Departures Youth Voices is built on a strong media-literacy foundation visible in the 11 workshop modules. It is designed to adapt and change based on a variety of factors, including the students’ needs, the facility, resources available, and our education partners expectations. With each project, we work with students from different areas of the city with different backgrounds and different skill sets, in traditional classroom settings and in community facilities both with varying resources.

The Education Notes blog helps to mediate between the plan designed for each installment of Youth Voices and the reality of the classroom. By reflecting on the weekly workshops from the educator's perspective, we are able to write and share about the process of the project, and how it relates to larger social and educational issues.

We invite you to follow Departures Youth Voices as we work closely with students and community members to Re-envision the L.A. River.

Meet the Youth Voices Student Producers through their "Meet Me" PowerPoint presentations. It's a straightforward but powerful process where the students represent who they are through found or personal images. It's a great way for students to present themselves and their interests, learn their strengths and weaknesses as media producers, and get a glimpse of the technological tools they'll be using throughout the Departures project.

A major part of this production involves students using visuals to tell the story of their relationship to their neighborhood, so what better way to begin than with an exploration of the self? So, come and meet our LA River student producers!

In the process of discovering their neighborhoods, students are asked to draw a map of the places that are meaningful to them. This subjective experience results in a personal map that reflects students' experience and memory of their communities. These maps are not supposed to be geographically accurate, but more represent the students' mental landscape of where they live.

With Youth Voices, students explore their own neighborhoods and generate various media assets to help tell the story of where they live in relation to who they are. We call this the My Neighborhood & Me Project. The students then work in groups to help research and produce multimedia content with the Departures team, building on their acquired production skills from the first project.