Urban Unrest

09 January 2006 | Community | Ernesto Aguilar

The 2006 KPFT Summer Youth Program is shaping up to be a very exciting session! Last year opened the youth program, but this year, I’m working with Volunteer Coordinator Gina Miller, intern Jayn and Eric and Luke, two of our most ardent youth volunteers, to bring a much stronger program to fruition.

This year, youth will be engaged in more structured activities and have summer blocks of time available to participate. KPFT’s Summer Youth Program participants are involved in a variety of projects, including:

• Writing and producing announcements for various community and station events.

• Participating in and being responsible for aspects of daily operations of KPFT, such as program transitions, engineering, producing, etc.

• A biweekly (first and third Thursdays) one-hour noontime program wholly hosted and produced by youth volunteers. Programs will be composed of non-poetry segments\, features, interviews, call-ins, etc. Each show’s programming format will be determined collectively by youth. Engineering, reporting, editing, hosting, producing and other roles will be distributed on a rotating basis.

• A biweekly (third and fourth Thursday) companion podcast. Similar to the on-air program, youth volunteers will produce a program to be aired via our streaming website, KPFTI.org.

• Opportunities to create and distribute segments that will be shared nationally via Pacifica’s affiliate network and to other community stations.

• Collaborating with staff to stream monthly Listener Station Board meetings, which are held at Alliance Francaise, 427 Lovett, next door to KPFT. This will expose youth to streaming technology as well as the LSB, KPFT’s board of directors.

• Developing, scripting and editing video training guides in bringing adults up to speed on various technologies.

• Other projects as assigned to youth volunteers.

Topics for programming are determined at whole-group planning meetings. During these meetings, members work in groups of two to eight people to generate a list of possible topics. Adult staff comments on the show ideas like everyone else but don’t participate in the voting and have no veto power. Students who do not attend the planning meetings are given assignments based on their training and what we know about their interests. At the end of every broadcast, youth conduct a critique, and the adult professionals participate.

We’ll also see a number of returning youth, including Eric, Luke and Madison. I expect a number of students from Waltrip High School to also join us. Should be a great summer. Stay tuned!

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