Cities
Malletts Bay, Vermont
Brown Ledge Camp, the site of the initial training, is located on Malletts Bay on the shores of Lake Champlain, just north of Burlington, Vermont. It is a beautiful site, with cabins nestled on a rocky outcropping rising up from the lake. In September, the leaves are beginning to change, but the water holds much of the summer heat, so it’s still a great time to swim. The camp facilities include all the equipment necessary for sailing, canoeing, kayaking, windsurfing, waterskiing and wakeboarding. There are also clay tennis courts, an archery range and a large theatre. The camp brims with opportunities for recreation or relaxation in the beautiful natural surroundings, but when you yearn for a little more civilization, it’s only a fifteen-minute ride into the college town of Burlington, with its excellent shopping, restaurants and culture.
Burlington, Vermont
Just a few minutes from the training site at Brown Ledge Camp, Burlington is the largest city in Vermont and the home of the University of Vermont. Burlington is in many ways a charming New England town, but with its large student population and many visitors from throughout the nation, it has developed a strong cultural scene, with many musical and cultural venues as well as excellent restaurants. The city is anchored by Church Street Marketplace, a pedestrian mall at the heart of the city, which fills with shoppers, street performers and people-watchers every weekend.
During the training session, Burlington will be our civilized getaway, but it will also function as a laboratory for beginning to think about how to explore a city and mine its documentary potential. While Burlington is a fun city, it is still a city, and faces many typical urban issues—homelessness, drug addiction, global warming, immigration. Also, as a college town, it draws activists and rabble rousers as well as artists and musicians. All of these elements present great documentary subjects.
Salt Lake City, Utah
Salt Lake City is commonly associated with two things: Mormonism and mountains. While there is much more to this fascinating and livable city, Mormonism and mountains are part of what makes it so unique.
Salt Lake is, of course, the center of Mormonism, which is both the world's fastest growing religion and one that is often misunderstood. There is no better place to explore both its theological beliefs and its often complex societal ramifications. At the same time, Salt Lake City is not a uniformly Mormon city; the population is less than 50% Mormon, and within the LDS community there is tremendous variation in belief and culture. The city is characterized by constant negotiations between all the different elements of the community, which includes, among others, religious conservatives, partying skiers, environmentalists, gays and lesbians, and the recent wave of Mexican immigrants. These tensions make for a complicated and fascinating cultural/political dance. In addition, there are the larger tensions between generally tolerant Salt Lake City, which recently had the most progressive mayor in America, and the rest of Utah, much of which is extremely conservative. All these negotiations are great fodder for documentary work and create unique opportunities for interesting social action and community service.
Any photograph of Salt Lake reveals its beautiful setting, surrounded by magnificent mountains. These mountains are their own reward, and make Salt Lake a great base for exploring Utah, which has some of the most extraordinary natural beauty in the United States. But nature is also a source of struggle, with battles over water rights, uranium tailings, toxic dumping, and land use. The western states have been the site of many of the most heated, high-stakes environmental struggles, and since Salt Lake City is Utah's capitol, it is a great place to find environmental groups to work with and stories to tell.
Salt Lake City has some other, less predictable, appeals. It is a center of refugee resettlement; the International Rescue Committee is very active there helping refugees from Somalia and other parts of Africa to remake their lives in America. Again this offers the opportunity for both meaningful work and fascinating documentaries. Salt Lake City is also a center of industrial banking, much in the news of late, and because of the University of Utah, it has a wide array of groups and activities of interest to students.
For more information on Salt Lake City:
New Orleans, Louisiana
New Orleans needs no introduction; it is an obvious choice for a program emphasizing community service, documentary production and regional America. Equally famous for its music, its food, its playful atmosphere, and its post-Katrina struggles, it is a city that has always been unique and is now facing unique difficulties. Its creole background gave it an accent, a cuisine and a set of values far different from its Southern neighbors. The streets of New Orleans are visually identified by the intricate ironwork on the balconies and are aurally identified by the live music emanating from every bar. New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz, has always been known for its music, but what stands out about music there is not the extraordinary number of skilled professional musicians, it is the extraordinary number of skilled amateurs. In no other city is music so interwoven into daily life. The jazz funerals, the impromptu parades, the instruments that are passed down from parent to child—all these are marks of New Orleans’ idiosyncratic culture. Mardi Gras is not just a tourist attraction, it is an authentic expression of a, quirky, creative, fun-loving community. While New Orleans has for years been one of the poorest cities in America, it has also been the one where the highest percentage of residents described themselves as happy and where families stayed put for generations.
That is one side of New Orleans—musical, playful, relaxed, creative—and it is a side that makes for fascinating documentary possibilities. But the other side and its stories are equally clear and dramatic, the stories of a city where 80 percent of the houses were flooded, whose population has only now crept up to only half of its pre-Katrina level, a city trying to recreate itself with little money and shockingly little support from the federal government. This is a story of trying to rebuild an education system that was one of the worst in the nation even before its schools were flooded. It is a story of the intersections of race, poverty and governmental neglect. It is a story of how hard it is to rebuild a city from its foundations. New Orleans is in the process of recreating itself, and in doing so revealing how complicated and fragile a city’s structure is. There is nowhere in America more challenging, revelatory, heartbreaking and inspiring than New Orleans.