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Little did I know how much of my core values, international mindset and future life plans would develop when I joined the Children’s Express Indianapolis bureau—now called Y-Press—just a few weeks after my 13th birthday, smack in the middle of 7th grade. I was nervous and shy, having no idea what to expect, but I loved books and writing, so I applied to attend a weekend-long training.
Fifteen years later, I can still recall each one of the six teenagers who trained us. The idea that my peers—not adults—would train us was a revolutionary idea to me, and a taste of what was to come. I quickly learned that everything in the program is built around a core principle: that young people’s voices matter; and, every aspect of the organization, from the story process to the board of directors, is built around youth leadership.
Taking part in a youth-led organization meant both amazing opportunities as well as a lot of grunt work. We led interviews and completed articles, but we had to do our research, prepare questions, and write and rewrite until our articles were as strong as any professional journalist.
One of the most frightening tasks was making phone calls. Do you know how rare 13-year-olds are required to call up complete strangers and request interviews? I was terrified. But I learned from the older kids—the editors—to write out a script and practice it before making a call. (Later I would give the same training to friends in college who didn’t have that experience and struggled making simple calls to the college registrar or a new landlord).
That summer, I was part of a reporting team that traveled to Havana, Cuba. Thanks to journalism visas from both the Cuban and American governments, we were able to legally travel to the country in a time when few Americans could, to report on the lives of Cuban youth during the “Special Period.”
We prepared for months through weekly meetings, phone interviews with Cuban youth in Miami, and piles of research. One of the most memorable briefing exercises included filling large pieces of paper with our stereotypes about Cuba: cigars, Castro, army fatigues, authoritarianism, boat people. Recognizing and naming stereotypes was powerful, as it helped me understand that the role of a journalist is to uncover and think critically about such unspoken biases.
Although we had adult mentors who traveled with us, it was our job to schedule our time in Havana—another exciting leadership opportunity. We were granted permission to cover the annual convention of the Pioneros—communist youth from across the island. Prior to departure, we scheduled interviews in private homes, churches and at the Synagogue and read up on the complex laws governing American traveling to Cuba, but nothing could prepare us for the actual experience of international journalism.
For me, each day felt like an adventure. One of the first days, we spoke in hushed tones with a 17-year-old in her family’s crumbling mansion. She spoke of the struggles of the Special Period and economic woes, such as the young women who would sell their bodies for a bar of soap. Days later, her story contrasted the patriotism of the Pioneers, who had traveled from all over the island to celebrate their love for their country and the revolution. I wondered what I had taken for granted from a US perspective. When we interviewed a young poet and some of her peers, we bonded, despite the seeming enmity between our two governments. As I traveled around Havana and saw signs denouncing the US embargo, I realized that maybe my government wasn’t telling me the entire picture.
If I had been reporting on all of these interviews alone, I perhaps would have never made sense of it all. However, we had an important policy: debriefings were mandatory after interviews. And so at the end of each day, the other young reporters and I would gather and discuss what we had observed and learned from our interviewees.
Often, our spirited conversations would last for hours, debating communism, the US embargo and other complexities. The debriefings helped me recall the initial list of stereotypes we had generated, and it was remarkable how few I believed by the end of the trip—the Cuba I had come to know was much more complex, complicated, and interesting. That fall I wrote my first article for the local paper, The Indianapolis Star, about my observations of the country, and how much I learned from the young people I interviewed. See the article in it’s original format here and in PDF form here.
The Cuban youth I interviewed in Havana were the first of many interviewees who would profoundly impact me over the years. Some of the most memorable stories I worked on after returning to the US included interviews at the Indiana School for the Deaf, Latino youth living in Indianapolis, and a classmate who was expelled from my high school following the massacre at Columbine. As a youth media journalist, I was also able to continue to travel, interviewing young cancer patients in Russia and kids living in and on the streets in Brazil. As I grew older, my Children’s Express/Y-Press experience grew with me, offering new ways to see the world, and an incredible opportunity to learn by doing.
As I stayed with the organization, I experienced important nonprofit learning opportunities particularly during a time of crisis. Children’s Express nationally had undergone a leadership change, and was attempting to reduce the level of youth involvement in editorial decisions. The adult leadership at the bureau met with members, alum, and parents to decide what to do. Collectively, we decided to break-off and become independent, but not before weighing the positives and negatives, and having very serious discussions about our broader goals and values. Then came the re-branding process, where we brainstormed names to reflect what our bureau did. One parent, an advertising executive, helped us think strategically about this. We decided on the name “Y-Press,” and he worked with us to design a logo that incorporated a question mark, representing one of our core values to never stop asking “why.”
While our overall focus was to produce quality articles and radio pieces, in the process, youth leaders learned how to collaborate, fundraise, work with professionals, help make big decisions during times of change, and organize trainings. By the time I graduated from high school, and by extension Y-Press, I was committed to making something out of the incredible opportunities I had been given. I went on to major in international relations and lead student volunteer trips overseas, intern for African journalism Programs and become a student leader at my university.
This month marks 15 years that I have participated in the youth media field, and one of my greatest take-away is that the full impact of youth media programs extends far beyond the media products themselves, and lasts much longer.
Youth media programs affect the lives of their participants, and by extension the lives of everyone they interact with. In the fifteen years since my first nervous weekend of training, I have trained hundreds of youth to follow in the same footsteps, first as a Y-Press member, and after college returning to Indianapolis for a year to work as an adult staff member and mentor.
In 2007, I left Indianapolis to contribute to research on refugee youth living on the Thailand/Burma border. Inspired by the youth I met, I co-founded Digital Democracy, a nonprofit that harnesses new technology to empower marginalized communities. Since its founding, I have been continually grateful for the lessons I learned at Y-Press, which has greatly informed our own programs, starting with the idea that making media can be an important first step in leadership development. One of our initiatives, Project Einstein, draws directly on this by empowering refugee youth through digital photo trainings, new media literacy curriculum, and online exchanges that connect students living in refugee camps overseas to resettled refugee students in the United States.
At Y-Press, I learned that young people are just as capable as adults of producing quality journalism. At Digital Democracy, we extend this belief in people in a global manner, using human rights as a basis for taking technology tools to groups such as refugees, women and youth who have been neglected, abused, and/or marginalized.
Whether working with women in Haiti to create a technological response to gender-based violence or connecting human rights workers in Southeast Asia via mobile phones, we focus not just on the end products, but the process of empowering our partners as leaders in those projects. And we have been able to incorporate youth media in many ways, particularly with Project Einstein trainings in Bangladesh, Thailand, South Africa, Kenya, and Guatemala, thanks to the partnership of a fellow Y-Press alum.
In each of our youth media projects, I have a goal I strive for—the precedent that was set for me at Y-Press. These goals include how to:
• ask questions and think critically;
• break down a seemingly impossible task and make it manageable;
• work in a team and believe in oneself; and,
• emphasize that young people’s voices matter and deserve to be heard.
Every human being, no matter how young, deserves to have his or her voice heard. Youth media programs have the power to change the world by instilling this value in the young people they serve. Nothing makes me more excited or proud than when I watch as another young person accepts, learns and re-produces this fact and helps others recognize and value the multiple other voices in one’s community. Through youth media as a journalist and now a co-founder of my own nonprofit, my experience continues to help others take that step toward creating truly global, engaged citizens.
Emily Jacobi is co-founder and executive director of Digital Democracy, a New York-based nonprofit that works globally to empower marginalized communities with digital tools. Emily began her career at the age of 13, as a youth journalist reporting from Havana, Cuba on the lives of young Cubans during the Troubled Period. Since then she has worked on media and research projects in Latin America, West and Southern Africa and Southeast Asia, as well as En Los Campos, a multi-media exhibit highlighting the lives of teenage migrant farm workers in the United States. Prior to founding Digital Democracy she worked at Internews Network, AllAfrica.com, the Center for PeaceBuilding International and Y-Press.

Robert Martin trained professionally as a stage and screen actor and continues to produce, direct, write and perform original stories in schools, theaters, festivals and just about any community setting where a story needs to be told and folks want to tell them. He specializes in the fields of Community-based Arts, Applied Theater, and Digital Storytelling; utilizing his diverse background in alternative styles of theater, hip-hop and oral history to create original media. He currently produces the Clear Creek Festival, a multi-discipline, community arts festival just outside of Berea, KY.
YMR: You have developed a successful approach toward incorporating Applied Theater and media production in the classroom. How did your own background inform the work you do today?
Robert Martin: I became a youth media educator and researcher through a passion for theater and story. Like most of the arts, theater gave me a voice, a platform to explore my identity, and tools to interact with the world. Through theater, I could connect to others, communicate my own experience, and begin to examine the world.
In college, I spent a lot of my time thinking about storytelling—what the tools are that a storyteller needs to successfully honor both voices in the story, that of the actor and character they portray. Theater helped me record my experiences in my physical and emotional memory so I could re-create experience as a writer, actor or director. After graduating, I moved to New York City and was drawn to community-based artists and culture workers—people who did not necessarily identify as traditional theater practitioners, but who had stories to tell about their homes, lives, communities, and place in the world.
I found that when a group is deeply invested and has control over the fate of their projects, the participants often develop a much greater capacity and passion in telling their own stories and incorporating stories they find meaningful. From this place I approached my work as a theater artist and activist, which led to becoming a teaching artist; and, eventually led to work as a youth media educator.
YMR: How did you come to the work of applying theater and media production techniques in the school context? Tell us about your experience in transfer schools and your vision for your work.
Martin: It started when I became a teaching artist with Dance Theatre Etcetera working in NYC Transfer High Schools in Brooklyn. I was wrestling with how to connect my own insights into the power of storytelling with the situation facing Transfer School students. Transfer students are sensitive to failure and doubt, which are aggravated by the traditional top-down, learning-for-the-test, pass/fail structure of the conventional public school system.
Transfer schools are a particular initiative by the NYC school system to address over-aged, under-credited students. These are students that in high school fell behind in their necessary Regents’ credits requirements for reasons of truancy and a variety of other factors, dropped out of school, and agreed to re-enter the educational process through a Transfer School. These schools are typically small (with about 150 students) and have a staff of advocate counselors from a partnered social service agency who meet with students in group sessions each week in addition to their Regents-required classes. Coined “group,” these meetings are a more accessible space to talk about the challenges that affect the school process.
In addition, transfer schools often have a curriculum that is student-based and each student has her or his own trajectory. Additional structures are set up to help re-frame the student’s experience so that they no longer experience failure, including opportunities to work or intern and see society and the workplace differently.
As a teaching artist, I found that an efficient way to cut through the anxiety and insecurity shared by the students in relation to their previous experiences, often with oppressive institutional structures, was to focus my approach as a facilitator using a Freirian approach of Co-Intentional Education—the idea that every person has something to offer, a story to tell, and the capacity to teach as a member of a community if the learning space is genuinely grounded in power sharing and dialogue.
My goal was to help students use media to re-frame their history of experiencing failure within the school system. For many students media was also a tool to examine challenges they felt within their families, their communities, and society more generally—toward an experience of ownership, agency, pride, and community engagement.
YMR: In your work, Applied Theater techniques are a fundamental component of the process through which you support students’ storytelling and media production. Explain a bit more about how this works.
Martin: My aim has been to combine applied theater and critical pedagogy alongside digital storytelling because media and video production clearly piqued my students’ interest from day one. Most students were instantly hooked by the prospect of learning media production, specifically professional camera equipment and editing software.
Students were using media technology as a tool for recording and communicating information. I had only a small role in getting them engaged in this aspect of the class, mostly because new media technology, including video, audio, social media and cell phones, were totally normalized and preferred means of communicating. It took a bit more time to ramp up to the task of telling personal stories, but when framed around assignments—such as: create a short PSA on an issue teens face at school or discuss the challenges teens face getting to school in the morning through a short narrative film—students were able to own their vantage point, become more open to sharing and receptive to other’s feedback as we began to build community around shared experience.
I found that using Applied Theater techniques, such as role-playing exercises, were key. For example, students would role-play as media creators (a role I would ultimately ask them to own by the end of the class) the process of presenting a film treatment to an audience who, in turn, played the role of a production company giving the presenter the opportunity to dialogue around suggestions for improvement and collaboratively arrive at strategies for moving forward.
The combination of Applied Theater and media production, in addition to offering high level tools of expression, creation, and collaboration, positively impacts the lives of students, offering a process that allows students who experienced failure in school to reframe their experiences in a different light with the support of their peers.
YMR: What would you recommend to other youth media educators, given your experience?
Martin: I recently completed my Master’s degree through the first Applied Theater Masters program in the United States at the City University of New York School of Professional Studies (CUNY SPS). At CUNY, I was able to reflect on my teaching practice as a scholar practitioner and go further in capturing the best practices of fusing applied theater with digital storytelling to make the most of classroom learning.
My research evidence includes first-hand accounts from my students who explained why the process engaged them as learners and how it helped change their ideas of what they could accomplish in their lives.
Youth media educators can apply theater and media production to over-aged, under credited students—an important demographic—but also in any school as the goals are the same: to build classrooms that transgress, pursue critical dialogue, support a safe and accessible space for students to explore what ignites and confounds them and their place in society. Such classrooms emulate those envisioned by such scholars as Dewey, hooks and Freire. But the goal is not simply a classroom commitment to “educate” in an innovative way or even to achieve a rise in graduation rates. While those are important outcomes, our approach is fundamentally about valuing young people and their experiences and encouraging them to own and invest in their lives and communities when so many outside influences suggest the opposite.
An Applied Theatre approach to Digital Storytelling will be challenging to the youth media practitioner as it requires group building, acting, devising material, role play, and critical dialogue carefully integrated within a tight media pedagogy. We also know most teachers may not have opportunities to create these learning opportunities left unsupported in their classrooms; but, as alternative educators with access, we can utilize these tools to aid the classroom in becoming a transgressive and safe space that deeply engages story and personal development through theater and media.