Sum up for Homeless and Runaway Youth Service Providers

This post is for every­one who made it to my work­shop on Media Strate­gies at the 22nd annual Empire State Coali­tion con­fer­ence for home­less and run­away youth ser­vice providers the other week. I had a great time giv­ing the work­shop and appre­ci­ate your inter­est and input. This is a run­down of some of the top­ics, tools, and links we went over. Please don’t hes­i­tate to ask me more questions.

Here’s the PDF of the pre­sen­ta­tion: ESC Media Strate­gies Presentation

Media Lit­er­acy

Paulo Freire’s Empow­er­ment Spi­ral is a pow­er­ful edu­ca­tion frame­work that has gained pop­u­lar­ity among teach­ers of Media Lit­er­acy. A good run­down on Freire is avail­able at the Infor­mal Edu­ca­tion Ency­clo­pe­dia. I encour­age you to famil­iar­ize your­self with some of his works, includ­ing Ped­a­gogy of the Oppressed.

The Cen­ter for Media Lit­er­acy has three well researched guides on the­ory, prac­tice, and imple­men­ta­tion avail­able in PDF for­mat. Most mate­r­ial is bro­ken down by grade level, K-12.

For a more aca­d­e­mic overview of the cur­rent media land­scape, Neil Post­man is is good writer to turn to. His work falls under the rubric of Media Ecology.

Wendy Ewald pio­neered an effec­tive Lit­er­acy Through Pho­tog­ra­phy sys­tem that has gained pop­u­lar­ity world wide over the past two decades. It’s easy to hand young peo­ple cam­eras and have a lit­tle fun. The more dif­fi­cult thing is to effec­tively teach them some­thing in the process and open doors to growth and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Ewald’s book I Wanna Take Me A Pic­ture talks about how she devel­oped the process of write-photograph-write and dif­fer­ent activ­i­ties she has used within this structure.

Ethics, Safety and Visual Representation

We talked about Donna DeCesare’s project pho­tograph­ing youth in Cen­tral Amer­ica effected by gang vio­lence. She used a col­lab­o­ra­tive method to pro­duce unique images that reflected the children’s sto­ries while still pro­tect­ing their iden­ti­ties. You can find the audio from a panel dis­cus­sion with DeCe­sare and the head pho­tog­ra­phy edi­tor at UNICEF and pho­tographs on the Open Soci­ety Institute’s website.

Media Pro­duc­tion

We focused on web 2.0 tech­nolo­gies as a cheap, acces­si­ble, and effec­tive for­mat for you and your orga­ni­za­tions to net­work and get the mes­sage out. With the recent exam­ple of the Jena 6 case, the power of grass­roots, web-based media can not be under­es­ti­mated. The Over­brook Foun­da­tion put out a report on how these tools are being under­uti­lized by human rights orga­ni­za­tion. So let’s get on top of this…

Web 2.0 refers to the recent shift in the inter­net toward social media. The con­sumers of infor­ma­tion are now the mak­ers of infor­ma­tion. The first step to using these messy but pow­er­ful sys­tems is get­ting orga­nized and find con­tent rel­e­vant to your pur­poses. Book­mark­ing sites like Deli­cious and RSS read­ers like Blog­lines are good tools with which to famil­iar­ize your­self. If you can han­dle email, these tools will be easy to mas­ter. The trick is mak­ing them a part of your rou­tine. Once you get the idea, you might want to set up your own blog on Word­Press, or any num­ber of other free services.

Our con­ver­sa­tion on social media quickly lead to a ques­tions about clients’ use of site like MySpace. Orga­ni­za­tions ser­vic­ing home­less and run­away youth have widely diver­gent posi­tions on allow­ing clients to access these sites and using them as forums for com­mu­ni­ca­tion. I hope that these con­ver­sa­tions can result in pos­i­tive shifts in how your orga­ni­za­tions see youth engage­ment with social net­work­ing sites. Danah Boyd has writ­ten on youth and social net­work­ing. Her arti­cles might be a good jump­ing off point. Please post com­ments on resources you use in mak­ing pol­icy deci­sion in your orga­ni­za­tion, as I am research­ing this topic currently.

Media Rela­tions

Most of my infor­ma­tion on tra­di­tional media real­tions was drawn from A Media Rela­tions Hand­book for Non-Governmental Orga­ni­za­tions by Sara Sil­ver­man, The Inde­pen­dent Jour­nal­ism Foun­da­tion, avail­able in PDF form here.

Other Resources

The Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Ini­tia­tive
Global repos­i­tory for reports and papers on com­mu­ni­ca­tion in social jus­tice and human rights. Excel­lent site! Sign up for emails on top­ics of inter­est to you.

Coy­ote Com­mu­ni­ca­tions
Resources on Media rela­tions and pro­duc­tion for mis­sion based organizations.

Spin Project
Tools for cre­at­ing media around build a fair, just and equi­table soci­ety. Check out their tuto­ri­als.

Youth Media Reporter
Cov­er­age of youth media and issues fac­ing them.

Cyber Bul­ly­ing 411
Site for youth with resources on pre­vent­ing and deal­ing with online harassment.

Video for Change by Wit­ness
Basic guide to prac­ti­cal pro­duc­tion and use of video for advo­cacy and activism by the inter­na­tional NGO Wit­ness.

Regard­ing the Pain of Oth­ers by Susan Son­tag
Reflec­tions on the his­tory of visual media and the eth­i­cal dilem­mas it presents

Design Basics Index by Jim Krause
Basic, fun graphic design principles