COMMIT was founded in 2010 as a non-profit-organization and works to extend and improve further training for community media practitioners in Austria and in Europe. COMMIT organizes trainings and develops concepts for further education in the field of community media and adult learning. COMMIT works towards professionalization and formal recognition of community media training and of the acquired skills. COMMIT’s next events can be found on their website: http://commit.at/nc/veranstaltungen/ (in German).
Organizational members of COMMIT are most community radio and community TVs in Austria. Personal members are several experts from the connected scientific fields. Besides its core activities in media training for its members and other adult education organizations COMMIT works in the field of research, for the media authority, ministry of education and lastly for the Council of Europe report Spaces of Inclusion – an explorative study on needs of refugees and migrants in the domain of media communication and on responses by community media.
COMMIT runs its operations mainly based on funding from the Austrian non-commercial broadcasting fund and project support from the Ministry of Education and several EU-Programs.
COMMIT is based in Bad Eisenkappel and runs an office in Vienna:
COMMIT – Vienna Office
Prinz-Eugen-Straße 72, 1.5
A-1040 Vienna
Contact:
Helmut Peissl (director) hp@commit.at
Mobile: +43 650 49 48 774
„The prior challenge for COMMIT is to support and motivate a maximum of all people active in community media to develop further their program and their competencies not only to bring their topics and perspectives on the air but also to be for a larger public an alternative source of information. Concerning the recognition of CM we are convinced that our experience and capacity to deliver training on media and information literacy in a time of disinformation and hateful debate should reach much more recognition by educational institutions and by politics.
We are proud that we work closely together with the national institute for adult education to strengthen the perspective of critical media literacy which has to include a transformative aspect and the awareness that media systems are always also systems of economic and political power. This perspective is mainly of high relevance when we reach out to disadvantaged or vulnerable individuals or groups. All too often the paradigm of “lifelong learning” with its promise of training for a better employability masks the need for social change in times of increasing inequalities.”
COMMIT offers approx. 20 workshops and seminars per year which attract each year close to 300 participants, community media volunteers and staff members coming from all 17 community Radios and TVs across Austria. At our Vienna office we work with a core team of three staff members and some 30 independent trainers. With regular participation in European projects we contribute to the exchange on the European level and bring ideas and experience from Europa to our local members. Among the most recent projects were the coordination of the report ‘Spaces of Inclusion’ (with the Council of Europe), participation in the Media against Hate project (project website, training modules) and Ethical Media Training for Active Citizenship. The new project, SMART-Trainers and New Neighbours, both also with CMFE as partner, are starting right in autumn 2018 and early 2019. [Text: December 2018]
Title page of Spaces of Inclusion, 2018