Making Waves

Since April 1997 the Rockefeller Foundation, through its Communications Office in New York under the leadership of Denise Gray-Felder, has been promoting a series of meetings among communications specialists to reflect on communication for social change at the hinge of the millennium. These meetings in Bellagio, Italy, Cape Town, South Africa, and New York, New York, have helped to define the questions, rather than the models. They contributed to the creation of a position paper that has been widely distributed in print and through various Web sites, in English, Spanish and French. Some issues discussed during the meetings — and also through e-mail exchanges between meetings — lead the group to realize that much of the ideal communication processes that involve people could be found in a number of grassroots experiences in a variety of forms in many developing countries. The need for more research that would bring to light relevant information on experiences of participatory communication for social change war. That is how this exercise came to life.