🎙️Your media arts & culture news 📷 ALLIANCE eBulletin April 2021

🎙️Your media arts & culture news 📷 ALLIANCE eBulletin April 2021

Welcome to a special Youth Media edition of the Alliance eBulletin – we are excited to share with you the goals and vision of our programming in youth media and invite all members and partners into the work with us. The National Youth Media Network is a longstanding Alliance program designed to connect, support and elevate a diverse and visionary group of intergenerational media artists, youth media-focused organizations, educators, practitioners and culture workers across the country. Over the last five years, our national program was co-envisioned and co-led by Bay Area-based producers Jason Wyman and Myah Overstreet who together developed a Fellows program of youth arts leaders who reimagined how the Alliance could best serve our emerging artists and our communities and create new models for the field.

At the beginning of the pandemic, our Youth Media Network team held weekly gatherings, so members could share stories of what was happening locally and brainstorm strategies for how to respond. Our Fellows produced interactive virtual sessions and extraordinary comic zines on Being Good Ancestors, Rebuilding Systems, Redefining Normal, and Making Access Tangible – in preparation for our 2nd Annual Youth Media Virtual Summit. We gathered and curated articles, websites, books, videos, and resource guides to expand our collective thinking and discover even more connection and possibility. This work, and this group, inspired me every day of the week.

 

In Jason’s 2020 End-of-Year letter, he wrote:

 

“For the past five years, I have had the honor to tend to and care for The Alliance Youth Media Network. Looking back, I see a multi-racial, multi-gender, intergenerational, youth-centered, cross-geographic, issue-oriented, emergent, and decentralized autonomous collective that co-creates small, accessible, healing, liberatory, inquiry-initiated, art-and-story-based virtual and physical gatherings. And when I look into its future, I see a myriad directions and possibilities…it is overwhelmingly beautiful.” 

 

Kapi’olani  (Pio) Lee and Aimee Espiritu have created a model for that future.  The 2021 program is called The Youth Media Leadership Workshop. Pio says, “…we believe that your story is powerful, that it is yours alone, and that what you share is meant to be shared. The Youth Media Leadership Workshop is designed to provide an intergenerational youth-centered space that supports its participants in their storytelling practice by exploring new skills and knowledge through inquiry and project-based learning. We also believe that the Youth Media field has answers (especially during these times) that others can learn from, and we will be presenting the results of our inquiry-based work at our national Youth Media Summit in July as an example of youth leadership.”


Kapi’olani  (Pio) Lee                                Aimee Espiritu

Our new Fellows will join Aimee and Pio producing the Summit – a virtual gathering designed to lift up, center, and name the spaces and places where youth and young adults create with and for each other. The Summit will be a week-long online event in July, and will feature youth-led presentations and workshops, a Leadership Lab with Aimee Espiritu, virtual roundtables that explore critical questions posed by our network members and youth artists, as well as a festival of new youth media videos, stories and multimedia produced by our members. Check out upcoming activities and the Summit agenda on the website. If you’d like to get involved, contact Pio at kapi’olani@thealliance.media

As we move deeper into 2021 and look towards 2022, The Alliance is building more intentional connections between the Youth Media Leadership Workshop and Arts2Work, the Innovation Studio projects, and our Exhibition and International programs. Centering the voices of youth and mentoring next generation creatives is a project for all of us.

~ Wendy
wendy@thealliance.media

Angelina Tuggle (Georgia)

Angelina Tuggle (Georgia)

Ana Isabel Soudaly (Minnesota)

Ana Isabel Soudaly (Minnesota)

Melina Kritikopoulos

Melina Kritikopoulos

Ana Isabel Soudaly (Minnesota)

Ana Isabel Soudaly (Minnesota)

Will Cavada (California)

Will Cavada (California)

Linsday Franklin

Linsday Franklin

Regan Kelly (Georgia)

Regan Kelly (Georgia)

re:imagineATL’s EmergeATL apprentencship program photographed by Nicholas T. Jones

Notes from the Field

re:imagine ATL Host Upcoming Festival and Seek Youth Apprenticeship Applications
On June first, The Alliance member re:imagineATL will be hosting  DreamFest Drive-In a drive in showcase of youth film from their #NoCommentFilm Fellowship. The fellowship is a year long mentorship program aimed at helping student filmmakers ages 16-19 learn to write, produce and pitch their films. Applications for the upcoming year of instruction are currently open and due by May 15th. The festival will also feature content from their college age Emerge: apprenticeship program.  Re:imagineATL call for locals to “Check it out and pull up to support the next generation of filmmaking talent coming out of Atlanta.”

Virtual Youth Programs Held Every Week by RYSE
The Alliance member RYSE has been continuing its diverse schedule of youth workshops virtually. Their calendar includes a variety of arts, educational, and activist oriented programming centered around the “belief that young people have the lived knowledge and expertise to identify, prioritize, and direct the activities and services necessary to thrive.”

PhillyCam’s Real Skills Program Supports Youth Media Makers
Studedents age 14-21 can participate in The Alliance member, PhillCam’s youth media program Reel Skills. The program “provide[s] access to equipment and other professional tools that help Philly youth explore various forms of media to examine and tell their own stories through their own lens.” Community media center PhillyCAM hosts a number of video programs including their series Student Docs with episodes like Moral of Murals in which “Student filmmaker Sean Park examines the effect of murals on a community and what these public artworks mean to the residents.”

Wide Angle Youth Media Hosting Spring 2021 Courses
Following their mission to “cultivate and amplify the voices of Baltimore youth to engage audiences across generational, cultural, and social divides” The Alliance member Wide Angle Youth Media is set to host a number of spring courses for Middle and High School artists including classes on graphic design, video content creation and public speaking.

MIGZI Continues First Person Productions
In addition to a variety of projects The Alliance member MIGZI is continuing their First Person Productions program. FPP aims to equip native youth with “21st century media skills.” The program “differentiates itself from other media programs because of the social enterprise aspect of the program which allows youth to develop not only expertise in videography and photography, but also management, digital marketing, and interpersonal skills.”

SpyHop Hosting Spring Workshops
Youth digital arts center SpyHop will continue hosting its wide spectrum of programming including their upcoming online Cinematic Photography workshop, as well as 2d animation and Video Game Sound Design media labs. They will also be broadcasting music from the Woodshedding class on a Twitch stream listening party on March 11th.

YouthFX Provides Fellowship and Production Company Experience for Youth
Albany, NY organization YouthFX is “teaching [youth] the technical and creative aspects of digital film making and media production” through their year-long fellowship program Next Doc and their production company Rougue FX.

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Media Policy Watch

by Priscilla G.

Washington State passed legislation to end restrictions on public broadband earlier this month according to Ars Technica. The bill which is currently awaiting approval from Washington’s Governor Jay Islee’s would overturn legislation that has been in place for 21 years prohibiting local government from providing broadband access directly to customers. ““The Public Broadband Act broadly authorizes all local governments to provide broadband to anyone—people who are totally unserved, people who have some internet access but it’s not affordable or reliable — any people at all,” Said the bill’s sponsor State Representative Drew Hansen in an article published by Motherboard.

Washington’s Bill accompanies Biden’s announcement late last month of a $100 Billion public broadband plan. Biden has stated that he wants affordable internet to be available to all Americans by the year 2029 as reported by Newsweek. According to the White House’s fact sheet the investment will  “reduce internet prices for all Americans, increase adoption in both rural and urban areas, hold providers accountable, and save taxpayer money.”

Last week Vice published an article celebrating urban farm New World Growers and Lobelia Commons— two successful food autonomy projects tied to the grassroots social media campaign #1400challenge. The #14000 challenge– a collaboration between the group Inhabit and communities across the country– seeks to turn pooled stimulus money into local, collective projects, and to design clear, replicable graphic guides for others to use. “Without us taking the reins ourselves, especially with our food, we are going to be beholden to the [rich] people that really don’t care about us,” says Michael Chaney, founder of New World Growers, highlighting the potential of such projects in the face of the precarious circumstances many currently face.

We want to hear from you. Are you concerned with any national media policy stories that are underreported? Are there any local stories in your area that need highlighting? Please let us know.