At Groundswell’s Annual Retreat in February 2011, stakeholders such as staff, board, youth, and community partners came together to discuss progress on our strategic plan and begin brainstorming for new initiatives to ensure our organization continues to meet the needs of our constituents. At this retreat, Groundswell formed a New Media Committee to consider innovative ways to meet the demands of a changing media landscape. The New Media Committee was tasked with developing pilot projects that engage our audiences using new technology, as well as considering how we could incorporate the use of new media in our programs.
 
Out of the first meetings of the Committee came our first ever youth driven blogs, piloted during our flagship Summer Leadership Institute in the summer of 2011. The blogs were met with great enthusiasm and engaged a broader audience in our work. They also provided young people an opportunity to create a dialog around what they were doing on the project sites.
 
In early 2012, the New Media Committee met again to discuss where we might take the lessons learned from the blog pilots. One thing was clear – that when our young people are empowered to make their voices heard, people listen.  It was decided that by putting communications tools in the hands of our young people, we would not only empower them to learn new media and communications skills that would help them in life, such as photography, video, graphic design, and public relations, but also improve our organizational outreach, generating more engaging content.
 
On Friday, July 13, Groundswell launched this year’s pilot Youth Media Council with great success.  The Council is made up of one youth representative from each of our seven Summer Leadership institute projects currently underway.  The representatives are responsible for documenting the process of each project and ultimately creating a unique communications piece that can be used to promote and disseminate the underlying message of each artwork completed over the summer.
 
The first Youth Media Council meeting provided representatives with an introduction to photography, comparing Art and Fashion photographs to Communications photos. They learned that an artistic photograph can convey deeper meaning through visual cues that are defined by the artist, and that the angle, context, and content are all things that the artist can manipulate to change what is being conveyed in an image. They also looked at parallel nonprofit communications campaigns that used similar visual terms to approach issues of environmentalism, sexual stereotypes, and global hunger. 
 
The day was topped off with a photo scavenger hunt where our young Council representatives took some really beautiful shots.  Straying from the items listed on their scavenger hunt check list, they used each other as models, met new and interesting people on the street, and captured some of Brooklyn’s more intimate street art.
 
The Youth Media Council will meet every Friday throughout the summer to learn about communications tools, upload documentation of their individual projects, and will conclude in the creation of a ‘zine that tells their stories of the summer, as well as an exhibition of the work created throughout the seven weeks of our Summer Leadership Institute.  Guest speakers are lined up to provide specific teaching points including media personality and Board member Jay DeDapper, public relations expert and Board member Robin Deutsch Edwards, photographer Jonny Fego, videographer Riely Clough, and blogger Matt Albrecht.
 
To keep track of the progress of the Youth Media Council this summer, visit the Youth Media Council run Tumblr blog and visit our event listings to attend the final exhibition and other events this summer.