Project Details

Chicago’s young people are facing a moment of crisis that has been building for decades.  What for adults has been a job recession in 2009, has been a depression for teens since 2000, when the federal government de-funded youth employment programs, resulting in a 30% loss of jobs for youth in the city. In a typical diverse neighborhood, such as Humboldt Park, teen unemployment is at 70%, while the high school dropout rate hovers at 50%. Since 2007, over 70 youth have been murdered in brutal incidences of violence. The well-documented obstacles of entrenched violence and poverty facing Chicago youth are compounded by the less apparent, but distorted representation of youth of color in mass media who are often marginalized by negative messages directed at and about them in the mainstream.

Despite facing these incredible challenges, many of Chicago’s over 100,000 teens are disengaged from the policymaking processes in their schools, communities, and city. High school newspapers, once a staple on every campus, grow increasingly rare each year. The State of Illinois recently cut its arts programs budget by 50%, resulting in massive cuts to high school arts departments and leaving many youth without valuable opportunities for creative self-expression.  As adult power brokers struggle to find solutions to the crisis facing young people in Chicago, youth are systematically silenced and excluded from having a meaningful impact on shaping policies that affect them.  They are also excluded from opportunities to better understand the policies from their own perspectives. Youth need opportunities to create informed art and media-making that engages them in the WHOLE process of gathering, understanding, making sense of, and finally presenting their experiences.

The Chicago Youth Voices Network (CYVN) strives to amplify the voices of Chicago’s youth that are too often ignored, across geographical neighborhoods and identity-based politics. Central to the mission of the network is the value that young people need to be seen, heard, and actively involved in the decisions that affect their lives. CYVN organizations, working in schools and community centers citywide, engage young people in creative activities exploring and addressing the issues that affect them most.  Our decades of collective experience affirm that when young people are asked to participate, create, and contribute to society through media arts production, they respond with tremendous energy and enthusiasm for civic participation.

The NUF SAID Project engages a team of several hundred youth serving as researchers, journalists, and media artists to collectively gather findings, develop stories, and produce artwork that will shed light on the well-being of Chicago’s young people and address and how they are impacted by related civic issues including: Crime, Education, Employment, Health and the Environment, and Housing.  A central online hub  serves as the portal for accessing polls, polling data, analysis and art works. The process unfolds in three steps:

1) Social media and civic action training: A two-day, inter-generational teach-in kicks off the project and prepares youth and adult leaders to employ social media and online polling tools for peer-to-peer data collection and media-based reporting. Youth media makers present examples of their own work around the five issue areas to policy experts, researchers and adult leaders. This media work serves as a springboard for discussion about the existing gaps and distortions in coverage, information and analysis of youth issues within the media. In this way, authentic works of youth expression helps to frame a participatory and liberatory process that informs the development of key polling questions and data gathering goals. By the end of the two day teach-in, youth and adult leaders from each participating CYVN organization will have designed an individualized workplan.

2) Information/ data collection:   Youth participants will gather information about their experiences in five key areas, including employment, housing and environmental health. Bimonthly online/SMS polls developed by a team of youth leader representatives from each CYVN member organization will be designed to gauge the pulse of youth in these five key areas. The polling process will unfold in four rounds occurring from February to September. A first round of polling will utilize more traditional survey techniques in order to establish an accurate “baseline” of data. Participation in these polls is incentivized, and data can be aggregated and disseminated instantaneously. This initial round will be followed by three rounds that encourage youth participants to more broadly engage their peers on key questions through the use of social media tools and SMS.

But beyond just polling, youth participants will also be encouraged to think about information and information gathering in more creative ways—for instance, documenting food deserts (as one possible measure of environmental health) in their neighborhoods by sending cell phone pictures to a central data depository via SMS. Youth will be asked and encouraged to view research as a creative process, gathering the “raw material” that allows us to understand and communicate our experiences.  Our intention is for this information-gathering phase to also allow youth participants to gain new perspectives on the experiences of other youth in the city. Rather than the hyperlocal perspective they are often limited by, crowd-sourcing data from youth across the city will allow them to see the similarities and differences in experience that enrich our narratives and inform our social policies. Youth will be encouraged to interact with the data they and their peers collect through games, quizzes, and media art works often implemented and accessed through multiple platforms, including social networks and through NUF-SAID.org.

3) Multimedia arts production: Youth mine data, conduct interviews, and explore the narratives these polls raise through videos, spoken word poetry, animations, 3D simulations, games, remixes and other forms of new media art. Once the youth media makers have access to polling data, they will work within partnering CYVN organizations to interpret the information and create digital stories and art that bring the data to life. In essence, the art serves as a creative analysis of the data collected in earlier stages of the project, allowing them to illuminate and flesh out what they have gathered from their peers.  These media arts projects will take many forms, from traditional documentary to spoken word poetry and interactive games and video remixes that are distributed through our online portal website, a site that encourages audience interaction and feedback as well as new media creation by users. In addition, the projects will be disseminated across multiple platforms to audiences using already established channels including television and radio broadcasts, print publications, and websites which serve as the current means of distribution for CYVN organizations, and which reach audiences in the tens of thousands.

Goals

The goal of the NUF SAID Project is to accelerate the pulse of citywide youth action and awareness, particularly around the urgency of the current economic crisis, using a city wide collaborative model based on youth-centered participatory research, media and culture.

CYVN’s NUF SAID Project employs social media technologies to both gauge the effects of the recession on youth and to empower young media artists to create work that addresses these vital community issues. Youth are civically engaged throughout the process by gathering and analyzing current polling data from their peers and using media arts tools to construct compelling narratives that bring to life the challenges of their generation. These media arts productions promote positive solutions to community issues and actively engage audiences in interactive, multimedia, multi-platform experiences that encourage civic participation. In addition, the project creates a new web portal called NUF-SAID.org – where youth can access polls, polling results, youth media and resources. NUF-SAID.org also houses tools for creative interaction and expression such as an online video remix platform, challenges, quizzes, games, debate forums, interactive mapping tools and other new technologies that allow data to have many different lives and repercussions.  This opens up a new way for youth to think about how to do research that not only reflects their own questions and concerns but that also informs their creative process and future civic engagements. The intention is for youth participants to use social media tools to explore, understand, document, and represent their unique experience of this particular socio-economic moment in time.

Empowered with the tools and training to create authentic and insightful media messages, youth media makers assure that the voices of their peers are heard. In this way, youth enter the civic discourse around the issues that mean the most to them. According to the Center for Social Media at American University, media arts training “helps people of all ages to be critical thinkers, effective communicators, and active citizens.”   Youth who participate in CYVN media arts programs are challenged to think creatively and develop independent ideas, propelling them to a lifelong habit of self-inquiry, civic engagement, and self-expression.

Through the NUF SAID Project, we anticipate reaching thousands of youth in nearly every neighborhood in Chicago as participants in our research activities and as visitors to our website.  Over 90% of our participants are low-income and minority.  In addition, our participants include young people with disabilities, LGBQT communities, drop-out youth, youth in foster care, post-incarcerated youth, and recent immigrants.

Have a look at this behind-the-scenes video to learn more about CYVN and NUF SAID: