Category: 2006

The following article originally appeared in Youth Today.
A civil war is brewing in youth workforce development centers. It pits many veteran youth workers against a younger crowd that boasts to kids, “I can relate.”
Sound familiar?
I watched the two sides clash at a recent staff training session hosted by the city of Los Angeles. Younger staff members emphasized the importance of making the youth centers more youth-friendly. Tenured staff, on the other hand, denounced the Biggie Smalls posters smiling down at them from their classroom walls.
So it should come as no surprise that many educators and work force development professionals can’t figure out how to entice disconnected youth with programming that will lead them toward successful lives.
They’d better figure it out soon. The Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University reported that among 16- to 24-year-olds, one out of every four African-Americans and one of every five Latinos were jobless, on the street and not in school.
The younger staff members at the Crossroads 2005 California Conference, believing that I promoted the use of hip-hop, were certain I would side with them. The more experienced staffers, aware of my advocacy for youth, were sure I would speak on their behalf.
I surprised them both.
First I zeroed in on the experienced staffers, explaining that we have too many eight-track youth programs in an MP3 world. I spoke about how today’s youth service and education programs are slow to catch up to the rising waves of youth interests and ways to use those interests to promote educational and work force achievement.
“We might as well stuff a Bee Gees eight-track into the machine and get ready to do the hustle,” I said. “But the kids won’t be willing to join in.”

“We might as well stuff a Bee Gees eight-track into the machine and get ready to do the hustle,” I said.

Then I focused in on the younger “I can relate to kids” crowd. By using commercial hip-hop, I explained, they inadvertently promote many of the behaviors that their programs work against. Bottom line: Many program staff have little information on how to connect with disconnected young adults, and many younger workers incorrectly think they have to dress, act and talk like young adults to connect.
Both groups threw their hands in the air. “What are we to do?” echoed throughout the room.
It’s fair to ask how we can yank the eight-track out of the machine and dissuade younger staff from trying to rap like Eminem. The answer lies in YCC: Youth Cultural Competence.
YCC is not multi-culturalism, which focuses on general ethnicity and race. YCC understands that young adults bring their own cultural capital to a program, and it uses that capital to produce positive outcomes for youth.
Former Harvard Professor Pedro Noguera explains the need this way. “It is imperative that efforts to help black youth be guided by ongoing attempts at understanding the cultural forms they produce, and the ways in which they respond and adapt to their social and cultural environment. Without such an understanding, efforts to influence the attitude and behaviors of African-American males will most likely fail to capture their imagination and be ignored.”
However, with all due respect to the younger staff members and their desire to “get down,” we need to separate YCC from hip-hop, especially commercial hip-hop.
First, hip-hop is just one form of youth cultural capital. Not every young person is rapping or wants to rap.
Second, commercial hip-hop has been misdirected and misguided by corporate interests and greed. If you use the culture, make sure to take out the commercial.
Third, being YCC means continually adjusting to the cultural interest of the youth. Remember jazz? What was once rebel music quickly became the choice of the older generation.
YCC adults put their ears to the wall and use whatever popular cultural outlet that their youth are interested in to reach them and retain their active participation.
Young people connect to adults who respect their youth culture. Rhodes scholar Jay MacLeod suggests in his book, Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood, that those who work with youth “need not have a black belt in karate, place a premium on machismo, swear in class, or have working-class roots like most students. However, they must be prepared to validate the identities that their students have taken on as part of growing up.”
When youth workers negate the cultural capital of young adults, they devalue the young adults. In an urban culture, where respect is premium, consider the inevitable turn-off to education and work force programs when young people’s culture is “disrespected.”
So put down your bayonets. Let’s end this battle and get “krumped” – er, I mean, Youth Culturally Competent.
Edward DeJesus is founder and president of the Youth Development and Research Fund in Montgomery Village, Maryland.

Continue reading Forget Hip-Hop—Get YCC

“As technologies evolve and priorities shift, media nonprofits struggle to stay afloat,” the Village Voice reports. “If one of the biggest threats to our democracy is the consolidation of the media, where do you allocate the limited money you have to make the greatest impact?” asks Alyce Myatt, formerly the MacArthur Foundation’s program officer for media. The answer is “media policy.”
While a few media organizations continue to thrive, including Apalshop and the Bay Area Video Coalition, both of which have strong youth programs, others experiment with new ways to bring in dollars.

Teens in Baltimore “recently invited legislators to an exhibit used 45 black-and-white photos they took to document conditions in their schools: broken heaters, broken toilets and broken windows,” What Kids Can Do learned through the Baltimore Sun.

Arrest rates for girls have risen, and the media has embraced the notion of a new breed of violent girls. But some experts say the “real change is in how police and society deal with acts that used to be viewed as relatively minor,” reports LiveScience.com (here via Yahoo! News). A 2004 report by the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence drew similar conclusions, finding that the media’s portrayal of violent girls, among other things, had contributed to the increase in arrests of girls.

A generation ago, “youth media” meant the official school newspaper. Students in the top English tracks wrote the articles and served as editors. Most papers consciously mimicked the uncontroversial subjects and staid layout of the local daily newspaper.
But during the 1960s, many school newspaper editors decided that writing about the latest football game or prom queen was not enough. They clamored to cover the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, student rights, and other social issues. School administrators refused to let them. One result was that thousands of irreverent high school underground newspapers blossomed. Another was that traditional student papers began to seem irrelevant. Meanwhile, budget cuts and white flight from urban schools also took a toll on the high school press.
In 1974, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial launched a two-year study of the problems facing scholastic journalism. They found that the high school press was characterized by censorship, racism, elitism, and mediocrity. Sister Ann Heintz, a newspaper adviser at a Chicago Catholic high school, was one of the study’s chief investigators and an advocate for youth voices and journalism education. She also was inspired by the Foxfire teen journalism program. (During the 1970s, Foxfire produced a series of teen-written books that celebrated the life and lore of backcountry Georgia. The books became national best sellers.)
After issuing its final report, “Captive Voices,” the RFK Memorial put its money where its mouth was: it provided funding to help Heintz launch New Expression, a citywide paper by and for Chicago teens. As an independent paper, it was not subject to censorship by a single school principal. Heintz was also free to recruit a diverse group of writers, not just AP English students. At the same time, she did not like the shrill advocacy and raw language of the underground press. She wanted New Expression to conform to traditional journalistic standards of fairness and objectivity.
Heintz’s idea of combining the independence and diversity of voices in the underground press with the journalistic responsibility of the traditional press—with teen writers—had never been tried before.

Combining the diversity of voices in the underground press with the journalistic responsibility of the traditional press-with teen writers-had never been tried.

New Expression was a quick success with teens and funders. In addition to providing rigorous training to a diverse group of writers, Heintz had three other goals. One was to prepare more minority youth for careers in journalism. Another was to investigate stories that the adult media would probably overlook and oversimplify, because they aren’t close enough to teen experiences. (New Expression writers investigated teen prostitution in an early issue.) The third was to provide teen readers a realistic reflection of their lives and experiences to counteract the stereotypes often found in the adult media.
Heintz’s philosophy and approach were contagious. Within a few years papers popped up in New York, Delaware, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, Boston, Atlanta, Denver, and in several smaller cities. Most of them were based on the Chicago model. Bob Clampitt founded Children’s Express, now called Children’s PressLine, a journalism program for younger children, in the late 1970s. And in the early 1980s an entrepreneur launched a glossy for-profit magazine written by teens called Highwire.
Since then, more than 50 citywide teen magazines have launched. About a dozen are still publishing. They are tabloids or magazine-size, with frequencies of 4-8 issues per year. Most of the magazines are published by independent nonprofits, but some are part of larger organizations. The magazines that folded typically lasted a couple years, but failed to attract enough funding, develop good distribution systems, or find and keep strong editors and directors.
In the 1990s, many groups started magazines aimed at specialized audiences, like teens in foster care or juvenile jails, or teens who wanted advice about sex and relationships. On the for-profit side, dozens of daily newspapers created “youth pages” to try to win back younger readers. Many of them solicited some teen-written material. Daily papers in a few cities—Hartford and Seattle, for example—created separate teen magazines or inserts. The daily newspaper “teen page” model is still widespread, but lacks the compelling authenticity of stand-alone teen newspapers and magazines.
Also in the 1990s, several commercial magazine publishers launched teen versions of their adult product, such as CosmoGIRL!, Teen People, Time for Kids, and the Wall Street Journal Classroom Edition. But these rarely address the issues of urban and marginalized youth.
Today the official high school press does meet a need in the suburban areas where it still exists, but the urban magazine remains the strongest movement in independent teen print journalism. What is uniquely important about it is that it focuses on serving the most marginalized, most voiceless youth in society—and making those voices heard by their peers and adults. Their stories will never be regularly heard or covered in commercial media, or even in most high school papers, teen websites, ’zines, or any other forum. They need intensive, costly training to learn the skills they need to make their voices heard. They and the communities they live in lack the resources to launch their own media.
By focusing on the most marginalized youth and by organizing efforts to reach them in settings where they will actually read the publications, these nonprofits can continue helping teens learn new skills, provide an accurate, affirming reflection of their lives, and promote justice.
Keith Hefner is the founder, publisher, and executive director of Youth Communication, a youth-made print media organization. “From Proms to Protests” is excerpted from a paper commissioned by the Open Society Institute for a March 2004 convening on youth media.
Above left: Antwaun Garcia writes for Represent, a Youth Communication magazine by and for teens in foster care.

Continue reading From Proms to Protests

Increasingly, teens are no longer satisfied to “let a bunch of middle-aged people tell [them] what it’s like to be an American teen,” reports the L.A. Times (registration required). “That attitude is spreading as more teenage writers storm the barricades of publishing, starting with the YA category but by no means ending there.”

Student protesters in France are fighting a policy that would allow young workers to be fired without cause. U.S. media coverage has been largely unsympathetic to the young activists, and Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting puzzles over why.

Federal regulation requires radio stations to serve local communities in return for airwaves. A group of young activists and musicians in California say the media giant Clear Channel is shirking this responsibility, resulting in monotonous programming (for anyone without an Ipod) and neglected communities. The Youth Media Council challenged two Bay Area Clear Channel affiliates with petitions to deny future licensing on the grounds that the station “did not serve their local communities and did not provide adequate access to their public records,” Wiretap reports.

Local Insight into an International Problem

Last week Christopher Schuepp, who recently spoke to YMR about the international youth media movement, accompanied a group of young Albanian TV journalists to Macedonia. When the teens walked into a high school in Skopje, everyone “terribly booed,” says Schuepp. Why? One week earlier the local media had wrongly vilified the young journalists.
The issue of young people receiving an inordinate amount of negative press is an international problem, says Schuepp. “Similar things are happening in France right now,” he notes. “The students and young people demonstrating against the unfair new job regulations are simply portrayed as ‘troublemakers’” by the Agence France Press.
To help combat youth stereotyping in the media, Schuepp recommends reading “Speaking for Ourselves: A Youth Assessment of Local News Coverage.”
“It gives great background information and in-depth data on one of the main issues that is wrong with the media today: the negative portrayal of young people,” says Schuepp. “I think the conclusions and recommendations in ‘Speaking for Ourselves’ should be sent to the Agence France Press immediately. And actually to all practicing journalists around the globe.”

Giving Up on Cool: A Media Literacy Tool

Dave Yanofsky of Uth TV, who recently wrote about quality in youth media, recommends Frontline’s film Merchants of Cool: A Report on the Creators & Marketers of Popular Culture for Teenagers. The video takes a close look at how creators and sellers of popular culture have made teenagers the “hottest consumer demographic in America,” according to Frontline. It explores questions relevant to media literacy such as: Are the creators of cool “simply reflecting teen desires or have they begun to manufacture those desires in a bid to secure this lucrative market? And have they gone too far in their attempts to reach the hearts—and wallets—of America’s youth?”
Yanofsky, who used to head the media literacy organization Just Think, has found that the video provides ample fuel for a group discussion “about youth culture, advertising, and media literacy. Teens can use it to gain insight into how they often end up walking around with a huge bulls eye on their backs when it comes to advertising and the creation of ‘cool.’”

Evaluating Program Impact

Youth programs work is an eternal request of funders, yet evaluating youth media program impact is still a trial-and-error process, YMR recently reported. Tony Streit of the Educational Development Center (EDC) says that might soon change, thanks to the Center’s ongoing research around youth media program evaluation.
On April 17, EDC’s YouthLearn will launch an update to their website that will provide a look inside their work with Time Warner–funded youth media programs. EDC assisted Time Warner grantees in building capacity to conduct effective program evaluations. The new section has easy-to-follow strategies, evaluation models, and tools for youth media programs looking to measure impact. EDC’s research on self-assessment methods common to the field is also available.

Continue reading What They’re Reading (and Watching)

“We are currently in the midst of an explosion of video and filmmaking by young people,” Youth Media Distribution (YMDI) reports. “Giving these young filmmakers the tools they need to get their artistic work out to the public is essential.” YMDI does just that with lessons for youth media educators that guide students through the earliest stages of film planning to distributing their work. Lessons are intended to be used with individual students who already have some training in filmmaking or videography—they do not include basic filming or editing techniques, for instance.