When youth unite to bring social change in their communities, it feels like spring is coming. You see a new life rising from the hard land to blossom into florets of fresh ideas. Today, spring came at the Youth Media Summit in South Hadley.
One of the workshops at the Summit showed a movie of unprivileged youth from Bronx, NY advocate for their rights to high-qualtiy education resources. The students are demanding a good home for their loved school, the Leadership Institute. Naturally, media strategies play a critical role in their initiative.
Juan Antigua, the workshop's facilitator and also a member of the youth advocacy group, explained the importance of pairing the right media with the right message. Media should be used in accordance to one's specific goals, not just dumped in the public sphere.
"What type of media strategies to use for specific issues?" Juan asked, pointing to a list of opportunities—press releases, blogging, social networking sites, films, music, art. For recruiting purposes, for instance, social media lends itself an effective platform to organize youth. Popular blogs, on the other hand, tend to capture the attention of local media. Longer video projects will connect the specific community with a wider network of organizations with similar goals and interests.
Ultimately, multiple media channels complement one another and thrive in an ecosystem. That is why executing them in isolation cannot bring sustainable change.