Overview

Over a decade at SCVTV, I built and ran the production infrastructure behind a wide range of nonprofit, civic, and community-benefit media — recurring editorial formats, mission-driven fundraising content, live civic and crisis coverage, hybrid productions built for organizations without the budget or bandwidth to produce this work themselves, and documentary work preserving local institutional history.

This case study looks at that body of work not as a portfolio of individual projects, but as a system: one designed to serve resource-limited organizations reliably, over years, not just for a single campaign.

Background

I moved through SCVTV from Reporter to Producer to Station Manager to Executive Director, and the nonprofit-facing work grew in both scale and depth over that arc.

A meaningful part of that depth came from being embedded on the community side, not just the production side — I served on:

• Board of Directors Member, Santa Clarita Valley Education Foundation

• Advisor, College of the Canyons Career Technical Education (CTE) Advisory Committee

• Advisor, William S. Hart Union High School District College & Career Readiness/ Career Technical Education Advisory Committee

• Advisor, Boys & Girls Club of Santa Clarita Valley

• Advisor, Bridge to Home

• Advisor, College of the Canyons Alumni Network

• Advisor, Arts for Santa Clarita

• Member, Santa Clarita Valley Nonprofit Leaders Network

• Member, Santa Clarita Valley Fourth of July Parade Committee

• Member, Zonta Club of Santa Clarita Valley

That meant the organizations I was producing for weren't clients in the transactional sense; I understood their missions and constraints from the inside.

I also pursued training specific to this kind of work — the Center for Nonprofit Management's Nonprofit Management and Grant Writing certificate programs (2023) — which shaped how I approached fundraising-adjacent production and organizational partnerships.

The Challenge

Nonprofit, civic, and cultural organizations generally can't staff or fund production the way a commercial client can. The recurring problems this work had to solve:

• No in-house capacity to produce consistent, quality video content

• Content that has to move an audience to act — donate, attend, show up — not just inform

• High-stakes, emotionally sensitive moments (a community vigil) that leave no room for a redo

• Institutional histories and milestones (a 100-year-old newspaper, a city's founding, a historic theater) at risk of going undocumented without someone willing to do the research and produce it

• A media landscape where traditional local coverage — and the PEG funding supporting it — was already shrinking, raising the bar for what independently-produced content needed to accomplish

My Role

Across this work, I held a mix of production and organizational roles: Executive & Creative Producer, Director, Interviewer, Technical Producer/Director, livestream lead, camera, and editor, depending on the project's scale and the organization's capacity. On several projects, I was also a standing advisory committee member, shaping strategy and messaging alongside the organization rather than just executing a brief handed to me. On the documentary work, my role often extended into research, screenwriting, and interviewing, building the narrative from primary sources rather than just capturing coverage.

Approach

The work breaks into five formats, each solving a different version of the resource or preservation problem:

Recurring infrastructure

SCVTV's Community Corner (150+ episodes, 900+ segments) was built as a rotating pipeline so any local organization, from the Sheriff's Station to nonprofits like Carousel Ranch, could get a professionally produced segment without a bespoke production build each time.