With the introduction of the portable and affordable Sony Portapak video camera in the 1960s, many videomakers formed collectives and experimented with different ways of using portable video technology in order to bring the perspectives of average citizens to the airwaves. These alternative, or "guerrilla," videomakers were interested in utilizing video technology as a catalyst for social change. University Community Video (UCV) was a guerrilla video collective based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This organization, founded in 1973, devoted itself to the creation of videos that expressed non-mainstream or socially progressive content, especially content that reflected the views of minorities, women, and the impoverished, groups whose concerns often were excluded from network programming. UCV also created a community access center through which they could train the public in how to use video technology as a means of community- or self-expression. UCV shared their own videos and those made by community members via two public television shows, Changing Channels and Everybody's T.V. Time. For over a decade, UCV served as a fascinating model for the production and instruction of community-based, activist-oriented video. Few other American video collectives from this time period were as successful as UCV in terms of reaching out to a surrounding community and ensuring that marginalized voices were given a televised outlet.

This study explores the history of University Community Video and examines the means through which its members created a viable model of alternative, community-based video that allowed for the expression of non-mainstream perspectives. In order to best understand UCV, multiple facets of the organization are considered, including its origins in the progressive politics of the youth movement in the late 1960s, the organization's cooperative structure, its democratic philosophical approach to the video medium, and the ways in which it interacted with its surrounding community. This study also examines UCV's decline as a community access and production center and eventual transformation into a regional media arts center, Intermedia Arts Minnesota, noting both the organization's successes as well as its shortcomings. Finally, how UCV's approach might have relevance for videomakers in today's world of affordable digital media is also taken into account.