Philadelphia Community Access Coalition
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MR. RIDDLE: My name is Anthony Riddle. And I'm the Executive Director of Manhattan Neighborhood Network.

And I'd first like to thank Chairman Ortiz, the members of the Council, and all of the members of the public for giving me the opportunity and the privilege to address you on public access in the City of Philadelphia, the spiritual birthplace of democracy in America. I'd like to thank you for your time in allowing me, sort of an outsider, to come and speak to you of the success that we've had.

In the past, I've been the executive director of the public access facility in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as well as Atlanta, Georgia. I started in this field as somebody who just needed a place to edit some videotape in about 1980, and I started in a field that I didn't know existed, and since then, have spent 18 years of my life working in this field because it's something for which I feel great deal of passion. A number of people do feel this passion. I can't speak to the source of their reasoning, but I would like to tell you a little story that explains mine.

The Juneteenth holiday is a holiday celebrated by African-Americans, which represents the day in June, June 19, 1865, when the Africans in Galveston, Texas, found out about the Emancipation Proclamation. This was two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. It meant that for two and a half years, people were born into slavery that should have born free. It meant that for two and a half years, people died in slavery that should have had a few moments of freedom. And it meant that for two and a half years, people gave their lives to a system which chose not to give them the information they needed to be free people in our society.

This is not a story about black people in America; this is a story about all of our children. This is a story of the choice that we have to decide whether our children will be free or have the capability of having the information they need to run a democratic society. And this is why I've spent my time with public access.

I'd like to talk about some of the successes that we've had in Manhattan. Manhattan is a large community, and we run possibly the most active public access facility in the nation. We have more than 5,000 producers annually. We have free use of television production facility equipment to over 600 producers and crews per year. We've shown more than 200,000 programs in less than 5 years. We currently program about 65,000 tapes per year.

We offer workshop training free of charge to the public, to more than 2,000 people. We've trained more than 250 community organizations in how to use these tools to get out their message to the people that they serve. We've had additional training offered through our community -- through other community organizations throughout Manhattan.

We have production facilities that offer more than 25,000 hours of editing per year, 3 studios in use at our main facility, 15 portable camera packages, 8 edit systems that we give out to other organizations for their use throughout the year.

In terms of our outreach, we have community programs in many languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese) Creole, Russian, Portuguese, French, and Hungarian.

We have programs for and about or by youth, seniors, disabled people, arts and culture, education, religion, gay and lesbian, labor, health, environment, self-help, politics, and other community concerns.

We have every variety of entertainment program that you can imagine.

And our issues represent the very diverse politics of Manhattan almost as thoroughly as possible.

We also have an individual grant program to which we grant money to community organizations to help them use video to further their service to the community. Over the years, we've offered these grants to 42 community-based organizations, 141 individual producers have received production education grants. We've awarded over $1.3 million to community organizations and over $100,000 in individual production grants. And we've done all of this -- including running 4 channels 24 hours a day, 7 days a week -- for less than the cost of one can of Coca Cola per subscriber per month.

Put in other terms, our annual budget is less that what it costs for George, Elaine, and Kramer for one episode of "Seinfeld." So we think we're cost-effective.

I've left remarks for you so I won't go over all the information that's in the remarks, but I would like to mention some of the groups that we work with.

We work with the Abyssinian Baptist Church, conducting media-literacy workshops for youth with a video production component.

We work with the Community Association of Progressive Dominicans, in which youth have worked as peer educators and assistant instructors to 11- to 13-year-olds, developing programming on topics such as HIV education and violence prevention.

We've worked with the Chinese Staff and Workers Association, which includes training of gross-roots organizers and activists, to help organize the sweat shops that abound in New York City.

We work with the Community Food Resource Center through the Community Media Project, providing community screenings, training, and programming that documents and informs the public about the effects of recent welfare reforms.

We've worked with the Education Video Center, which conducts video classes in the public high schools.

We've worked with the Friends of Harlem Hospital, training youth in video production and community screening programming focusing on youth on issues of injury prevention.

We've worked with the Stanley Isaac's Neighborhood Center Project supported by regularly-scheduled programming produced by adult literacy students.

And we've worked with the Women's Prison Association. This is a 150-year-old organization that works with women who are incarcerated, helping them in the reunification center, using video to help the children understand the situation that their mothers are in and how they can become citizens in their own respect with an identity separate from this.

This is just a short view. But I'd like to, in closing, just talk a little bit about what our future plans are because I've had the opportunity to travel, not only throughout the United States, but in conjunction with the Alliance for Community Media, to Hungary, Romania to North Africa, to Russia, to talk about what we're doing here, and they're very, very interested because many of these people have come out of totalitarian systems, and they understand exactly the importance of all of this. I was about to travel to St. Petersberg with President Carter to help them understand how they can an autonomous television, including public access.

But one of the things that I did understand too is that there's a community development component to all of this, that it's useless to tell people they have the opportunity to speak without giving them the resources to be able to speak. And so it's important for to us, as people who run public access centers, to understand how our center can help develop underdeveloped communities economically too. So in the remarks that I've given you, I've included remarks that were given to our borough president, talking about how we can set up our center to be an incubator system, not only offering training, but providing a hub for economic development in areas that need organizations such as ours.

So, you know, once again, I want to thank you for allowing me to come here and speak to you. If you have any questions about controversial programming, I've prided myself on the ability to deal with this in a positive and effective manner for creating tolerance in the community, and I'd be glad to answer it.

Thank you.

COUNCILMAN COHEN: Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

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