First-year student Lauren Andriessen found herself doing something unexpected this semester: learning to clean an offset printing press at a volunteer organization in the Bronx.
She didn’t know that’s what she was signing up for when she enrolled in Fundamentals of Communications and Media Studies. But when she got the chance last month, something clicked.
“It was a little scary at first, but after you get the hang of it, it’s very fun to do,” said Andriessen, who came to Fordham from Bali and plans to major in communication and media studies. She said the experience made her feel more connected to her studies.
“You are getting something real. You are not just sitting behind a desk.”
Printing Support and Community Organizing
Andriessen’s plunge into the realm of printers and print media—sometimes viewed as archaic in today’s world—came courtesy of Women’s Press Collective, a volunteer organization in the Bronx that provides printing, design, and writer training for community-based organizations.
The group was founded in 1982 to give farm workers and other low-paid women workers a voice through publications–something they were not getting from corporate media. Now, they provide publication support for community-based organizations throughout the city.
Her class partnered with the group thanks to Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning center, which supports courses that give students and faculty a chance to take concepts they learn about in class and explore them in neighboring communities.
A Sense of Values
Ashar Foley, Ph.D., a senior lecturer of communications and media studies who teaches the class, said she was inspired to partner with the collective after one of her students shared with her misgivings about journalism last fall.
“She said, ‘I want to major in it, but it seems like the mainstream media only reports on certain things and doesn’t tell the whole story if it contradicts certain official narratives,’” she said.
Foley encouraged her to try volunteering with the collective, and the students’ experience was so positive they decided to stick with journalism.
Foley brought members of the collective in to speak to her class in January, and students have been volunteering at the collective’s Kingsbridge office on Saturdays this semester.
“They can get a sense of what community values are and look like. This is a well-organized space, but it’s not glossy. It’s a place that operates on shoestring budgets and not according to values promoted by corporate media,” Foley said.
Independent Media Is Key
The collective’s focus on physical media is not accidental.
According to organizers, printed materials encourage face-to-face distribution and interactions that are critical for building strong community organizations.
As part of the class visit, Gabriel Guy, a first-year student from Morton, Pennsylvania, who is planning to major in anthropology and communication, helped stuff envelopes with a newsletter that one of the collective’s partners was creating.
“I thought it was cool to have [the Women’s Press Collective]as a partner to our class because right before I visited, we were talking in class about media representation and the power of who gets to tell what stories,” he said.
Cathi Steele, a volunteer for the collective who spoke to Foley’s class at Lincoln Center, said independent media is key to improving the lives of local communities.
She noted that Fordham students helped with a zine for one of the collective’s partners. It will be given to tenants in a Bronx housing development that has been without heat or gas since last May.
“We’re joining together writers, printers, designers, with organizers of low-income and marginalized communities who really need a media that provides truthful, relevant information from their perspective,” she said.
“We like to say, ‘Don’t just criticize the media, organize it.’ We have to build a media that represents all of us.”
