AMP shares and develops models for transforming our selves and our communities through creative communications. Creating our own media is a process of speaking and listening that allows us to imagine other realities and then organize to make them real. The Allied Media Projects network emerges out of thirteen years of organic relationship-building across issues, identities, organizing practices and creative mediums.

Allied Media Projects cultivate media strategies for a more just and creative world. From the unique intersection of media and communications, art, technology, education and social justice, we share and develop models for transforming ourselves and our communities.

Our work is grounded in Network Principles developed and evolved through dialogue with our uniquely diverse and collaborative community of participants.

AMP grew out of the annual Allied Media Conference, which began in 1999 as a celebration of independent publishing and do-it-yourself culture. The AMC has expanded to a large and diverse gathering, offering hands-on trainings in a wide-range of media practices, from breakdancing to video-blogging to building radio transmitters and wireless mesh networks. The AMC fosters strategies for how these practices can support and inspire grassroots organizing for social justice.

AMP moved the AMC from its original home in Bowling Green, OH to Detroit, MI in 2007, connecting with the city’s rich legacy of community media and social movements. The AMC has become a one-of-a-kind convergence point for the most visionary and effective media-based organizers from across the U.S. and beyond, who come to Detroit every year to teach and to learn.

AMP’s local programs model and innovate practices in education, economic development and community organizing. We facilitate organizing around issues of technology access, participation, common ownership, and healthy communities through the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition. Our Detroit Future Media program is a 6-month training course in core digital media competencies, and their application in shaping Detroit’s future through education, entrepreneurship and community organizing. Through Detroit Future Schools, we pair graduates from Detroit Future Media with K-12 teachers to design and implement digital media arts-integrated curricula in the classroom.

We are building web platforms that support and celebrate the collaboration and creativity of our network. AMPTalk is an online forum for idea-development and resource-sharing amongst the participants of the Allied Media Projects network. Allied365.org is an online catalog where participants in the Allied Media Conference, Detroit Future Media, and Detroit Future Schools showcase and distribute their services, curricula, and other offerings.

AMP NETWORK PRINCIPLES

We are making an honest attempt to solve the most significant problems of our day.

We are building a network of people and organizations that are developing long-term solutions based on the immediate confrontation of our most pressing problems.

Wherever there is a problem, there are already people acting on the problem in some fashion. Understanding those actions is the starting point for developing effective strategies to resolve the problem, so we focus on the solutions, not the problems.

We emphasize our own power and legitimacy.

We presume our power, not our powerlessness.

We spend more time building than attacking.

We focus on strategies rather than issues.

The strongest solutions happen through the process, not in a moment at the end of the process.

The most effective strategies for us are the ones that work in situations of scarce resources and intersecting systems of oppression because those solutions tend to be the most holistic and sustainable.

Place is important. For the AMC, Detroit is important as a source of innovative, collaborative, low-resource solutions. Detroit gives the conference a sense of place, just as each of the conference participants bring their own sense of place with them to the conference.

We encourage people to engage with their whole selves, not just with one part of their identity.

We begin by listening.