Our mission at MediaRights.org is to make social issue documentaries and advocacy videos easy to find and use via a community site for media makers, activists, educators and librarians. MediaRights.org is a not-for-profit organization founded by Big Mouth Productions, a social issue documentary production company. The site was launched with funding from the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Institute.

At MediaRights.org, we are very concerned with the limited representation of young people in popular media. There is a growing movement of youth taking the media into their own hands and making their own films. Yet there are few distribution or exhibition venues for these works. In response to this need, MediaRights.org has created an online portal for finding and distributing youth made social issue documentaries. We are adding a youth media (YM) symbol to our database of over 1,500 films to make it easier to find and purchase youth produced work. It is free to list a documentary on MediaRights.org and we will link to the Web site or email of whoever is fulfilling the orders. The film listings include Member Reviews and members can choose their favorite films.

MediaRights.org publishes articles online about youth media and activism and we are creating an online Youth Workshop to help young media activists make videos, find each other, and share their experiences. In our Newsstand we have an article titled "The Right To Be Seen And Heard: Youth Media Distribution" which you can find here. Also the Media That Matters Online Film Festival is featuring youth media. The festival is co-presented by The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival and will be exhibited on monitors at Lincoln Center in June.

MediaRights.org has produced panels featuring young media activists including one at the Museum of Natural History and one at the gURL.com Film Festival. In our effort to open up new markets for youth-made social issue documentaries and documentaries about youth, we are conducting workshops at conferences for youth around the country. These workshops will focus on how to use existing documentaries as tools for activism, organizing and provoking discussion about difficult subjects.

We are always interested in sharing content and resources with other like-minded sites. We also are interested in posting articles about media and activism written by young people. To submit an article contact Nicole Betancourt, nicole@mediarights.org.

You can search films on MediaRights.org by 13 main social issues: Criminal Justice, Economic Justice, Environment, Gay/Lesbian, Gender/Women, Health, Human Rights, Immigration, International, Media, Politics/Government, Racial Justice, Religious Freedom, and Youth.

And there are over 52 sub-issues!
 

YOUTH MAKING MEDIA: MAIN PAGE

AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.