Check out this gorgeous video from a group that mashes together communications and youth education organizing with young people in New Orleans.

I caught up with the Community Media Organizing Project at Nashville’s lovely Scarritt Bennett College conference center. Some highlights & reflections from the session.Practical use of social media: Community Farm Alliance does a nice easy blog, accessible via their site. Kaycie Len Carter, the rural organizer, said she and a co-worker started the blog after a workshop on social media a couple years ago (you know that’s gratifying to the trainer, ahem, me!). They use it to post legislative updates for their members during the state’s legislative session. CFA’s urban chapter in Louisville is using Facebook to good effect, as well.But for CFA as well as a number of other folks in the room, connection issues remain a major barrier to use of the Internet. In the countryside in Kentucky and I think many of the other places folks came to this conference from, buying a satellite dish is the most viable thing next to dial-up schmial-up (why bother, right?). To that end, we spent some session time thinking about audience beyond geography via the Internet. Groups in the room included:

• 9to5 Atlanta Working Women
• Community Farm Alliance
• Families & Fiends of Lousiana’s Incarcerated Children, FFLIC
• Federation of Child Care Centers of Alabama, FOCAL
• Greater Birmingham Ministries
• Kentuckians for the Commonwealth
• Save Our Cumberland Mountains
• Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition
• Rethinking New Orleans Schools

As a trainer, I observed two other things:

1. Face to Face is best: Heads nodded and you could almost hear a sigh of relief and agreement when we discussed that online activities will never take the place of face to face interaction and that lower-cost (to the user) actions online tend to deliver lesser benefits to the organization. We did talk a little about the interaction between what happens out there in imaginary web land and right here in the real world.
2. Teaching? What’s the best way to teach this stuff? Although I set up my session to go through strategy, I found that the group and I both wanted to kind of go through each social medium and talk about them 1 by 1. Next time I might just do that….

More details on the workshop including the handouts are at nonprofitcommunicators.ning.com.