Sharing Lessons Learned: WHYY’s Toolkit on Launching Youth Public Media Programs

WHYY has been running youth media programs for 20 years. In that time, we’ve grown our program from serving a dozen kids each year to serving a few thousand. We’ve helped nearly 50 Philadelphia schools launch their own youth media programs through WHYY Media Labs. Over the past four summers, we’ve been building bridges to employment for our students through the Pathways to Media Careers program, which combines job skill training with real-world work experiences where they can use their media skills to publish work, build their portfolios, and grow professional networks.

All the while, we have raised the funds to sustain this work and to build a department of media education staff with the skillset to handle both media production and youth development.

Taking the long view, WHYY’s youth media programs have been a roaring success. They have undoubtedly changed the courses of many young lives and have played an important part in how the station sees the communities we serve and the kids who live in them. Serving youth and elevating youth voices is now something our station just does. It’s part of who we are. But it hasn’t always been this way. The road to successful youth media programs has been far from a straight line. For every successful partnership or program, there have been snags, dead-ends, and many lessons learned.

The youth media team at WHYY has been thrilled to see more and more stations take an interest in teens and tweens over the past few years. We think every station has a part to play in sharing public media’s skills, platforms, and networks with kids who otherwise would not have access to these things. And we don’t think it needs to take 20 years to build a program like ours. That’s why we’re sharing successful models, lessons learned, resources, and the undergirding philosophy in a new guide: Public Stations and Youth, a toolkit for launching youth media programs.

We tried our best to design a resource that would build on our knowledge and passion for serving youth without being too closely tied to our station type (joint licensee, regional, independent non-profit, about 200 employees); geography (urban, East Coast, excellent public transportation network), or content specialties (journalism, arts, and culture). We tried to make the toolkit as applicable to stations merely contemplating the launch of a youth media program and stations looking for extra tools for already mature programs. Most of all, we tried to make it unintimidating and useful.

One way to read the toolkit is to start at the end. We have a suspicion what most stations are looking for are hard curricular resources. These are linked in the appendix. Feel free to use them and adapt them to your needs. (Just give us credit). We’re constantly updating our resources and have a pretty good workflow in place to ensure new materials get uploaded to the same appendix. One next step is to figure out how other stations can share their original resources as well.

Still, we recommend you start in the beginning. Everything that follows comes honestly through trial and error and listening to the kids we serve and the team members who serve them. We still have a ton to learn, and it won’t take long (maybe a year, maybe less) for much of we’ve written to feel dated. But for now, this really is our best guess for what stations need to know before they dive into the world of youth media.

 

How good of a guess this is remains to be seen, and it’s where you come in. Initial feedback has been positive, but what we really need is for a few stations to try to use the thing and let us know what works and what doesn’t, what hits the right notes and what doesn’t ring true, what applies to your station and what feels like it’s pretty WHYY specific, what can be left out and what’s missing.

Your feedback is absolutely essential to the success of this toolkit and will directly shape its next iteration, which is why we made this google form. Tell us what you think!

And in the meantime, reach out to csantoro@whyy.org any time to talk youth media. We’re happy to discuss current and future programs, work through thorny issues, and most of all celebrate your success! Looking forward to hearing from you.

 

 

Craig Santoro, Director of Education Programs joined WHYY in 2002 and shortly thereafter started the station’s first youth media program. Since then, he has created and managed ongoing after-school documentary workshops for area teenagers and partnered with community centers to hold video production classes for teens that have dropped out of school. He’s developed award-winning video summer camps, partnered with numerous schools to train teachers to use video in their classrooms, organized the WHYY Youth Media Awards and created video learning experiences for nonprofit organizations, higher education institutions and learners of all ages. He developed and leads the WHYY Media Lab program as an extension of this work which has provided hands-on, media arts education to more than15,000 Philadelphia students, grades K-12, over the past six years.