Savvy Chavvy
How social networks can bring a new sense of community to excluded groups
This social network has evolved in an unusual way. It started in early 2008 as a citizen journalism training initiative for marginalised communities. Funding of £82,000 was provided to enable 50 young Gypsies and Travellers to use social media, and a website using the free Ning platform was used to link the widely dispersed students with their trainers and each other.
Within two months many more Gypsies had signed up to the discussions as the users themselves decided to use the site as their own private social network. These young people are subjected to racist abuse, and rather than broadcasting their stories in public, what they needed was a private space to socialise. The award-winning Savvy Chavvy site now has 2200 members – a high proportion of the Traveller community – and is widely used for exchanging photos and video clips and joining campaigns. Natural leaders have emerged who have now been trained to administer and moderate the site.
The term ‘chavvy’ is a traditional one for a young Gypsy or Traveller, and savvy means smart. The Savvy Chavvy project was originally designed to help young Gypsies and Travellers find a stronger voice in the world by using social media by producing podcasts and videos about their communities.
The Mediabox fund provided support via UnLtd and Media for Development, and On Road Media was commissioned to identify five partner Gypsy groups, buy equipment for each group, carry out five week-long training courses for 50 Gypsies and to provide ongoing support once the network was up and running. UnLtd gave awards of £1000 to each group to produce ten short films between them, and Mediabox matched this funding. The total funding to date has been £82,000, of which less than one tenth was spent on equipment and insurances.
Nathalie McDermott of On Road Media led the first phase of the project with five months of funding from December 2007 to April 2008. Nathalie is a consultant who specialises in working with marginalised communities, introducing them to new technologies and giving them the skills to use them. Most of the equipment was loaned free of charge. The two trainers also provided equipment for videos and podcasts – Olympus audio recorders and Sanyo Xacti cameras, laptops – at an approximate cost of £1000 per group.
While they succeeded in training fifty young people to produce compelling content, they soon found the project taking a different direction, and a life of its own. The young people found their voices – but preferred to converse in the safe space of a closed online social network, where they would not be subjected to the racist abuse commonly applied to Gypsies on the open web.
In each case the young people had to be associated with a social hub – a youth group or school – so that they could have a sustainable way of carrying on with citizen journalism activities. The project team had set up an online site on the free social networking platform Ning, and the young people quickly started to produce and share rich content on a number of different themes. These included what it is like to live on a camp site, the history of Gypsy and Traveller communities, and boxing – a strong tradition among these communities.
The site soon started to reach beyond the original fifty members and attract other young Gypsy people to sign up and join in discussions. During month two of the project, the participants decided to accept the change in direction as a reality and make Savvy Chavvy a social rather than citizen journalism space. The video equipment is still available for use but it is no longer the main focus of the project.
Nathalie explains: “Savvy Chavvy has become a social network where people do all the things that social networks are so good at supporting. They have brilliant discussions, they posts photos, video, they do everything that young people do well. They flirt with each other, they make friends, they make connections.”
“But they are also doing serious things – like having discussions about racism, bullying and Travellers dropping out of school. They run campaigns about sites that have been closed. It is a hotbed of activity for young Gypsies and Travellers in a safe space which they don’t have elsewhere on the web – which I think this is one of the main reasons it took off.”
About 2200 people had registered on the site by November 2008. Nathalie observes: “It may not sound like a large number of people, but for the travelling community, which is a relatively small one, it is huge number and they are heavily using the site.”
Nathalie believes that one reason why the site has grown rapidly is because it is ‘owned’ by the users. Originally – during the citizen journalism phase – the administrators were to have been youth leaders. However, natural leaders have now emerged from the online community itself, and they have been given training both in site administration and on how to deal with difficult situations online. To start with there were problems with open registration because people were subjected to racist abuse from non-Gypsies joining the site. The newly skilled administrators and facilitators have evolved rules for the site and instituted a registration system designed to ensure that only young Gypsies and Travellers can participate.
“It’s great to have a site where you feel comfortable and safe discussing these things,” says Rosina Hughes, a 17-year-old from Wareham, Dorset. “You’re all dirty” and “you’re all scum”, are some of the racist responses she says she has received on other social networking sites. “They have Gypsy hate groups, so it’s important that we have our own space”, she says.
Savvy Chavvy is not just a success in the eyes of those using the site. The site has gained national media coverage, and in July 2008, Prime Minister Gordon Brown presented Savvy Chavvy with the Catalyst Community Award for innovative use of social technology to support communities. And the Guardian praised Savvy Chavvy for reclaiming the term ‘chav’ from its use as a term of abuse. Although it failed to create a network of citizen journalists, the project has succeeded in giving excluded young people a voice – by giving them a place to be heard.
Nathalie concludes that at the beginning of a project like this it is essential to spend plenty of time developing meaningful and authentic relationships with partner groups within the community. This part was rushed for Savvy Chavvy because of the timetabling requirements of the funding agreement. Nathalie now feels that this was one of the reasons for the citizen journalism part of the project has not been continuing as the network flourishes. “The site would not have worked if it had been a way of showing other people what Gypsy lives were like. Young Gypsies do not want to feel they are in some sort of zoo. What they needed was a safe space to build their own community.”
Savvy Chavvy has provided a place where the users have been able to reclaim the term ‘chav’ as their own traditional description of a young Gypsy or Traveller. During development of the social network, new volunteer facilitators and ambassadors for its work have emerged. With additional training they have set their own rules for access. These newly skilled facilitators and users are displaying great enthusiasm and commitment. Nathalie believes that this, and the free nature of the Ning platform, means that the Savvy Chavvy project has a strong chance of sustaining its activity now that external funding for the project has ended.
Nathalie McDermott’s lessons from the Savvy Chavvy project
- Make sure the existing leaders in the community understand and embrace what is planned - but do not expect them necessarily to be the leaders online.
- Be prepared for the community to reshape the objectives. It will thrive if it meets real needs, and ambassadors will emerge.
- Investment in people - their training and support - is more important than investment in technology.
- Keep it simple, and make sure that when people go home after training they can do everything for themselves without further training.
- Keep the ongoing costs of the technology low, and if possible free.
- Sustainability is achieved through low costs and ownership of the project by the community.
- Be prepared to use commercial platforms to achieve this, rather than bespoke sites that require continuing technical support.
- Do not assume that marginalised communities will necessarily want to build communication bridges to the mainstream. They may be more concerned about creating a safe space for themselves.
