California Story Fund
Reaching Forward: Youth Voices for Change
Center for the Study of Regional Change
UC Davis
Project Director: Jonathan London
Youths to document and map neighborhood concerns
This project will involve youth leaders from the West Sacramento Youth Resource Coalition in creating digital stories and maps documenting neighborhood conditions that affect their lives and their hopes and dreams for the future. The coalition, which aims to give youths a stronger voice in their communities, is supported by the Sierra Health Foundation’s REACH youth initiative.
“The project is important because it will help ensure that the coalition’s programs and services reflect the voices, concerns and dreams of typically underrepresented and underserved youths,” said Project Director Jonathan London.
London said that youth leaders have identified a number of challenges they face in the West Sacramento area, including high teen arrest rates, gang violence, and lack of safe places to play and safe routes to school.
Participants in the project will receive training in digital media production, storytelling, story-mapping, leadership, group collaboration, advocacy and public speaking, among other areas.
Each of the youths will select a topic and work in pairs to collect data, generate text and produce photographs and video recordings on their topics. They will then create a digital map of their work, showing, for example, dangerous zones, safe zones, routes to school, historical markers, and so forth.
As a final project, each the youths will create a digital story on a theme of individual interest, which on completion will be added to the map. A project website will feature the map and other youth-produced work.
The project will conclude with two events in spring 2009. London said that the digital videos created through the project would be compiled for distribution on DVDs to area public television channels.