As I study the now global field of youth and community development, I see a critical opportunity arising out of the interaction of new media creation tools and a new breed of facilitators who understand their unique organizing capacity. My current hypothesis is: when outside facilitation methods are more open and iterative, youth development programs will be more responsive and demonstrate deeper learning of participatory media skills, across cultural contexts.

The two cases explored in this paper are: my summer internship experience with the alternative education programs of Drishya (in partnership with Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, India) and a class-based youth organizing and media project with YouthBuild Lawrence (Massachusetts). My analysis is a narrative of how I, as a facilitator from outside a community, applied similar process-oriented methods when planning and implementing programs in these two contexts. My attempted facilitation methods were: (1) choosing from both low and high-tech tools, (2) designing curriculum iteratively and (3) decentralizing instruction.

Upon reflection, this study found that each program was constrained by surprisingly similar mediating contextual factors, but still produced the outcomes of some participatory development processes. Based on these rays of hope, I conclude that these programs could continue to advance if local facilitation is further tempered by the values of “produsage,” because these values are inherent in the tools of new media.