Author: Ingrid Hu Dahl

July 19 – 22, 2007 San Jose State University
Deadline: April 15, 2007
What is the Social Justice Training Institute?
Since December of 1998, the Social Justice Training Institute has been providing an opportunity for individuals committed to issues of inclusion to develop their skills in the areas of dialogue and connectedness. Over 400 professional colleagues have participated in this experience to date. We are now expanding the experience to include an opportunity for students to gather and do some “personal work” related to social justice issues. The institute is open to 60
undergraduate students on college and university campuses in the U.S. and abroad. This advanced experience is for students who have done a fairly significant amount of work on social justice issues.
Six alumni will join two or three SJTI faculty to complete the facilitation team.
Institute Format
The Social Justice Training Institute will provide an intensive developmental opportunity for students to examine the complex dynamics of oppression and to develop strategies to foster positive change on their campuses and in their communities.
Students who attend the institute will be given the opportunity to explore the identities that make up who they are and better understand the extent to which these identities impact all they do. Through facilitated activities and exercises along with small group dialogue, participants will engage in conversations that will challenge and support them in their journey toward understanding how they can each – individually – impact our global community. To this
end, each student will be asked to obtain a “partner” from their home campus and to develop a Social Justice Commitment (SJC) detailing personal growth goals, an intervention that will impact their home campus and ways in which they can contribute to their community. The partner must be a faculty member, staff member or administrator on the student’s home campus. Participants will work with their partner after the institute to continue their growth
process and to implement their SJC.
Additional information can be found at: http://www.sjti.org/home_student.html

Sesame Street Kosovo (originally launched in 2004 and again in 2006) are thirty minute shows on TV that combine education with tolerance. The program is based on existing segments from Sesame Workshop’s international library, but combined with locally produced live action films that are incorporated into the television series. These two-minute films depict the everyday lives of children from a variety of backgrounds and provide a window through which viewers can learn about the traditions and experiences of others.
The show is the first locally produced educational media initiative in the area – and the first that provides children of diverse ethnic backgrounds with age-appropriate messages encouraging respect for each other.
UNICEF is producing a round of outreach materials for use in a variety of learning environments to extend the educational messages of the series to Kosovo’s most remote areas.
Read a full article at UNICEF’s web page here.

Documentary Media Studies Program
Presented by The New School in New York
Deadline: April 16 (for fall 2007)
The Department of Media Studies at The New School is now accepting applications for its fall 2007 Documentary Media Studies certificate program. Launched in September 2006, this one-year intensive program is designed for college graduates and working professionals interested in hands-on documentary filmmaking. Working closely with faculty and visiting filmmakers like D.A. Pennebaker and Peter Davis, students are encouraged to use the documentary medium to create works of social and political significance.
IFP Narrative Rough Cut Lab
Deadline: April 27
IFP runs two labs annually to instill “readiness” for feature filmmakers. The program is open to first-time narrative filmmakers who have shot all or a substantial amount of the footage required for their features but who have not completed post-production. The 4-day labs are held June 12-15 in New York City and provide a dynamic system of feedback and advice on technical, creative and post-production issues ranging from music clearance to creative editorial problems to festival strategies. The lab is free for the selected projects. (The Documentary Lab deadline is Sept. 10 for Lab dates of Nov. 6-9.)

With the nonprofit What Kids Can Do http://www.whatkidscando.org as a springboard, young people are documenting global change through photographs, essays, and audio, and drawing interest from students and teachers across the hemispheres.
The voices of eight students at Beijing High School No. 12 this week contributed the latest entry on the WKCD website, “Life in New China.” Speaking candidly in English and Chinese, teenagers talk about such high school universals as friendship, art, sports, lunch, and school uniforms.
Launched with help from the Asia Society, the China pages also contain side-by-side photographs and commentary in which students show the rapid changes in their city’s culture. One can even download a multimedia Chinese- English “dictionary” featuring the voices of younger students as they translate captions for photos of Beijing.
In the rural Tanzanian village of Kambi ya Simba, secondary school students who had never before held a camera helped create the book In Our Village: Kambi Ya Simba Through the Eyes of Its Youth, published in late 2006 by Next Generation Press. Their interviews, photographs, and videos, posted at http://www.inourvillage.org, have sparked spin-off projects in
far-flung places from Guatemala to Los Angeles.
Another ambitious project on has WKCD working with youth in Delhi and San Francisco to document the effects of globalization in their communities. Part of a worldwide collaboration sponsored by Adobe Youth Voices, it will result in mixed-media pieces produced by young people supplied with digital cameras, tape recorders, and Adobe creative software.
Immigrant and refugee youth in southeast London are creating digital stories about their resettlement. Youth in Bangalore are working on a “Day in the Life” photo essay.
“It’s all part of our commitment to make global what is local, and local what is global,” says What Kids Can Do president Barbara Cervone.
See full story at PRNewswire.

South Africa is hosting the 5th World Summit on Media for Children (5WSMC), which starts on Saturday March 24 and runs to March 28 in Johannesburg.
The theme of the summit is “Media as a Tool for Global Peace and Democracy.”
It’s organised by the Children and Broadcasting Foundation for Africa, in partnership with SABC, ICASA, and The Department of Communications and with support from Telkom and the Media Diversity and Development Agency.
The summit will bring together 1,000 local and international media professionals, government and NGOs working in the area of quality media for children with a specific aim of developing a comprehensive children’s media policy framework, to highlight sustainable solutions for high quality content.
For more information visit www.5wsmc.com

Ibrahim Abdul-Matin is the technology organizer at Movement Strategies Center in Oakland, California. Sure, you can read his colorful bio on the MSC website here to learn that he is a writer, blogger, and networker. But what you may not know about Ibrahim is that he enjoys moleskin notepads, brooklyn, east coast snow; that he used to be a scholarship football player, was a founding member and host of an event called of Rudemovements at NYC”s APT.
Ibrahim rocks. He balances working as a youth media professional and producing events in the world of progressive music. The Rude crew has produced two albums on vinyl that are rare and well-received in the international underground DJ scene:
http://www.rudemovements.net/002/index.html. Ibrahim was also a founding editor of Wentied magazine and regularly pitches, writes stories and recruits young activist writers for WireTap Magazine.
Read a recent article about Ibrahim’s projects:
http://www.colorlines.com/article.php?ID=176

Letter from the Editor
Welcome to March 2007 (Volume 1: Issue 3) of Youth Media Reporter (YMR).
I had the fortune to travel to the Portland, OR and San Francisco, CA the last week of February to meet several key figures in the youth media field—all of whom are exceptional, unique, and radical people—and to perform at Noise Pop with my band Boyskout. My time out west was truly inspirational and I would like to thank everyone I met for their time, insights, and shared dialogue.
Based on the success of this trip, YMR will visit several other cities to meet youth media professionals: New York City (our own backyard) in April, Baltimore, MD & Washington, D.C. in May, and Chicago, IL in the summer. If you would like to meet up for coffee and discuss your work, youth leaders, and organization, feel free to contact me directly.
After meeting over twenty diverse youth media professionals on the west coast, I realized that each of us has our own radiant, brilliant, and almost humorous stories about ourselves, and how we entered this field. These are stories that would be of interest and value to current or future colleagues. As a resource that serves professionals and leaders in the youth media field, YMR will now feature a spotlight on a professional’s life every month. Along with a photo, individuals will explain what they were doing before their youth media profession, their inspiration or motivation to join the youth media community as well as short facts about their life and experiences.
Taking time out of our busy lives to learn about our shared and different pathways to this field can not only put the faces to names, but also build bonds we may not otherwise discover. Let us know if you or someone you know should be a featured youth media professional.
In our next YMR issue, I will write a reflection piece on the youth media professionals I met in the bay area. Many are also future contributors to YMR: stay tuned.
It is our hope that as a youth media professional, you will find the perspectives and learned outcomes in each article refreshing, enlightening, and resourceful. As a field-building initiative, we hope to continue serving the youth media field, expand its’ audience, and make a difference as we go.
Thank you for your continued support and enjoy this month’s issue.
Warmly,
Ingrid Hu Dahl
Editor, YMR
Report from the field and make a difference!

Youth groups around Scotland have been researching and writing the site, www.time-travellers.org.uk, which includes photographs, interviews and sections on history and modern culture. Shantelle, 15, from Edinburgh, said: “We want to show them what we’re really like and get some more positive feedback. “A lot of travellers get bullied at school, so I don’t really talk about it very much. People don’t understand us.”
To read an article about these young gypsies, go to: http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com/edinburgh.cfm?id=364492007

The Common Language Project offers media literacy and production workshops in a variety of educational settings throughout the United States and Canada. Their curriculum varies according to educational level, and can be custom tailored to specific classroom needs.
For middle school and high school classes they cover basic media literacy, discussing the role of independent media in society and issues of diversity and ownership in media. They also offer trainings on basic multimedia production.
For undergraduate and graduate courses they cover multimedia production, the nuts and bolts of international reporting and web-publishing, and career development in independent media.
They provide workshops free of charge for public schools in Western Washington, and often ask for little more than the cost of transportation from other institutions.
CLP is traveling and may be in your area. Contact CLP to find out and to schedule a workshop.
To find out more, or to schedule a workshop, email: education@clpmag.org.
About The Common Language Project:
The Common Language Project is a nonprofit online multimedia magazine and collective commmitted to covering underreported issue as well as teaching young people how to critically consume media as well as how to create their own content. The CLP offers free media literacy workshops in any public middle schools and high schools.
www.commonlanguageproject.net

The MediaSnackers monthly vodcast is a fifteen minute shot
(more or less) of yummy-youth-media-goodness: http:// mediasnackers.com/focus/vodcasts/
MediaSnackers podcast #72 features Joshua Boltuch, one of the co-founders of Amie Street, a music- focussed social networking site with a totally different music sales/revenue model.
http://mediasnackers.com/report/2007/March/07/294/