2009 Youth Media Summit and Official Report-Out

Six planes in eight days and still, energy is the first word that comes to mind as I reflect on NAMAC. I arrived a day early and I wasn’t the only one.

In flea market terms, the youth media educators, filmmakers and artists that arrived to attend a pre-conference at NAMAC would be considered the “early birds,” attending an official Report-Out of the National Youth Media Summit that occurred just a few weeks prior in Lake Forest, IL.

The early birds came from Portland, the Twin Cities, Albuquerque, Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, and many from the local Boston youth media network. They each received an NYMS report-out, which summarizes the goals and outcomes of the Summit, key take-aways, and strategies in six priority issue areas in the field.

The Report-out began with a brief review of the last five years of youth media field-building work, captured in Steve Goodman and Diana Coryat’s OSI White Paper and Kathleen Tyner’s sector survey “Mapping the Field,” in NAMAC’s A Closer Look.

Following the historical references, the participants joined in a conversation around the outcomes of the Youth Media Summit and next steps.

The ultimate outcome of the Summit is a strategic plan and a State of the Field report. Both of these documents, to be released this fall, are informed by the Summit, a 12-person steering committee, a sector survey, and a meta-analysis of Youth Media Reporter.

Report-out participants had an opportunity to contribute to the work of the Youth Media Summit by developing action plans to address the strategies outlined in each of the six issue areas.

Divided into five groups, Report-out participants developed short and long term goals, illustrated in comic strips, which they presented to the rest of their colleagues in a similar manner as Summit participants did on day one (click here to see videos of these presentations).

In response to the call for more innovative distribution strategies, Report-out participants came up with the following ideas:

• a traveling youth media film festival, which would encourage young producers in each participating city to organize, invite a broad audience, local youth filmmakers and other forms of media-makers, to the national festival
• how best to plant the seeds of youth media in each season and care for the changing crops, balancing process and product
• a youth media sharing network that would identify organizations that could partner to share resources and skills
• a youth media hub that would share youth media products, expanding and utilizing resources like the Youth Video Exchange Network
• an advisory group in the field, including young people, that would collect data from the field, help stakeholders to stray from re-inventing the wheel, and launch an interim site to sort/compile information
• a national youth media day, to be recognized by the public and spur stakeholders in the field to share dialogue, best practices, and showcase work by youth producers.

The 2009 Youth Media Summit and Official Report-out is timely because the youth media field is at a critical juncture where funding is a source of anxiety as foundations re-assess their financial focus, and the economic climate creates more and more necessity for the kind of work that youth media creates for young people, communities, and society at large.

Despite these obstacles, the McCormick Foundation and the Academy for Educational Development, through Youth Media Reporter, have worked to carry out a field-building initiative for youth media in order to help sustain the field using a strategic plan for the next 3-5 years.

Shortly, Youth Media Reporter will upload a Wiki that will capture the momentum, synergy, and dialogue spurred by the Summit and Report-out. We invite you to join the conversation to help shape our next steps and best efforts for the youth media field—a diverse, unique and one-of-a-kind sector as the best flea market a vendor like me could be a part of.

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Ingrid Hu Dahl
Program Officer
Youth Media

Managing Editor
Youth Media Reporter