Me-ness

Attillah Springer got her start in the media after her mother refused to let her volunteer on the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior. She started in the newsroom at  96.1WEFM and also wrote a series of vignettes on the history of the steelband called ‘Pan is a Jumbie’ as part of the station’s ‘Carnival of the Mind’.  She also started writing for the Sunday Express Vox magazine, before leaving for Jamaica to read for a BA in Media and Communication. It was while engaging inner city residents on skin bleaching that she developed an interest in using media for advocacy and activism particularly for those whose voices remain silenced by mainstream agendas.

 

She has written a column and blog covering social, environmental and women’s issues for the Trinidad Guardian since 2002 when she moved to England.

 

In London she worked with the London Language and Literacy Unit’s programmes in migrant communities, empowering parents’ indigenous knowledge to engage their children with the English educational system.

 

She also co-edited a book of personal accounts of parents’ experiences with literacy and learning   and in her free time worked as a media volunteer with the Crossroads Women’s Centre with various women’s groups including Black Women’s Rape Action Project and the English Collective of Prostitutes.

 

She returned to Trinidad in 2005 and got involved assisting activists in the south Western peninsula in campaigning against aluminum smelters. In July 2007 she represented local environmentalists at the Global Impacts of Heavy Industry Conference in Reyjavik, Iceland and during the 2009 People’s Summit she designed and facilitated a media skills training workshop for activists and other frontline community workers with the Portland Grassroots Media Collective.  She remains an active part of the global movement to keep the lines of communication around environmental issues open across grassroots communities in South Africa, Iceland, India and Trinidad and Tobago.

 

Between 2006 and 2008 she produced and co-hosted New Voices a weekly television show exploring social, cultural, environmental and political concerns on Gayelle the Channel.

 

She returned to Gayelle the Channel in 2010 as part of a new team to redefine news where new technologies are central to the telling of community and global stories.  She brings an interest in environmental, social and cultural issues to her post.

 

Her first passion remains writing (not tree hugging, for her mother’s sake) and she has contributed pieces on contemporary Caribbean culture to regional and international magazines including Caribbean Beat, Another Magazine and recently was commissioned by Tate Modern to write an essay on Trinidad to accompany the 2010 exhibition of critically acclaimed artist Chris Ofili  and the summer of 2010 wrote on the work of second generation Trinidadian multi-media artist Zak Ove for his 2010 show Past Future in Berlin.

In her spare time she is a DJ, a hobby that evolved out of the successful Artist Community Centre Alice Yard’s Friday night sessions ‘Conversations in the Yard’ spearheaded by Sheldon Holder of 12 the Band. In 2010 she was part of a collective of musicians and djs calling themselves the Fringe Movement who staged a successful Fringe Festival at the annual Tobago Jazz Experience.

She is also a director of Idakeda Group a collective of women in her family creating cultural interventions for social change especially among women and youth in socially vulnerable communities in Trinidad and Tobago.