Tom Clinton, Executive Director of Community Media Center, sits by audio equipment in the studio for community radio station WYCE.
LEGAL NEWS PHOTOS BY CYNTHIA PRICE
By Cynthia Price
Legal News
Tom Clinton, former Varnum attorney, former in-house counsel with Touch Revolution in Holland, former co-organizer of SiTE:LAB art venues, has now landed at the Community Media Center (CMC).
But Clinton appears to see all those phases of his career as continuous, saying, “There are a lot of aspects of this job that my legal training is relevant to.” And there is certainly continuity in giving support to the democratic process then as now.
“Democracy works better when people have avenues to share their opinions and their stories,” Clinton says. “At the end of the day we exist, really, to facilitate that.”
All the different initiatives of CMC respect its initial mission: to provide access for all to media outlets and media resources.
Originally founded in 1980 as Grand Rapids Cable Access Center (GRCAC), the organization’s first project was GRTV. The first live broadcast of that public access channel was in 1982, and in 1989 the community radio station WYCE?came under the GRCAC umbrella. Under the leadership of Dirk Koning, one of the founders, GRCAC changed its name to Community Media Center in 1993.
Clinton says, “Subsequent to GRTV, Dirk started up various permutations of the IT Department. There were many forms that took along the way, but the IT people have developed a lot of websites for non-profits over the years.”
Other well-known functions of CMC have been training individuals and groups in media production, establishing a sort of lending library of production tools, including cameras, and creating Public Service Announcements for non-profit organizations. A GRTV program showcases individual non-profits each week, which will continue, Clinton says.
CMC created the Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy or GRIID, and still engages in media literacy. In 2005, CMC acquired the Wealthy Theater, which had been revitalized through a broad community effort but needed the financial backing of a larger organization.
More recently, CMC launched The Rapidian, an online citizen-journalism project, which focuses on placemaking and local news.
All of these continue to thrive under their respective managers, about which Clinton comments, “The staff here is pretty stable and they all do their jobs well, including the business manager. And, for example, Eric Wilson who’s been running the theater does it really well. So it wasn’t like I stepped into a crisis or had a lot of fires to put out.
“The last director Laurie Cirivillo, who’s still in town, and the interim E.D., Kayem Dunn, have both been really generous with their time.”
Many of the tasks Clinton faces as will take advantage of his legal background. “A lot of what I do as the E.D. involves contracts and agreements, including the collaborations we do with other groups, our contract with the city of Grand Rapids. and franchise agreements with cable providers,” he notes.
“While the specifics of the media environment are new to me,” he continues, “my background allows me to size up factual settings quickly. When I was a bankruptcy attorney, I had to quickly gain an understanding of what was going on, so I have no trouble doing that here even with so much happening.”
Clinton got an undergraduate degree in political science from the University of Michigan and followed that up with a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School.
After graduation, he worked at Varnum in the Chapter 11 bankruptcy area, representing both debtors and lenders. Upon his decision to return to Kendall College of Art and Design to study printmaking, he went to a part-time contractual corporate counsel role with Optera in Holland, formerly called Magna Donnelly, now called Touch Revolution. During that time Clinton was still also a Varnum employee. In 2002, he graduated from Kendall with his BFA, but he continued his work for the Holland firm.
He concurrently volunteered his time in an administrative role with SiTE:LAB, in which he organized art displays and exhibits in a variety of spaces along with co-founder Paul Amenta. SiTE:LAB has been judged the number one venue at ArtPrize more than once.
Clinton is himself a visual artist. In a previous article in the Grand Rapids Legal News on the occasion of SiTE:LAB’s receiving a Strong Voices award for his community involvement from the Progressive Women’s Alliance, Clinton said that he often encountered people who think he cut back on his legal career to pursue his art because he hated practicing law, but he actually loved and enjoyed it.
He emphasizes that his experience with SiTE:LAB also furthers his ability to do the director job at CMC. “Part of what I do here is facilitate projects by creative people,” he explains. “That what SiTE:LAB does, so there are a lot of crossovers.”
Clinton, who had also been a programmer for WYCE?in the late 1990s to early 2000s, explains that in the near future CMC as a whole intends to pursue all of its successful programs, but add a few new dimensions.
“Over time GRTV’s reason for being has really changed quite a bit,” Clinton explains. “With YouTube and video cameras on phones you don’t necessarily require a TV broadcast as a way to share with the public. In some ways the video production tools and availability of a studio have become more important. So now we’re looking at educational offerings and use of equipment to help people produce higher quality content. This includes the technical side, how to get good sound quality and light the video properly, but it also includes more intangible things like interview techniques and how to tell a story.”
The other area of focus is captured in the project’s name, “Elevating Voices.” With Kellogg Foundation funding, CMC?reaches out into the community to share its assets.
Clinton says, “Even though these video tools are widespread, there are still parts of the community that just aren’t able to avail themselves of them. So instead of only inviting the public to come here, we’re teaming up with a lot of non-profits to integrate the people they serve into what we do — giving a voice to the people who often haven’t had a voice. We’ve done videos at events like the one by Disability Advocates of Kent County Rosa Parks Circle, and with groups of people such as Heartside artists.
“One of the biggest shifts?I’ve seen in public policy is in the treatment of gays and lesbians,” Clinton continued. “That didn’t come about from legislators making strong policy arguments, it came about through sharing individual stories. When the population began to understand those stories, it was seismic how much public opinion changed.”
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