THE SHIFT PROJECT
A pilot project of this concept was conducted in 2010 at Youth Training Centre (YTC) for adolescents at the Golden Grove Prison Trinidad. 15 young inmates were exposed to a workshop in storytelling and animation. The outcome was a two minute animated short called ‘The Journey’This project was supported by CARICOM Secretariat and US AID
Turning those stories of dread and despair
into constructive affirmations.
She has coined her interpretation of it as ‘digital activism’.
She currently runs a NGO in collaboration with CARICOM called ‘The Shift Project’ which is an intervention program using digital technology to bring ‘at risk’ teens into the 21st century. This project took her and two female students to Guyana and Suriname where they conducted animation workshops with at risk youths. View the Shift Project
NEW PATH
In 2016 she spent a month in Jamaica for an intervention project called “New Path’ which used animation in prisons, funded by the Organization of American States through its Department of Public Security in Washington DC.
For just as the output of the computer is intangible and cannot be placed on a shelf, so does the inspiration she imposes, hide in the emotional, social and entrepreneurial outcomes of her interventions. She has spent her time in prisons in Trinidad and Jamaica, pulling out stories from young inmates.
Turning those stories of dread and despair into constructive affirmations. She gives the inmates an opportunity to express their fears, their trauma, and allow them to use storytelling to change the plot.
With over 20 years in the animation and digital media industry Camille now uses the Heroes Journey to rewrite the script that has kept others outside of the playing field both in the film industry and also in the play of life.
Repositioning ‘The Other’
“I do this because for too long our stories, the stories on the street, the stories of ‘the other’ have been articulated using traditional and elite script deconstruction. These scripts do not tell our stories.
And if they do, it is often from a distance… like David Attenborough talking about the whales in the ocean. It is time that we tell our stories without permission and it is time that the elite understands the discipline needed to simply listen without judgment and preconceived notions of what being black is. We can replace the word black with, queer, gay, autistic, blind whatever that otherness is”
The Power of Digital Activism Is In Its Silence.
Her work also invades the workspace.
Currently a mentor at AMA Culture Hive which is managed by the Arts Marketing Association, part of Arts Council England’s Audience Focus programme.
Here she mentors fellows from arts, heritage or cultural organisations online, to explore and experiment with diversity, while achieving digital transformation for their organisation. If any institution flounders about their job/role/work because the work to dig deep is too much, this is dangerous for any institution. If this is not addressed in some way it may close in on the institution that does not practice empathy.
Yes, she feels strongly that institutions can strive for empathy. How can an institution deconstruct its own ‘Heroes Journey Story Arc’, dig deep to find its catalyst for change and go down deep to the belly of the whale to create that needed change in the workplace. How can we re-frame the need for us to lead and serve our audiences to increase access where the gap is growing wider. That takes ‘internalization’ and when we do that we expose ourselves.
We become vulnerable and not many businesses will want to go there. Ownership is critical. Re-writing the script is the way to manifest change and to lead oneself into a new paradigm of the workplace.