Author: Kendra Hurley

Change Matters, an organization that “works with arts and social change organizations to make breakthroughs in fundraising, capacity, and grown,” has its own blog filled with fundraising advice. A recent post warns of the all-too-common pitfalls for many nonprofit start-ups.

Advocates for public-access TV say proposed legislation could end public-access TV nationwide and jeopardize community-based programs that “mirror community interest and needs,” like Manhattan Neighborhood Network’s Youth Channel, the New York Times reported. Advocates of the legislation contend that these fears are exaggerated.

“War is decided by older people and carried out by young people,” said Claire Holman, director of Blunt Radio, a Maine-based youth media organization. Iraq is no exception, said Holman, which is why young people at organizations like Blunt Radio are creating radio spots, videos, articles, and other media documenting their perspectives on the war. Some projects aim to help educate other teens, like Paper Tiger’s video “Military Myths,” which compares the reality of war to military ad campaigns and comes equipped with lesson plans for teachers and organizers. Others, like Chat the Planet’s MTV-broadcast series of young Americans talking live via webcam with young Iraqis, have helped personalize war coverage.
The following organizations have received special recognition for their coverage of Iraq.

“Reflections on Return”

Since the U.S. invaded Iraq, teen producers at Blunt Radio have made several spots about young people’s experiences of the war, including an interview with a young Iraq war veteran who returned to the United States after suffering a devastating throat injury. The soldier would not speak to adult reporters, but responded to teen producer Spencer Scott because he felt a peer could understand him. The interview became part of “Reflections on Return,” a radio series produced primarily by Bay Area-based Youth Radio and featuring voices of young soldiers returning from Iraq, struggling to re-enter their civilian lives. Much of “Reflections on Return” aired on National Public Radio and the series won an Edward R. Murrow Award of the Radio Television News Directors Association (RTNDA), arguably the most prestigous electronic journalism award in the country, said RTNDA chairman Dan Shelley.
Judges chose this entry, which competed against radio networks including ABC, CBC, and CNN, said Shelley, “because it provided a perspective on the Iraq war consequences that had largely been unreported in the other media, and that was youth voices. It is a critical perspective that people need to be aware of.”

“All That I Can Be”

In their video “All That I Can Be,” teens at the Educational Video Center (EVC) documented an EVC alum’s decision to join the army not out of patriotism, idealism, or a sense of duty, but because he needed money and saw the army as his only option to get ahead. It “is an exceptional example of how sophisticated youth-produced media can be,” said Shira Golding of Arts Engine, Inc., which featured the video in its Media That Matters Film Festival, where it received the Economic Justice Award. “Rather than conveying a heavy-handed and simplistic ‘military recruitment is bad’ message,” says Golding, the video “puts the issue in context. The young man grappling with whether or not to enlist wants to make something out of his life, and he has been made to feel that joining the army is his only real option. ‘All That I Can Be’ captures his choice from an intimate angle.”

“The Hard Sell”

Teen writer Cara Brumfield at Youth Communication went undercover. She approached military recruiters, pretending she was interested in joining the army. One recruiter told her about the vacation-like postcards he received from friends stationed in Iraq. The more questions Brumfield asked, the seemingly pushier the recruiters became. When she said she needed to consult her mother about joining the military, a recruiter treated her as though she was wasting their time. Her article “The Hard Sell,” published in Youth Communication’s New Youth Connections, won second place for investigative reporting for New York City’s Independent Press Awards. “The writer showed impressive determination in reporting the story—in using her personal experience to reveal the hardball tactics and deceit military recruiters use to get young people to sign up for service,” said City Limits editor Alyssa Katz, a judge for the awards. “She bravely put herself in the fray to get the story, and persisted even when she had opportunities and reasons to back out. And her writing moved us—as readers, we could feel what she was going through and understand what it’s like to be a vulnerable young person in the sights of military recruiters.”
New Youth Connections editor Hope Vanderberg hopes the story brought home something even more personal for the many teens who read it—“the fact that the war is not just something that is happening far away but something that they themselves might be involved in someday. They could easily become the ones fighting in it, so they need to figure out what they believe in.”
Above left: Will Solomon in EVC’s “All That I Can Be” prepares for Army life.

Continue reading Life During Wartime

A guide from the Dougy Center for Grieving Children & Families walks educators through the dos and don’ts of dealing with grieving students and communities. The advice is applicable to any organization or individual working with a young person affected by death.

“For years, I taught workshops on time management and burnout,” writes one contributor to Nonprofit Online News. “It dismayed me how organizations and individuals pathologize some very natural, human responses to unhealthy working conditions. Staff would be sent to my workshop to be ‘fixed,’ and while many would return with healthier habits, some would make the bold decision that they needed a better place to work…I always appreciated a healthy tension between those two outcomes. One of the books that helped me work with organizations that were prepared to take a more systemic approach was Katrina Shield’s In the Tiger’s Mouth: An Empowerment Guide for Social Action. With very little wasted space or fuzzy thinking, this is a book that will help any organization with sustainability.”

In the name of protecting young people from cyberpredators, a New Jersey Roman Catholic high school now prohibits students from posting personal blogs on the Internet, raising “interesting questions about the intersection of free speech and voluntary agreements with private institutions,” the Associated Press reports (here via the New York Times; registration required). This is one of several recent efforts in the United States to restrict students’ Internet postings.

The Newspaper Association of America Foundation’s Youth Editorial Alliance announced the winners of the competition recognizing the best of newspapers’ youth-written content. “Newspapers have always been a medium closely connected to the communities they serve, so it’s not surprising that young people would have a keen interest in reading stories and content created by their peers,” said the NAA senior vice president. Winners included Your Mom (General Excellence Rookie of the Year) and FlipSide (Best Website).

A growing number of teachers and professors are experimenting with blogs as a learning tool. Writing for an audience motivates students, and as one teacher told CNET News, students who blog are “learning the technical skills, but they’re also learning they have a voice online.” Meanwhile, teachers find themselves grappling with new terrain, like negotiating when and when not to censor.

Jim Randels, co-director of Students at the Center, a New Orleans writing project for teens, blogs from his temporary home in South Carolina on “what it means to live as part of a diaspora and to learn to teach from that place.” His blog, which appears on Education Week, will “share some of my students’ writings…exploring the shadows of what we used to do in class each day. We’ll think about writing as healing and community building. We’ll look into when and why these goals should be central rather than peripheral to the classroom. And we’ll think long and hard about what my colleague, SAC co-director Kalamu ya Salaam, wrote last week about New Orleans now being more the people who carry our city’s spirit, not the place itself.”

In an Orion Magazine essay, a former high school computer teacher argues that school computer labs can cause more harm than good. Recent research indicates that students who frequently use computers perform worse academically than those who use them rarely or not at all, he writes. And allowing kids access to virtual worlds filled with vicarious thrills they can control “can lead children into deadened, alienated, and manipulated relationships” with the real world. “The more external power children have at their disposal, the more difficult it will be for them to develop the inner capacities to use that power wisely.”