On the 14th March, MLI hosted the first ‘Lunch and Learn’ online event. Now that a return to the office is starting to take place the MLI team were conscious that people’s availability for the Media Literacy Monday webinars might be be different. In response, we are going to change the frequency of the Media Literacy Monday webinars to a quarterly basis and supplement them with these shorter, ad-hoc online sessions.
These lunch and learn webinars are designed to help MLI members focus on particular aspects of media literacy, over the course of a lunchtime, and hopefully act as a platform for learning, sharing information and prompting discussion about all aspects of media literacy, including interventions and activities.
For quite a while, two factors have regularly been identified as barriers to the effective promotion of media literacy – 1) lack of coordination at a national level, 2) funding.
Over the last three years, Media Literacy Ireland has been working to address the issue of coordination. Facilitated by the BAI, MLI has over 240 members from a very diverse range of sectors. Our work falls into four categories:
- ‘Coordination’ : where we aim to be an acknowledged first port of call in relation to media literacy queries and to provide support and advice for media literacy stakeholders (national and international).
- ‘Communication’: where we aim to foster discussion and debate around all aspects of media literacy in Ireland with a view to helping to identify emerging issues, gaps in provision, opportunities for collaboration.
- ‘Innovation’: where we try to inspire, encourage and facilitate the development of new media literacy projects, programmes and interventions, and encourage evaluation and sustainability, and
- ‘Promotion’ where we use the strength, reach and expertise of MLI members to collectively highlight media literacy related issues and sign-post to sources of support via multi-stakeholder public awareness campaigns.
So when it comes to providing strategic coordination in the area of media literacy we think, and we hope you agree, that significant progress has been made.
The second area that has long been identified as a challenge has been lack of funding for media literacy projects. So it was with great pleasure that we were able to offer a platform, via our ‘Lunch and Learn’ event, to three different funding streams that are now available to media literacy practitioners, academics and programme makers interested in promoting media literacy.
First to present was Luís Madureira Pires, Chairman of the Management Committee of the European and Media and Information fund who outlined the European Media and Information Fund (EMIF) calls with particular attention on the media literacy stream. For more information email info@emifund.eu.
The second presentation was from Orla Clancy, Creative Europe Desk Ireland outlining the current 2022 Creative Europe programme which includes a new Media Literacy funding call under the News Media strand of the programme. For more information on the Creative Europe funding call for media literacy email orla@creativeeuropeireland.eu
Last but certainly not least was Philp Cooper from the BAI who provided and overview of the Sound & Vision scheme and provided detail on the funding available under the Media Literacy theme. For more information email pcooper@bai.ie
