Youth Radio
"When I started to write about myself as far as like my identity of being a queer male of color from East Oakland, that was terrifying...It becomes that you realize you have a responsibility, something that started off as just me needing to express myself because I didn’t have nobody to talk to or I didn’t think anyone would listen to me, becomes other people need to hear this because I know there's someone else from where I'm from or from a similar place. This can change something for them."
- Joshua Merchant, Off/Page Project Fellow, poet, and activist
About
Youth Radio is an award-winning media production company based in Oakland, CA. Its mission is to train diverse youth in media production skills and give them a platform from which to process their experiences and change existing media narratives. Youth Radio contributors produce content around a wide range of issues through journalistic and creative media. It serves as NPR's Youth Desk and also allows young people to work with professional media producers.
Key Projects
The Off/Page project is an offshoot of Youth Radio via Youth Speaks and the Center for Investigative Reporting. Off/Page encourages youth to bring together serious, journalistic facts and relateable, memorable poetry. For instance, Off/Page hired young poet and activist Joshua Merchant to create a series of poetry workshops for youth in Stockton, one of the largest US cities to file for bankruptcy. While Merchant led the workshops and taught young people in Stockton how to use poetry and spoken word to express their lives, the journalistic wing researched statistics and facts about Stockton. The young poets were then able to combine this research with their poetry to create powerful political statements about life in a failing city.
Themes
Contributed by Samantha Close
Contributed by Samantha Close