the country at Samtse College of Education. About 72 media club members of the college attended a day-long sensitisation workshop on media literacy and social media, which is an on-going activity at the lab.

The day’s programme included the concepts of media literacy, listening groups, the power of the Internet, the impacts of social media and different forms of media. One of the participants, Namgay, said “the programme infused me with more knowledge about democracy and people’s participation and their role to make it right.”

Punam Ghalley shared the sentiments of most participants when she said she would pass on the message on social media and create awareness of it among other people using different media. Group works were also done to help the participants understand the core concepts of media literacy and the impacts of social media.

Way forward

As we've successfully turned the Media Lab into a functioning enterprise, we are in the process of revamping our Global Giving donation strategy and plan to de-activate our current project and expand our fundraising goals to cover the entirety of our work. This new project would not only fund workshops at our Media Lab, but also help support our forums, publications, and youth engagement programs.

We are excited about this transition and hope you are too. Our new GlobalGiving project will be known as 'Empower Bhutan's Citizens to Engage in Democracy.'