Allied Media Conference

Presenters: Palestine Education Project, Hook Productions, MNN Youth Channel

The US-Palestine Youth Solidarity Network (YSN) will host a live video-conference with youth in Palestine. Participants will be responding to the media they have engaged with in parallel workshops in Palestine and at the AMC. Both workshops will have introduced digital stories, music videos, radio spots, and other media created by youth in both the U.S. and Palestine and this live video conference will be a chance for them to hear each other's thoughts and questions. YSN partners in Palestine proposed this idea so that their young members can see how the digital stories and music they've created during YSN workshops are used and what impact they have.

Presenters: Facilitators from the Palestine Education Project; Students from Bushwick Community High School

Using a mixture of demonstration and discussion, this workshop will share the Palestine /Israek Education Project's (PEP) work using media in teaching about about Israel/Palestine. We will explore ways to raise awareness about the Palestinian struggle while developing ways for youth in the US to articulate and address their own connections to colonialism, racism, and militarism. Educators and students will co-facilitate, using Palestinian hip hop videos and lyrics, digital stories made by Palestinian youth in refugee camps, radio and video pieces created by youth in Brooklyn, and clips from the documentary “Slingshot Hip Hop” to jumpstart conversations around racism, occupation, and resistance. This workshop will provide concrete activity suggestions, hand-outs, and audio-visual materials.

Presenters: Aurora Castellanos, Shahidah Lacy, Yianeth Saenz, Phred Swain-Sugarman, Taylor White and Scott Boswell of The Bay Area Video Collective

This screening / forum will give attendees the chance to view and discuss brand-new social justice shorts by youth from the Oakland Bay Area. Five teen filmmakers from The Factory will present and discuss their work covering a range of topics from the effects of NAFTA on immigration to post-traumatic stress amongst urban youth to reparations for African-Americans. The Factory is an Oakland-based digital filmmaking program of the Bay Area Video Coalition that engages teens to produce creative works bound for national exhibition. With an emphasis on creative and political expression, youth artists work collaboratively to produce professional quality work that aims to bring youth perspective, culture, and talent to a wide audience.

Presenters: Amy Bach, Heavyn-Leigh American and Habibah Ahmad of Manhattan Neighborhood Network

What is youth-centered participatory action research and how can it be used to advance the field of youth media? Come hear about a collaborative research project that the Manhattan Neighborhood Network's Youth Channel (YC) is doing to involve young people in the development of a cable tv channel dedicated to media made by youth for youth. Called "YC All-City", it will be the nation's first channel to work with teams of young people to shape, produce, and promote youth programming. The workshop will offer participants an opportunity to explore some of the challenges, possibilities, and strategies for supporting organizational work that allows the community to take an active role in the process of research.

A film screening followed by a discussion with members of the Visions To Peace Project, Washington D.C.

In this daring and thoughtful documentary, youth and youth justice workers reveal the many faces of violence against youth. They share personal stories, art and honest dialog with hope of sparking new visions for safety that do not depend on policing and prisons. Vision Is Our Power was created by youth and young adults of the Visions to Peace Project, a youth leadership and movement-building project located in Washington, DC. We are committed to building a broad vision and movement for safety, justice and freedom - the building blocks of peace - through the use of arts, media and community education. Following the screening, members of the Visions to Peace Project will facilitate a discussion and exercises in which participants will work together to create analysis, visions and strategies for ending multiple forms of violence against youth.

Presenters: Zane Scheuerlein and Marisol Becerra Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, Open Youth Networks

Google maps enables users to embed pictures and videos. By adding pictures and videos that tell the stories of the issues in communities across the globe, one can network and exchange strategies with other groups. In this interactive and hands-on workshop, we will show "The Cloud Factory," a youth produced video about environmental racism in the Mexican-American neighborhood of Little Village. We will also present our mapzine and teach others to contribute digital content and essentially use Google maps as a tool of social action and community organizing. Workshop participants will create personal stories about the environment through digital media and embed them onto Google maps.

Presenter: Hotep, President of HustleUniversity.org

The Unbought and Unbossed presentation provides proven strategies for success for all independent media producers; particularly those struggling with financing and distributing their works. This presentation is highly popular because of its practical, solution-based methodology. The audience will go home with: 1) 10 power principles to improve their professional and personal lives. 2) Practical strategies for how they can apply the principles. 3) A list of FREE websites that they can easily use to get started 4) Powerful (yet inexpensive) Marketing and Promotional strategies 5) Amazing new distribution methods 6) An empowered mind state, which will no longer allow them to wait for opportunity, but help them consistently find ways to create opportunity for themselves.

Presenters:Shira Hassan, Amber Kutka, Ryanna Sandoval, Cindy Ibarra and Isa Villaflor of The Young Women's Empowerment Project

In this interactive session we will make a zine together! Learn YWEP's quick and dirty method of making zines on the fly! Young Women's Empowerment Project is a social justice based harm reduction organization working with girls and transgender girls involved in the sex trade and street economy. We have been making zines since our very first day together. We emphasize self-care and social justice and our zines always have a theme or a message about a topic we care about at the time. Past zines have been: F**K the Police, Real Srug Information, Eyes Wide Open, a series of zines on the sex trade and many more…

Presenters: Binh Ly, Global Action Project; Kat Aaron, Radio Rootz; Jennifer Macchiarelli, Youth Rights Media; Amber Marie Felton, Philadelphia Student Union

Many in the youth media field believe that they are doing social justice work by simply working with youth of color or youth from underserved communities and exploring issues that impact them. While that work may tackle important social issues, it does not necessarily fulfill its potential to affect social change. This panel will share strategies from several youth media organizations, who are connecting youth voice with social justice movements.

Presenters: Dulani, Sarah Singh, and Jamila of Global Action Project

We believe it is essential to think strategically when making media. In order to do that, we must understand how and why the dominant media frames our communities and experience in a certain light, and then build our own strategies to create media that reflects our values and reframes our experience on our own terms. This workshop is very interactive, and combines small group work with larger group discussions, hands-on production, and story-telling. We want participants to build and learn from each other's experiences, gain media literacy skills, and develop a visual strategy tool they can use to advance their work.