Cultivating Community:
Urban farming in West Oakland

About The Project

City Slicker Farms has spent the last ten years working to promote access to fresh produce and prevent violence by "boosting community" in West Oakland through a series of communal urban gardens and weekly farm stands. City Slickers also offers residents a "Backyard Garden" program, in which the organization helps homeowners set up gardens in their backyard and then provides them with seedlings and regular follow-up visits.

Zoe and Jasmine, the Factory filmmakers working with City Slickers, wanted to create a project that brought visibility the organization and shared important information about their efforts, but they also wanted to make something that reinforced the City Slicker commitment to bringing people together and creating a sense of shared community.

They devised a web-native video that utilized utilized both Google Maps and Youtube. As their documentary plays, each mention of a different farm site that City Slicker Farms has created results in a Google map pin drop. These pins are clickable, linking to a short Youtube-link video portrait of the location. Furthermore, they built in an option for viewers to drop their own pins where their home gardens are located and share videos or still images of their progress.

About The Partnership

In the summer of 2011, the Bay Area Video Coalition's Factory filmmaking program for teenagers partnered with the Mozilla Foundation and four Bay Area non-profit organizations to create web-native social-justice video projects. A web-native video is a story that can only be experienced fully on the Internet – it takes advantage of the Internet's capacity for engagement and connectivity to create an experience that allows the viewer/user a heightened degree of control and interactivity.

These projects were made possible through the creation of the open-source software “Popcorn Maker” by programmers at Mozilla. Popcorn Maker is a program that allows filmmakers with only a minimal grasp of HTML to integrate the limitless resources of the Internet to into the film experience they are providing their audience. Click here to learn more about Popcorn Maker.

The subjects of the web-native videos were four non-profit organizations who participated in The Factory's annual Community Filmmaking Partnerships. The Factory's CFPs pair a team of youth filmmakers with a "client" organization - the youth spend time volunteering for the organization, learning their values and goals, and then collaborate with the non-profit to produce media content that supports their mission. This year's CFPs are City Slicker Farms, the Huey P. Newton Foundation, Inspire USA, and Creative Growth.

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