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Beloved community members, Since our beginning, EVC has been a keeper of possibility, love, and critical hope. Last week, the way our nation voted left us feeling punched in the gut. Like so many times during EVC’s 40 years, electoral politics are at odds with our work and our wellbeing. We feel anxious, uncertain, and scared. But we’ve been here before. And we know this: sometimes the work happens through elected officials, but more often than not it happens through our own leadership, on the ground, in our communities and our neighborhoods. Time and again, EVC’s youth have reminded us that no one will do this for us. A loving, just, and equitable world will be the result of our ongoing struggle. Even as we reeled from the election’s aftermath last week, our young people instinctively mobilized to care for each other—especially for those who are most vulnerable at this moment. Our programs have only just started, yet the young people are already deeply bonding, due, in part, to EVC’s willingness to hold them through the intensity of this political moment. In one program last week, a youth producer courageously shared how he was recently forced to flee his homeland to seek asylum in the U.S. In the new political reality with a president-elect threatening mass deportations, this young person is now afraid of imprisonment and deportation. As tears streamed down his face, another young person, also a newcomer, rose and embraced the speaker. They held each other in a long embrace at the front of the class for all to see, modeling the care at the heart of EVC’s homeplace. They taught us how critical it is to hold each other in this perilous moment however we can—physically, emotionally, spiritually, and politically. EVC will not let this be the end of the story—it is not even the beginning. It is, rather, a reminder that the work always continues, always moves steadily forward. As you can read from our recent blog post, “ EVC Activism ,” EVC has always worked inside of social justice movements to win the kind of change that outlasts the verisimilitudes of electoral politics. Now, more than ever, we need you to gather your heart and your fire and join us. Help us hold our young people, protect our homeplace, and ensure that EVC is around for many more generations to come. In solidarity, Ambreen Qureshi Executive Director

By: Steve Goodman From EVC’s beginning in the 80s, our youth producers have created documentaries that ask critical questions about injustice and, in so doing, disrupt dehumanizing narratives and oppressive systems. They tell stories that lift up the silenced and the stigmatized and let them live in their full humanity. They lifted up the voices of people suffering from the AIDS epidemic, youth living in foster care, or in juvenile detention facilities, and asked why in the richest nation in the world, families were living in homeless shelters in Queens, in apartments without heat or hot water in East Harlem, or attending failing schools in the Bronx, segregated and unequal. Highlighting the grassroots activists and organizations working to change these injustices, EVC used culture and media arts as a form of activism to educate and motivate community audiences to support these efforts.  EVC’s role as an agent for change is more important than ever today, 40 years later, as our civil liberties and human rights are being eroded, dissent is being silenced, and a climate of intimidation and authoritarianism is on the rise. Teachers and librarians are attacked for teaching the truth about slavery and African American freedom struggles, and for teaching about LGBTQ life, particularly about Trans people. Migrants are exploited and discriminated against and are under constant threat of detention and deportation. School principals and college presidents are under attack, and in turn are cracking down on their students’ freedom of speech and protest of the US supported genocide in Gaza.  With the future of our democracy on the line in the upcoming presidential election and the new school year sure to bring renewed student protests and brutal police suppression of them, I’m reminded of two EVC documentaries: Journeys Through the Red, White and Blue and Policing the Times. They are exemplars of EVC’s work at the intersection of youth filmmaking, radical education, and political and social change. And they highlight the multiple strategies for organizing and activist-driven change including: the power of voting and the electoral process, the power of direct action and protest on the streets, and the power of teaching and critical student inquiry. They addressed two historic human rights and freedom struggles for African American dignity, empowerment and political representation: safety from state-sanctioned violence, systemic police brutality and murder; and protection of voting rights and political representation.  In both cases, EVC students were chronicling and also participating in critical moments in our nation’s social and political activist history. They were both witnessing and making that history.  Students produced Policing the Time s during the early actions of the Black Lives Matter movement, which would explode five years later in the summer 2020 as one of the largest protest movements in US history. In Journeys Through the Red, White and Blue they documented a grassroots organizing effort in communities of color as well as the personal journeys of some group members preparing to vote for the first time in what would become  the historic election of the first African American president. In the Tradition of Activist Filmmaking In Policing the Times , EVC students documented protesters holding signs and chanting, “All Lives Matter! When Black Lives Matter! All Lives Matter! When Black Lives Matter!” This was back in 2015, before the police murder of George Floyd, but after the police killings of other unarmed Black people, including Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, and others. They filmed this peaceful rally held weekly at Grand Central Station, but they also ended up recording the arrest of the leader of the rally. I was struck by the flickering image of EVC student Jordi with camera in hand, illuminated by the red police lights reflected in side window of the police car as he bears witness to the arrest as they drove him away. In 2008, the Journeys Through the Red, White and Blue  crew brought their cameras to the Barack Obama presidential campaign headquarters in West Philadelphia. They volunteered as canvassers to knock on doors and distribute campaign literature to get out the vote in the Democratic primary. And they recorded themselves as active participants going door to door and also registering new citizen immigrants. As EVC student Shon says to one of the campaign organizers, “We’re gonna canvass, so get me some instructions. So we can go make history, right? Then he pumps his fist and says, “Yes, we can!”  These projects not only included interviews with experts, but documented EVC students as they investigated and also participated  in educational and political organizing work. For example, Shon is the same young man, who, earlier in the film and his own political development, ponders if his vote really matters, after speaking with his brother, a Iraq veteran, who laments on camera that his vote doesn’t really matter, and then contends with his dad, who reminds him that people died so that he could have the right to vote. We certainly weren’t the first to use media as a form of cultural activism; we were building on a rich history of radical filmmaking. As a college student in the mid 1970’s, I was shaken to my core after seeing The Battle of Chile  directed by Patricio Guzman and also Harlan County, USA directed   by Barbara Kopple. Guzman documented the CIA-backed fascist coup that overthrew the Chilean government of Salvador Allende and Kopple documented (and lived with) the miners’ years-long struggle for better wages and humane working conditions in the coalfields of Harlan County, Kentucky. After watching these, I decided I wanted to somehow be involved as a social documentary maker.  Closer to home, I was also inspired by how The Newsreel (now Third World Newsreel), a film collective formed in the late 60’s, used the power of media as a catalyst for discussion and social change. The media they created was always meant to be put in service of further organizing and activism. Shot in the gritty verite style of guerrilla filmmaking they produced dozens of radical films including Break and Enter a.k.a. Squatters, Rompiendo Puertas  (1971) that documented families who had been displaced by gentrification as they “liberated” and moved into vacant city-owned buildings in upper west side Manhattan. And they shot Columbia Revolt  inside the university buildings to capture the student protesters’ perspective who were occupying the university and then evicted and beaten by the police. Newsreel films were not for sale, but were meant to be put in the hands of organizers and activists to use in their political work. The makers would often go out to screen and speak with their films in union halls, college campuses, community and tenants organizations to show what organizing for social change looks like.  Drawing lessons from these and scores of other social change documentaries, in the 90s at EVC we established YOTV workshops (Youth Organizers TV) and later COTV workshops (Community Organizers TV), creating handbooks and teaching production to youth and to adult community activists. Behind these programs was the question of what we understood to be the relationship between the producers we taught, the social change documentaries they created, and the social change we/they sought to bring about. And finally, underlying all of this work was the question of what we meant by social change. Multiple Iterations of Activism It was always the case that our students were the first to experience change through the EVC projects they worked on. They learned about and developed their consciousness of social change through their research and active engagement with a wide range of family, friends and community members. These community partners also provided positive role models who were teaching, organizing and leading in the community and showing students that change is possible. In Journeys , students interviewed activists from the Medgar Evers College Center for Law and Social Justice, and the NY Immigration Coalition in addition to a NYC council member, a NY State Assemblyman, a civil rights activist/freedom singer, a political scientist, and immigration lawyer, as well as family members and friends.  The crew structured their stories around three of the crew members’ own autobiographical explorations into the value of their vote. Brian questions how the electoral college works and the role of his local Washington Heights city council member. Shon talks with his family members and voting activists to decide whether or not to vote. And Tidiane, an immigrant from Guinea, learns that as a non-citizen he pays taxes but is prevented from voting. As former YOTV Director Andrea Ortega-Williams described it,  We were all really tuned into the fact that this was a historic election. So when we thought about how do we engage and participate, ….we looked at ourselves [as an entry point to the topic]… we represented a Latino perspective of a young person, an African American voting for the first time, and an immigrant. ….here’s a line of inquiry that they’re following and they’re agents in their journey of discovery. And what’s great is that  their discovery leads to something tangible that helps them and others in the community. Andrea described her students’ deepening engagement from behind-the-camera documentarians to on-camera participants and activists: What is so powerful about EVC’s model of engagement during a moment like this is that [there were] multiple iterations of activism. There’s the level of them being engaged as active participants in their processes of learning. And then volunteering and canvassing, and speaking to other young people about their experience -registering new citizens to vote,speaking to elected officials, family members and activists. And then there’s the layer of them taking the film out, once it's done. Engaging in Q&As, and being in the community. ... I think it's one of the best forms of learning and activism.  School and Community Screenings In the tradition of The Newsreel’s call for media to further organizing, the Journeys  team extensively screened their documentary as part of registration drives for new youth voters of color. Coordinated by then EVC Community Engagement Director Sheila Aminmadani, in the months leading up the election the crew screened the documentary and led discussions in countless high schools and colleges in swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania as well as in media festivals and on community television. And the crew even went to Washington, D.C. to screen it on the weekend prior to Obama’s swearing in as part of “The People’s Inaugural Ball” at the Historical Society of Washington D.C. to celebrate the impact of grassroots organizing and the impact of the youth vote.  Andrea further reflected on the importance of the students recordings of their own grassroots organizing efforts canvassing and registering new immigrant voters,  ......you’re amplifying those efforts that are on the ground. And you’re creating a record of it that can go in different spaces that are, you know, that are far greater than that one immediate action that's taking place. So it's amplifying, multiplying.  In Policing , they interviewed grassroots activists in the National Action Against Police Brutality and Brownsville Community Justice Center, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and recorded their Know Your Rights workshop. They also interviewed a NYC Deputy Police Commissioner, a high school principal and a human rights lawyer, and screened past EVC videos on police brutality from the archives. The Policing  crew included a brief but powerful history of the systemic anti-black brutality dating back to patrols organized to catch fugitive slaves, the police dogs on civil rights protesters, though the beating of Rodney King, EVC footage from the ‘90s of a Harlem community protest of police shootings, up through police shootings of unarmed blacks in 2015. And they followed the story of Robert, one of the EVC youth producers who talks about his own experiences being brutalized by police in his community and in his school. Policing ends as Robert and a friend meet with their school principal, asking him for a school-wide program to teach students their rights.  Both of these projects sparked social and political change on multiple levels during and after production. Like throwing a stone into a pond and watching the circles of ripples grow, the school and community screenings reached individuals and institutions far beyond the students who originally made them. Policing  was not only screened in Robert’s school, but we were able to reach many more New York City students and teachers by partnering with the New York City DOE’s Office of Post Secondary Readiness (OPSR). We developed a teaching guide and copied hundreds of DVDs for OPSR to disseminate to Transfer school classrooms. We also presented the film and teaching guide for teachers and school leaders during a workshop at OPSR’s annual Transfer School Conference.  Engaging Teachers and Communities in Social Change This led to a deeper level of engagement with the Transfer Schools. They asked us to provide professional development training for teachers in the schools so they could facilitate video inquiry projects exploring the problem of police violence with their students. During the next semester, EVC teacher developers Cynthia Copeland, Emmanuel Garcia and I guided teachers in the planning and facilitation of three student projects in two schools, and also a “Making Of…” video documenting the entire process.  We called this professional development project, “Youth Powered Change.” One class chose to investigate the impact of gentrification and policing in their communities, particularly in Harlem where many students lived. Another looked at how police abuse of students in communities and in schools contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline. The third, with a large number of Dominican students, investigated how police departments’ "broken windows” tactics --- arresting residents for minor infractions such as jumping turnstiles or writing graffiti -- could lead to increased deportation and prevent NY from being a sanctuary city for unauthorized immigrants.  As co-facilitator and historian, Cynthia Copeland taught the police and gentrification project students about the history of Seneca Village that she had researched, a thriving 19th-century community of predominantly middle-class African Americans that was located near their Upper West Side Manhattan school. The ENL (English as a New Language) students felt proud and self-affirmed after interviewing community immigrant rights lawyers (in Spanish), who could provide them with critical assistance if any of their own family members ever faced deportation.  They presented their three final projects at a school-wide “town hall” meeting, which led to a powerful dialogue among students, teachers, school leaders, police officers, and city council members. The students concluded their video on police and immigrant rights with a narration in English and Spanish that taught the community audience about their legal rights, should immigration agents knock on their door.  As the principal described it, “The town hall was quite magical. To be able to bring all the stakeholders into the same room and engage in authentic dialogue and problem solving session is no easy task…. Both of my teachers said this has been a highlight of their careers. This has been for a cause, which has allowed us to take student voice to a new level…” Institutional Impact EVC’s impact on an institutional level expanded further the following year when OPSR asked us to develop a “ Know Your Rights Blueprin t” curriculum guide for principals and teachers across all their schools including unit plans linked to the students’ documentaries. The Blueprint was designed for schools to adopt EVC’s model of Youth Participatory Action based on student voice/choice and promotes collective study, problem solving, and action.  I thought it was significant that we had gained officially sanctioned systemic support for students to use documentary to investigate and confront the social injustices in their lives. Here’s the Blueprint  description explaining to the principal or teacher “What’s This Project All About?” Around the country and around the world, young people are raising their voices about issues that matter most to them, whether marching through the streets, lobbying for change with government and community leaders, or expressing their ideas through poetry, painting, or song. Young people are witness to injustice and advocates for system-wide changes. They are claiming their agency to participate and lead movements for positive change.  The Know Your Rights Blueprint is a teaching guide with everything you need to support students in taking action in their own school or community through the creation of a powerful documentary film. On the following pages, you will find lessons, models and tools that will make it possible for you to create a course, program or club that encourages youth activism….  Even in these dark times, I remain hopeful thinking about how the power of EVC’s activism lives on in the many thousands of students, teachers, principals and community members who‘ve participated in our projects over the last 40 years. And how its impact continues to be felt in the countless others who’ve watched, discussed and were empowered by our films to make a change in their communities. Whether that meant registering new voters, joining marches, organizing school teach-ins, or so many other forms of action, I’m proud that EVC’s documentaries and community engagement have carried on the radical tradition of using media to expose injustice, humanize and defend the rights and dignity of our students, their families, and all historically marginalized people.

By Dare Dukes and Saba Sebhatu with Nadia Feracho, Jasmin Mendoza, and Angel Galindo. Living in childhood without a sense of home, I found a place of sanctuary in “theorizing,” in making sense out of what was happening. I found a place where I could imagine possible futures, a place where life could be lived differently. This “lived” experience of critical thinking, of reflection and analysis, became a place where I worked at explaining the hurt and making it go away. Fundamentally, I learned from this experience that theory could be a healing place. —bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, Education as the Practice of Freedom , 1996 Educational Video Center’s youth-centered, trauma-informed, culturally responsive curriculum fosters critical literacy and related skills that are essential for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) to see, fully understand, and resist the oppressive structures that are harming their communities. Educational Video Center (EVC) is revising and updating our award-winning curriculum to address the ever-evolving needs of BIPOC youth and shifting approaches to media literacy in our rapidly changing technological and political worlds. Right at the center of this upgrade is a workshop called The 4 I's of Oppression , a training that, in the past couple of decades, has become a widely used tool not only by EVC, but by social justice organizations across the country. The 4 I’s  workshop presents a framework that helps participants see how their everyday experiences of injustice can be understood—and ultimately resisted—inside the context of broader oppressive systems and the institutions perpetuating them. What Are the 4 I's of Oppression? The 4 I’s  workshop guides participants through exploring four types of oppression: ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized. Our workshop defines these four types as follows: Ideological Any oppressive system has at its core the idea that one group is somehow better than another, and in some measure has the right to control the other group. Institutional The network of institutional structures, policies, and practices that create advantages and benefits for some, and discrimination, oppression, and disadvantages for others. (E.g., companies, governmental bodies, prisons, schools, organizations, families, and religious institutions.) Interpersonal Interactions between people where people use oppressive behavior, insults, or violence. Internalized The process by which a member of an oppressed group comes to accept and live out the inaccurate myths and stereotypes applied to the group by its oppressors. The Workshop: Seeing Structural Oppression in the Day-to-Day Through interactive, participant-centered exploration, the 4 I’s  workshop gives learners an understanding of how oppression manifests in these four categories. Participants experience firsthand how to see and break down the mechanisms of power and privilege while reflecting on their positions within these structures. This fosters not only understanding, but also a sense of accountability, empathy, and solidarity. In this way, the workshop equips folks with the critical lens needed to recognize, challenge, and transform oppression in its many forms. This learning trajectory—from understanding to action—can be seen in two key exercises at the center of the workshop, Concept Mapping and The Corner Activity. Concept Mapping In the Concept Mapping exercise, the word “oppression” is placed at the center of a piece of paper on the wall. Responding to the word, students brainstorm and visually “map out” their associations and thoughts. In one recent EVC workshop, participants wrote down instances of oppression they encounter in their daily lives, such as “exploitation,” “suppression of voices,” “controlling of information,” “systemic suppression,” “manipulation,” “humiliation,” “denial of rights,” and “abuse of power.” Mapping in this way helps participants understand oppression and its various manifestations, and how it shows up in their everyday world.  EVC recognizes that educational systems, too, can be hierarchical and oppressive. Our Freirian pedagogy directly mediates this, creating non-hierarchical participatory learning spaces that center the lives and experiences of our young people. This approach creates connections and opens avenues for discussion that might not emerge through traditional methods.  The Corner Activity In the Corner Activity exercise, participants deepen their understanding of oppression through lived scenarios. Each corner in the room is designated as representing one of the four Is of oppression: ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized.  Participants are then presented with various scenarios and tasked with discerning the type of oppression illustrated. They indicate their choice by moving to the corresponding corner. The activity transforms abstract concepts into something participants can grapple with, discuss, and debate in real-time. Students articulate their reasoning, listen to differing viewpoints and personal experiences, and collectively deepen their understanding. The 4 I’s  in Real Time In July 2024, EVC once again facilitated The 4 I’s of Oppression  workshop for youth and educators. Media educator Nadia Feracho adapted the workshop to accommodate her majority migrant student population. Speaking to the power of the workshop, Nadia said, “The 4 I’s is new to all of the students. They come in most of the time without the knowledge of the various types of oppression, or the language, but they come in with the experience.” The workshop gives students—in this case migrant youth—the language they need to name the oppressions they experience daily. The conversation unfolded as students, including youth such as Jasmin and Angel shared personal insights and experiences with oppression in their daily and school lives. The discussion shed light on the unique challenges faced by immigrant communities. These included issues largely invisible to those outside the community, including grappling with an implicit hierarchy related to language proficiency. Jasmin and Angel Jasmin and Angel, students in EVC’s Youth Documentary Workshops and both immigrants from Mexico, discussed how the workshop impacted them. Jasmin recalled: At the beginning of the activity, my instructor told me that I need to think of a time where I experienced some type of oppression, and which kind. I started to write about my experience in my journal, and I started to think about one time I was on the train and a person started to attack me and say that because I'm Mexican I needed to go back to my country. I started to realize this kind of attack corresponds to interpersonal oppression; I began to ask what are the aspects that we need to solve this type of oppression? Angel's story, on the other hand, revealed an issue within the educational system. He experienced bullying from fellow ESL students, revealing a troubling aspect of immigrant life in schools—an exclusionary hierarchy based on English language proficiency that pits students against each other, rather than encouraging mutual support and understanding.  The phenomenon isn't limited to student-based interpersonal oppressions; it reflects a broader systemic or institutional failing that centers proficiency to the implicit and explicit exclusion of recent arrivals and those at the beginning of their language acquisition process.  The workshop helped Angel and everyone understand that the interpersonal biases they were experiencing over language proficiency were ultimately grounded in institutional and, ultimately, ideological oppressions that centered the English language and assimilation over cultural and linguistic diversity. Media educator Nadia summed up the young people’s learning: “Now that students have this language, they're starting to connect all of these systems of oppression to each topic that we talk about in our films. They're able to tell their family members about what they learned in EVC. I love that they get to share this information with them.” Critical Literacy as a Foundation of Homeplace In her Teaching to Transgress , bell hooks describes how critical thinking became the bedrock of her sense of safety, belonging, and power in an oppressive world: the “‘lived’ experience of critical thinking, of reflection and analysis, became a place where I worked at explaining the hurt and making it go away.”  At EVC, the 4 I’s  workshop is the incubator for the development of critical literacy—the ability to read, write, and rewrite the narratives that are the raw materials of one’s world. There is no place in EVC’s culture where this intersection of critical understanding, belonging, and action is more apparent than in the documentaries our young people have made over the years. Here are just a few examples from EVC's archive of films that explore various aspects of the 4 I’s : “New Visions: A New Look at the American Dream” (2015) – This film examines migrant discrimination in the workplace and ideological oppression. “Laws Written on My Body” (2023) – This documentary addresses sexism and institutional oppression, focusing on abortion rights and their societal impact. “The Shade of My Beauty” (2024) – This film explores colorism and internalized oppression within Black and Latino communities. “Breaking Through Stereotypes” (1994) – This documentary analyzes racial and ethnic stereotypes and their influence on interpersonal interactions. These films are a small example of the scores of EVC media works that have offered youth leaders a uniquely powerful way to rewrite the narratives that are harming them, and to replace them with stories of critical understanding, hope, and power. And these films’ jumping off point is, in many ways, the framework presented in EVC’s 4 I’s  workshop.

By: Steve Goodman This blog post, written by EVC founder Steve Goodman, is Part 1 of a two-part series on EVC’s groundbreaking work supporting youth media production across the urban-rural divide. As I write this, Appalachia is once again in the news. Donald Trump’s pick for his vice-presidential running mate is controversial author J.D. Vance, who rose to fame in 2016 with the publication of his Hillbilly Elegy . A memoir of his time growing up in Appalachia, the best-selling memoir has been widely criticized by scholars and Appalachians for mining conservative stereotypes of working-class whites in the region and praising policies known to be harmful to the region. Vance’s voice, embraced by conservatives, brings home the need for youth and community perspectives with not just lived experience, but with critical literacy, an understanding of history, the ability to analyze how power functions within systems of oppression, and how oppression functions intersectionality across race, class, gender, and sexuality. In December 1984, I went to a retrospective of Appalshop films at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Originally founded in 1969 as a community film center and funded as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Appalshop by 1984 had become a thriving center for arts, culture, economic development, education, and community organizing in Eastern Kentucky, the heart of Appalachia. At the retrospective, I saw films by Appalachian filmmakers, including Herb E. Smith, Elizabeth Barret, Mimi Pickering and others. The documentaries explored women coal miners in labor unions, community struggles in general, and the history of degrading, classist depictions of the “hillbilly” of Appalachia. The films also celebrated the rich artistic, musical, and other cultural contributions the region has made to U.S. culture. These documentaries changed my life, and inspired me to take the fledgling Educational Video Center (EVC) in a bold new direction. The films broadened my thinking about the possibilities for what EVC could be and sparked the idea of EVC existing beyond the borders of New York City. Across the seemingly vast geographical, cultural, and racial divides between New York and Eastern Kentucky there was a shared need for youth to push back on the negative stereotypes that proliferated in mainstream movies, television, and news media by telling their own stories and showing the world as they experience it. I wanted to visit Appalshop. More than that, I wanted EVC youth to see and experience Appalshop and meet the young people who were living very different lives in the mountains but shared some of their struggles.  Urban and Rural Youth Together I imagined a summer documentary camp where EVC youth would live, learn, and make documentaries together with youth from Kentucky. I called Appalshop to see if they would be interested in hosting such a project. Appalshop was open to us visiting them and using their editing facilities, but they weren’t able to host a camp. They told me to call Marie Cirillo, a community organizer from Clearfork Valley in eastern Tennessee.  I called Marie, and she saw the great potential of bringing rural and urban youth together for a documentary filmmaking summer camp. She had cabins on the Woodland Community Land Trust where the youth could stay. And she had prior experience, since she’d been video-recording oral histories in coal-mining communities a decade earlier. I couldn’t believe my good luck, and I saw the idea of the camp taking shape before my eyes! Marie said there wasn’t much money, but, through her networks, she could provide most of the food (I remember eating a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and baloney sandwiches). And I told her we could bring all the video cameras, recording decks, microphones, monitors and VCRs. Friends loaned us extra sleeping bags for students who didn’t have any. Appalshop agreed to give us free use of their editing facilities in Kentucky.  Suzanne Valenza (my then partner) collaborated with me in planning and running the camp. She taught English at Queens Satellite Academy and helped recruit EVC youth from Bronx and Queens alternative high schools, where EVC was working. Marie recruited some youth who lived in the local area near the Roses Creek Holler. Others came from Appalachian communities just across the border in Kentucky and Virginia.  Now, I just needed to find the money to pay for our share of the food, for videotapes and other supplies. And of course we needed money to rent a van for the long drive to Tennessee and local travel once we got there.   We were very lucky to meet New York Community Trust Program Officer Kate Cheico, who gave us a three thousand dollar grant. (Kate later became an active member of EVC’s Board.) With that grand sum, we set out to run a month-long camp for about a dozen youth in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee.  Community Organizing and Solidarity As I got to know Marie better, I could see why Appalshop had recommended her. She was a force of nature—a dedicated, tireless, community organizer. She had been a member of the Glenmary Sisters, a small order of “new nuns” serving the urban poor in Chicago and the impoverished rural areas of Appalachia. She left the order and moved to Roses Creek Holler where she became a leader of the community land trust movement. Land trusts provided affordable and sustainable housing in places where unregulated, rampant land acquisition by absentee landlords was driving widespread poverty. Appalachia was rich in natural resources Yet timber, coal, and mining companies were extracting these resources, stockpiling their resulting wealth, and ensuring very little of it made it into the pockets of the people who lived on the land. . Marie devoted her life to countering these structural forces by developing community, supporting miners’ families, building women’s cooperatives, and nurturing small businesses.  Her work won her many friends and allies, and also attracted some powerful enemies. These enemies shot up her house, cut the brake linings of a volunteer’s car, causing them to crash, and burned down a local clinic and several houses she had built. Though slight in stature, Marie was fearless. She wasn’t intimidated by this violence. She continued organizing for environmental regulation of the strip-mining that was devastating the mountain environment and poisoning the drinking water. And she kept advocating for jobs, better healthcare and housing in the community.  Thinking back on this time, I now believe it might have been a good thing that I hadn’t known about the turbulent history of opposition to organizing in the community. I might have been overly concerned. Instead, I trusted in our partnership and in the goodwill of the local community. I knew that the kids would teach and learn from each other—and that I would be learning from all of them. I hoped that we were planting seeds that over time would bear fruit for the young participants involved in this intercultural experience. I envisioned that we were helping to develop new work opportunities for the youth. We were building awareness of urban and rural Americans of their shared histories and struggles. We were nurturing solidarity across historically marginalized poor white, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. And all of this, I believed, was a strong antidote to a growing divide that was beginning to define the United States. The Journey Begins Leaving behind the traffic of Queens and the Bronx, we traveled for hours on the flat open highway. Eventually, our van began to climb along the twisting, winding roads into the beautiful Cumberland Mountains. There were no shoulders, no guard rails, just a steep drop off down the side of the mountain. When I experienced moments of drowsiness during the long drive, I would be snapped awake by the adrenaline-rush of huge logging trucks carrying massive loads coming right at us as we rounded hairpin turns.  We arrived at Roses Creek excited and nervous. Marie welcomed us. Her modest home was abundant with beautiful Appalachian quilts hanging on the walls and locally handcrafted wooden furniture. The EVC youth met their rural counterparts, and we all went to unpack our things in the cabins. Immediately, the youth began sharing their cultures and experiences. The EVC youth said they were so used to the constant noises of the city that it was hard for them to get used to sleeping at night in the quiet of the mountains. Their discomfort was not helped by all the horror movies they liked watching where nothing good ever came to young people sleeping in cabins in the woods. But they came to feel more comfortable with the new surroundings, and soon the dance rhythms of merengue  music could be heard at night from the boombox the Dominican youth brought with them.  Land and Power Just a few years before our camp, John Gaventa had written his now classic book,  Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley, about the impact of these issues in the community around our camp . Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands  is another study of poverty in Appalachia and is credited with bringing an Appalachian focus to President Johnson’s War on Poverty. The themes in these books became the backdrop for our work. The day after our arrival, Marie took us on a tour of the area, showing us where the coal mines and mining camps used to be. The strip-mining had blown apart and ravaged the land. She helped us understand how we are all connected, especially by the land. Everything kept coming back to the question of land: Who owns it? Who owns what’s on top of it? Who owns what’s underneath it? This conversation spurred a brainstorming session the resulted in these questions,  scrawled on poster paper: What does this land mean to you? What are people’s legal and emotional attachments to the land?  Do you have one room with several purposes (stove in bedroom, beds in living room) Have you ever had your electricity cut off? How do you cook/heat?  ‘Even when you were in your mother’s womb, you were of the earth’– Clairce Hall Clairce swears they own it and the company stole it Power, in all its multiple meanings, was also a theme of our discussions. We talked about “power” as energy as electricity and “power” as agency and political self-determination. We pondered questions such as Who gets to control our life and property, for ourselves, our family and the larger community?  And what about the coal that’s extracted from the rural communities in Appalachia? It gives us the energy that powers our cities, but it comes at a terrible cost: the degradation of the land and of the health of the miners, who die from = accidents and black lung. The owners are enriched by what is beneath the ground, those living on top of that land are left impoverished.  We took our EVC teaching methods and used it with our students in the camp. Students brainstormed ideas for their projects and worked collaboratively taking turns using the camera, interviewing and editing.  Since it was a summer camp and we were all living together, we also listened to music, went swimming, and watched the movies on the VHS videos that we brought. We went to the small local town of Jellico to celebrate July 4th and, to my surprise, saw some local kids breakdancing out on the street. I remember when we all went camping and swimming in nearby Cove Lake, one of the local youth participants killed a large snake. It turned out to be a poisonous copperhead. It was then we learned we needed to keep an eye out for all the copperheads that lived in our area.  For the continuation of this blog post, read Part 2 .

By: Steve Goodman This blog post, written by EVC founder Steve Goodman, is Part 2 of a two-part series on EVC’s groundbreaking work supporting youth media production across the urban-rural divide. Read Part 1 here . I wrote in part 1  of this blog post how in 1984 I was deeply inspired by Appalachian filmmakers and supported by local grassroots organizers to create a summer program where New York City youth would collaborate with Appalachian youth to create documentaries that explored their shared experiences across the geographical and racial divides. The idea caught fire, and during that first summer in 1984, youth produced the following films. Award-Winning Documentaries “Letta’s Family” With 60% unemployment, the community was challenged by poverty, food insecurity, and poor healthcare. Many families subsisted on food stamps and what little they could grow in their gardens. But it was not easy to get people to talk about it on camera. Many folks felt a sense of shame, blaming themselves for their poverty, and they were understandably hesitant to open up to outsiders, given the history of exploitative media reporting on Appalachian poverty. When interviewed about problems related to housing and land ownership, some admitted that they were afraid that if they spoke out the company would run them off the land.  Despite these challenges the campers found someone willing to talk on camera. Marie introduced us to her courageous neighbor, Letta Casey, who lived up the road with her two boys, Henry (13) and JJ (9).  The boys were curious about our videotaping and hung out with us at the camp. They were playful and loved to joke and laugh with us.  The campers made a documentary, “Letta’s Family,”   that captured a day in this family’s lives. Letta and her family were hard-working and resilient. They didn’t have electricity or running water in their home and barely had enough to eat. Students documented “a day in their life” as they dug up potatoes in their garden, fed their chickens, carried jugs of water up to the house twice a day from the stream, and collected cans from the roadside to make some money from the scrap-metal man. They not only struggled financially, but with health as well. Letta’s malnutrition contributed to two miscarriages. She told us that Henry had a heart condition that resulted from all the painkillers she was taking when she was pregnant with him because of the terrible toothaches she suffered. By age 37, she lost all her teeth, and didn’t have money to have them replaced.  “Hungry to Learn” The second documentary we created that summer is “Hungry to Learn.” Filming it took us about an hour and a half drive each way to St. Charles, Virginia. A nun there who worked with Marie introduced us to Beatrice Huff. A single mother, Beatrice depended on food stamps as one of her few means of support. She wanted to be self-sufficient and earn a living as a nurse’s aid,so she began taking courses to become certified. As a direct result, social services cut her food stamps. The government was forcing her to choose between gaining an education and having enough to eat. The camp video crew interviewed Beatrice and documented her meeting with social services requesting a hearing to appeal her case. When they denied her request, we were sad and furious at the injustice of it. In the film she explained, “I do not have enough to eat. It’s hard to take from my neighbors and my family all the time.”  We were amassing piles of videotapes that all had to be viewed and logged. This was always a tedious process, even under the best conditions. It was especially challenging to stay focused when the temperature was soaring into the upper 90s, and there was no air conditioning to provide relief. But we all persisted. And when we were finally ready to edit the documentaries, we drove a couple of hours to Whitesburg, Kentucky to use the editing facilities at Appalshop, with assistance from Anne Lewis. When we finally finished our videos we had a community screening in Marie’s house followed by a discussion, which we recorded. We ran a long cable up the hill to a neighbor’s house so Letta and her family and other neighbors could also watch. The camper’s documentary took first prize at two National Video Festivals and was aired in Japan and nationally on NBC. Giving Up Wasn’t an Option After we all returned home, we were excited to learn that our students’ documentaries were beginning to stir up some action that we hoped could lead to some real material improvement for the Appalachian community. Later that fall, Marie helped organize a hearing before the select congressional committee on hunger in Appalachia where Letta, Beatrice, and others from the community would get to tell their stories. The New York Times , The Washington Post , and the major television networks  covered the hearing.  Sadly, their powerful testimony fell on deaf ears. The administrator of the Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service walked out of the hearing without listening to even one word of the women’s testimony. He said that he believed the food stamp program “is fine just the way it is—people can live on what they get.'' This dismissive, punitive attitude toward poor people was common in the Reagan government of the 80s, which made deep cuts in government funding for social services. According to them, $153 a month in food stamps for Letta and her boys “was fine just the way it is.”  Not only were we disappointed by this non-response from the men who held power in Washington, DC, but we were mortified when we heard that Henry and JJ had been teased and bullied in school for publicly testifying that they usually only had bread and potatoes to eat. Despite this resistance, giving up wasn’t an option. We recommitted ourselves to the collaborative work we had started. We continued bringing EVC students down to Roses Creek, working to amplify voices and create new opportunities for them, (since business and government was falling woefully short). With Marie’s guidance, we continued to use video production as a tool for documenting and educating the community about the local grassroots organizations that were building self-reliance and empowerment for youth and their families.  EVC and Rural Video Together With Marie’s support, Sue Ellison and Carolyn Deaton, two summer camp participants from that first summer, formed a video production company in Roses Creek called Rural Video. They conducted oral histories and documented and publicized local organizations and events. Sue and Carolyn visited their EVC friends in New York City the next year, and they corresponded with each other for many years after. The next summer, campers each received bright yellow T-shirts saying, “Video Camp Summer ‘86,” with both EVC and Rural Video on it. I still have mine!  In subsequent years, Dave Murdock, my brother Ben Goodman, EVC’s first office manager Liz Grabiner, and Brad Berman were among those who carried the work forward running the camp, teaching and coordinating the youth documentary productions. Students produced an amazing body of work covering a range of subjects, including teen parents, community housing programs, the need for garbage services, cooperative gardens, and the pervasive problem of hunger. We added a literacy component to the camp, setting aside time each day for students to reflect on the day’s events in their journals, as well as play theater games, draw, write poetry, draft stories, and listen to local bluegrass music. We compiled their writing, artwork, and photography in a journal we called, Mountain Video Review , a co-publication of EVC and Rural Video.  In one article, EVC youth Miriam Hernandez and Tennessee youth Sue Ellison and Richard Terry described the making of their video on teen parents: Picking our video topics was a very difficult process because everybody wanted to do something different. Some of the topics people wanted to do were employment problems, young employment programs, problems with the land being owned by big companies, childcare, drug abuse, community development groups, housing and teenage mothers. There were other ideas too, but finally we narrowed it down to housing and teen parents. The next day, Sue called up a few girls who she knew were pregnant or already had kids and we asked if they would talk with us about it…. In another article, Tyrone Bush and Carolyn Deaton and Anahid Avsharian wrote, One of the best things that happened in all this was that, since other people from different areas came in, I went deeper into the history of my community and got a better appreciation of it. … Making decisions in the editing room was quite a process. Sometimes it would take 15 minutes just to decide whether to add or delete one frame! McD.L.T.s and candy from the vending machines saw us through 20 hours of editing...The most fun was when we videotaped J.B. playing fiddle with Hutch. They have a band which plays bluegrass music and we ended up using their music in our tape.  We developed a partnership with CTV Channel 20 cable access station in Knoxville. Peggy Gilbertson, the general manager there, donated time for us to use her station’s edit suites and then broadcast their documentaries. They also shot studio interviews with the students about their work and their camp experiences. We’re All Connected…Still EVC has maintained our relationship with Appalshop. Years later we had a former Appalshop staff member, Caron Atlas, join the EVC board. I was thrilled to have Dee Davis, Jeff Hawkins, and Robert Gipe visit EVC and exchange ideas with us as they were starting their own youth media program, the Appalachian Media Institute, in 1988. And after a 30 year hiatus, Hana Sun and the Mozilla Foundation generously gave us funding to revive the camp in the summer of 2017. We called the project, “We’re All Connected.” After the polarizing effects of Trump’s election, there was a sense of great urgency to build bridges between urban and rural communities in our country. Marie was still in Roses Creek, as active as ever, now working with the Parent Resource Center. EVC media educators Mary Grueser and Emmanuel Garcia brought EVC students and lots of equipment down to the Clearfork Valley. Partnering again with Marie, as well as with June Pyle, Dawn Ivey, and William Isom, urban and rural youth lived, worked, and made films together. They investigated local problems of contaminated water, broadband access in the mountains, foster care, and the opioid epidemic. As in the 80s, the youth learned about the history of coal and timber extraction in the community, and visited the Highlander Research and Education Center to learn about the history of Southern organizing, and about the connections that bring urban and rural youth together.  While the cameras were a lot smaller, and computers a lot faster—well, we actually didn’t have any computers back in the 80s!—the spirit of collaboration and cross-cultural dialogue remained the same. Their friendships and connections were strengthened when the Tennessee youth reunited with EVC youth in New York City five months later over the Christmas holiday. As I described the campers’ different backgrounds and experiences in the opening issue of Mountain Video Review  in 1986,  Some of them left high school early, others attended alternative schools, and some attended college; they were Black, Hispanic, Native American and white; they came from the crowded neighborhoods of New York City, the towns and hollers in the Central Appalachian Mountains…. Rather than causing any problems, however, the youths often remarked on how their differences made the experiences of sharing and learning from each other that much richer.

By Dare Dukes and Marlene Peralta with Esther Alatishe, David Ibarra, Nadia Feracho and Niko Darling  Responding to Youth In 2018, the youth leaders of Educational Video Center (EVC) were instrumental in the hiring of the organization’s first BIPOC executive director, Ambreen Qureshi. Soon after, EVC’s youth leaders began telling Qureshi—over and over—that the biggest change they wanted to see at the organization was more educators who looked like them. When EVC named Ambreen Qureshi executive director in 2018, replacing departing founder Steve Goodman, Qureshi became the first person of color, first immigrant, and first woman to lead EVC in the organization’s history. As someone who shares many of the lived experiences of EVC’s youth and community members, Qureshi was and remains fiercely committed to refining and evolving the methods and strategies of EVC’s work to build a more equitable and culturally responsive education system and, beyond that, world. Aware of the large body of research regarding educators of color and student outcomes, Ambreen understood that BIPOC youth feel more at home and connected in educational settings when they can see themselves and their stories in their teachers. This connectedness makes young people feel like they matter, which, in turn, increases a sense of safety, purpose, and likelihood of educational achievement.  First Home, Then the School System Qureshi understood that in order for EVC to do the work in the world—building a more just and equitable education system—EVC had to first do the work at home. In collaboration with the staff, alumni, and board, Qureshi began shaping an organizational community that reflects the broader communities EVC works with. EVC has always supported youth from predominantly BIPOC as well as intersectional working-class, LGBTQIA+, and migrant communities. Over a four-year period, EVC evolved into a BIPOC-led, BIPOC-majority organization. Along the way, the staff and youth leaders came together to transform the organizational culture to allow for safe and brave spaces to talk about white supremacy, structural oppression, and how to disrupt these systems. Qureshi, in turn, started fresh mission-driven initiatives that evolved the work for a new era of community and youth activism. It was during this process that youth leaders told Qureshi they wanted to see EVC educators who shared their lived experiences. Qureshi responded by creating Credible Educators, a professional development program aimed at recruiting, mentoring, preparing, and placing in jobs BIPOC educators equipped to use media-arts as a tool for student healing, learning, and civic engagement in middle and high schools. Of that moment, Qureshi says:  It is a top priority for us to have educators who have the same lived experiences as our young people because our young people have been asking about this since I joined EVC, especially Spanish-speaking instructors. It is an important part of making EVC a safe space for students to hold difficult conversations as they navigate the impact of systemic oppression.  Credible Educators’ goals are to increase BIPOC student achievement by diversifying New York City’s population of media arts educators and increasing the capacity of schools to create transformative, culturally responsive, anti-racist learning spaces for youth let down by traditional education.  Following the Research EVC and its youth leaders are not alone in making the case for the benefits of having a more diverse pool of educators. Research supports this approach. According to a report from Johns Hopkins , Black students who have even one Black teacher by third grade are 13% more likely to enroll in college. The same research shows that Black men are 39% less likely to drop out of high school if they had at least one Black teacher in elementary school.  This is due to what social scientists call the positive outcomes of the “role model effect”—an effect that is especially beneficial for low-income youth. Despite these compelling facts, New York City, as with school districts nationwide, has a dire disconnect between students of color and their teachers. The vast majority of New York City students or 83% are BIPOC, while only 39% of teachers are. Meeting Young People Where They Are EVC’s pedagogy, which grounds Credible Educators, equips educators to meet young people—especially BIPOC, queer, and working class young people—where they are, at their unique stories, cultures, identities, traumas, and triumphs, to help them heal, grow, and thrive as learners, artists, and agents of change. This pedagogical approach, inspired by the work of educator, philosopher, and activist Paolo Freiere, replaces the traditional teacher-student hierarchy with non-hierarchical collective knowledge-building, in which everyone—educator and youth—is both learner and teacher simultaneously. The result is a learning space in which youth feel seen and heard, which, in turn, affords them the opportunity to begin to heal from trauma. This safe and brave space fosters joyful and rigorous collaborative learning, creative play, and, ultimately, a sense of agency, purpose, and power.  Trainings with an Equity Lens Each trainee receives almost 130 hours of pre-service instructional training and individualized coaching. The program is a mix of workshops on theory and practice, including topics such as student-centered learning, instructional scaffolding, developing a line of inquiry, and more. In parallel, so trainees can apply and reflect on their learnings in real time, they also work with a cohort of youth for a hands-on teaching practicum and are supported by an EVC pedagogy coach for feedback and support. Compensation: EVC compensates trainees in order to remove an often fatal barrier to participation in entry-level opportunities for trainings and hands-on experience—a lack of resources required to enable a novice educator to take time off from work to participate in low-wage, no-wage, and sometimes high-cost trainings and internships. This addresses a systemic inequity that is a root cause of the need for diversity that Credible Educators is designed to address. Youth Participants in Mock Workshops: There is no better way to learn, especially for educators, than by doing. Mock workshops, therefore, are a critical component of Credible Educator’s hands-on approach. To this end, EVC recruits program youth and alumni to act as participants in mock workshops. EVC compensates youth for their labor, time, and expertise. These same youth provide feedback, from a youth perspective, on the quality and effectiveness of Credible Educators and of the teaching skills of the trainees.  Instructors Instructors of the program have included Christine L. Mendoza, an EVC alum who, after receiving a BA in Media from Hunter College and an MA in Comparative Ethnic Studies from Queens University Belfast, returned to EVC as a media educator and consultant. As a program alum with a remarkable story of challenges, growth, and achievement, Mendoza is a prime example of the kind of credible educators EVC has cultivated since its beginning. Mendoza’s journey from program youth to media educator to teacher trainer in Credible Educators is the embodiment of EVC’s commitment to empower youth to not just heal, create, and achieve, but to lead. Leading, in the case of Mendoza, means returning to the communities and institutions that nurtured her to ensure those behind her have a path to their own version of success. Currently, the program is led by Cynthia Copeland, a veteran education consultant, a public historian focused on Afro-American studies, member of the Center for Trauma Resilient Communities teaching faculty,  and adjunct professor at Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University (NYU). At NYU, Copeland specializes in teaching and preparing preservice teachers. The Incredible Credible Educators Since the Credible Educators’ launch in Fall 2022, nine BIPOC educators have completed the program’s  intensive training.  Esther Alatishe, David Ibarra, Nadia Feracho and  Niko Darling  are some of the instructors who have been trained in Credible Educators. They agree that EVC’s anti-racist and student-led pedagogy changed their lives as educators. EVC’s transformative approach not only developed their professional skills but impacted them personally, as it made them reflect on their own experiences as students in oppressive education systems and how that experience inspires their approach as teachers.   EVC Media Educator Nadia Feracho  reflects: Most of us come from a culture where the hierarchy starts with the teacher. You listen to the teacher. You do as the teacher tells you to do. Learning in a way where there is no hierarchy helped me create better relationships with the students. I understand that they are more the experts in their own experiences, and it’s not my job to tell them how to feel or how to think. Niko Darling  calls the program “ Incredible  Educators,” based on her deep gratitude for her experience: The Credible Educators program reminded me of the importance of sharing my knowledge and passion for storytelling, filmmaking, and social justice. I am now much more adaptable and responsive to the changing needs of my students and the various educational environments. For  Esther Alatishe,  the program helped her change the way she thinks of herself as a teacher: …the student-led approach…as a teacher made me really reflect on that relationship I have with students. Being more of a supporter instead of instructing them to be a certain way, was something I really liked and I wished I had it more in my upbringing. I think it’s the most effective way of teaching. David Ibarra , an EVC media educator who used to be a teacher's assistant in his native Ecuador, said the program transformed the way he sees his students: The biggest change I had was to have patience, as part of the process to make [students] feel seen, heard, and especially valued. This experience reinforced my continuous self-learning and to understand more about them too. It’s a lot about self reflection, understanding, patience, and trusting their own path and giving them the tools to understand this. I think this changed me a lot in the way I approach teaching. Nadia expressed gratitude for how the program helped her learn how to see things from the students’ perspective, and to meet every student at their lived experience and culture—no small feat in a city as diverse as New York City: Credible Educators allowed me to be in the position of the students, because we had to literally do all the work that students would be doing during the semester. In doing that I realized how hard it was, number one, as a person who is from here, and so to think about students having to do all this work, and English being their second language. And then being new to the country, to the city, I can definitely see how that may affect them. Ripple Effect Credible Educators is still a new program, and EVC refines it with every new cohort. Building off of EVC’s 40 years of teacher professional development expertise, Credible Educators is rolling out a new generation of educators equipped to facilitate transformative learning spaces for BIPOC youth and significantly diversify New York City’s community of public school teachers. The program is exponentially increasing the reach and impact of EVC’s curriculum and it builds the capacity of public schools and afterschool arts programs throughout all five boroughs.

By: Dare Dukes and Marlene Peralta with Nyla Collado, Nadia Feracho, David Ibarra, Richelle Placencia, Francis Junior Genao Rodriguez,  Mously Thiam, and Franchesca Thomas. This is the second blog post in a series on how Educational Video Center cultivates “homeplace” for BIPOC youth leaders. “Homeplace” is a term originally defined by educator, activist, and writer bell hooks. While hooks defined “homeplace” as a uniquely Black site, EVC’s manifestation of homeplace embraces the heart of hooks’ definition as it encompasses the intersectional experiences of a spectrum of youth from communities that face oppression, including youth who are Black, brown, queer, trans, and working-class. Testifying before the New York City Council in March 2024, Educational Video Center (EVC) youth leader Mously Thiam appeared unflappable. A recent arrival to the U.S. from Senegal, she opened her remarks with a humble apology for her broken English and poor public-speaking skills, apparently fully aware of the stereotype of the recent immigrant her audience was projecting onto her. Then, slyly moving under cover of this stereotype, the 21-year-old Mously advocated with resolute insistence for herself, for Educational Video Center and other afterschool programs, for a fully funded public education system, and, finally, for New York City’s economy. In this moment—steady, fierce, and strategic—Mously embodied what youth leadership looks like at EVC. She appeared to be entirely aware of the dominant narrative about young people like her, and fully able to deftly step inside this narrative in order to flip it, to the benefit of herself and the communities for which she advocated. This capacity is Freirian “critical literacy” in action: Mously understood the narrative, put that narrative to use in order to invite her audience in, and leveraged it in order to advocate for her communities. And all along, right under the noses of the audience members, she rewrote the dehumanizing narrative of the shy, helpless immigrant struggling to assimilate into a story of belonging, power, and resistance. As Mously said to the City Council members that day, EVC helped her become “a new version of me.” In the framework of critical literacy, this “new version” is as much Mously’s evolved understanding of herself as it is her undoing of harmful stories others try to tell about her. Beyond Assimilation: Engagement, Empowerment, and Celebrating Difference Mously is just one example of the many immigrant youth who have joined EVC looking for a sense of belonging, safety, and power in their new city. For youth who have been pushed out of their home countries due to structural violence and oppression, a definition of belonging that insists on “assimilation”—an implied erasure of their ethnic and cultural uniqueness—only perpetuates a profound sense of displacement, both psychological and geographical. EVC’s approach is to lean into young people’s lived experience, encouraging them to celebrate it, articulate it, and rewrite the social narratives that undermine it. To create homeplace for migrant youth, therefore, EVC understands that a sense of belonging can only emerge if, in addition to opportunities to feel held and able to heal, migrant youth are offered opportunities to push back against the violence–both in their countries of origin and their new home—that continues to threaten their stability. At EVC, resistance is not an afterthought but a prerequisite to a sense of belonging. Of course, one of EVC’s main tools for building critical literacy and opportunities for resistance is filmmaking. Mously worked with other recent arrivals to make a powerful film that exemplifies the balance between belonging and resistance: their film, The Grass Isn’t Always Greener, Migrants in the Workplace (2023), investigates the exploitation of migrant labor in New York City. Working on this film gave Mously and her peers the opportunity to simultaneously build community, research and ground themselves in their new home, and explore how structural challenges to their wellbeing exist across borders, both in their countries of origins and their new home. Far from encouraging assimilation, the production process empowered the young migrant filmmakers to solidify their identities as engaged and critically aware residents in their new city, residents with uniquely powerful lived experiences that can bring new awareness to structural harms happening around the world, including right here in the United States. (Love + Healing) x (Power + Resistance) = Belonging Research shows that recent arrivals to the U.S. who participate in community organizing are better equipped to make sense of their identity in relation to the greater community. Moreover, the same body of research suggests that healing, learning, and social spaces like Educational Video Center provide communities of support and what Levinson calls “intimate cultures,” in his study of Mexican students in 2021,  which help young migrants to: 1) critique and dismantle negative stereotypes around migrant status that the media and political figures perpetuate; and 2) resist migration policies through community organizing. In traditional learning models the teacher is an authority figure who imparts knowledge to the passive student. EVC’s Freirian pedagogy shifts this power dynamic by fostering collective knowledge-building, where youth leaders and adult educators are equal partners in a process of intellectual and creative discovery. Youth determine the culture of the space and what safety looks like, the direction of the program, the content of the films they produce, and even the arc of their learning and evaluation. Nadia Feracho, an EVC media educator, describes how youth collectively set the culture of their workshops and creative processes. They create a “community agreement,” a list of behaviors and boundaries that together define safe, communicative, productive interactions and set boundaries around harmful words and actions. “They gain the autonomy to decide for themselves about what is a safe space and navigate that on their own. That’s something you rarely see,” she said. Youth write down their agreements, and educators help make sure the youth keep each other accountable. In a world where migrants can be hammered daily with harmful stories and stereotypes, these collective agreements defining safety means young people can let down their guard, begin to heal, and focus their energy less on survival and more on learning. As micro as such boundary-setting can appear to outsiders, it is the beginning of youth actively seeing and setting policies to create security in often insecure worlds. As youth gain a sense of safety and ultimately agency around the possibility of impacting their worlds, they can move their gaze outward toward and begin critiquing not just the hyper-local policies impacting their learning spaces but the macro policies and narratives harming their greater communities. The Fierce Urgency of Now Providing a space where migrant youth feel safe and can thrive as learners, artists, and activists is more important than ever. New York City has seen a historic influx of new immigrants—more than 116,000 since April 2022. The sudden increase in population has stressed the city’s infrastructure, creating challenges in serving these families, who are primarily from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Despite New York’s rich diversity, the reality is that migrant students are entering the most segregated education system in the country, and at a time of severe budget cuts. Even schools designed to work directly with migrant students are struggling to catch and hold these young people with all their manifold needs. Making matters worse, many city leaders have adopted inflammatory xenophobic rhetoric, with New York City’s mayor leading the charge. During this year’s city budgeting process, the mayor scapegoated the migrant population as part of a cynical strategy for unnecessarily-stringent budget cuts. Many of these children came to the U.S. unaccompanied, without family or friends. Many are “walkers”—migrants who have made the harrowing journey on foot. And many not only walked and walked alone, but did so traversing what’s known as the Darien Gap, a treacherous and arduous land-based pathway connecting South America to Central America. When a young migrant arrives in New York City, she often carries conflicting internal realities. On the one hand, she is resilient, hard working, determined to succeed, and filled with joyful aspirations for her new home. On the other hand, she is in crisis, isolated, and shouldering layers of trauma. Too often, these heroic young people end up bumping into systemic barriers in New York City that parallel the structures in their home countries that pushed them to leave. A community of educators, after school programs, and other experts are rising up to catch these young people and clear a pathway for their success. System-wide the New York City Board of Education lacks resources to meet the manifold needs of these young people. Yet there are specific schools and a smattering of educators—many of whom share the lived experiences of the young migrants—who are successfully working against the stream to gather the means to help. At the center of this community of support is the Educational Video Center (EVC). From its founding 40 years ago, EVC has designed programming to address the particular needs of all New York City public school students. In partnership with caring and expert educators and schools, EVC has pivoted to meet this wave of recent arrivals where they are, at their stories, at their traumas, and at their excitement to be in their new home. In schools throughout all five boroughs of New York City, EVC is using documentary video production as a powerful tool for engaging recent arrivals and helping them to carve out healing-centered spaces in their strange new schools to tell their stories, build community, gain confidence, and reestablish a sense of safety. In the last three years, EVC has doubled its Spanish-language programming offerings, evolved its curriculum, and trained and hired numerous Spanish-speaking educators, many of whom have stories that reflect those of the migrant students in their workshops. In addition, EVC continues to partner with and support public school teachers and schools that are actively and successfully centering the healing and success of migrant youth. The result is that New York City’s recent young arrivals have safe spaces to share their stories and be heard, engage with a loving community, begin the process of healing, and—one quiet story at a time—disrupt the politicians’ and media’s xenophobic narratives with first-person accounts of their struggles, accomplishments, and hopes and dreams for their new homes. Young recent arrivals in EVC programs have made powerful films about their migration stories that have moved and enlightened audiences, including city elected officials and educators. And they’ve also made documentaries that reflect how they already consider the U.S. their home and are eager to participate in the most important civic debates. These films have covered topics such as the American Dream, abuse of social media, climate change, xenophobia, and exploitation of migrant labor. Seeing Themselves in Their Educators Research shows that when young people have just one teacher who shares their lived experience they are significantly more likely to graduate high school. Because of this, and because EVC young people have asked for it, EVC actively recruits, trains, and hires educators of color, many of whom have lived experiences as migrants and recent arrivals. “I am an immigrant myself, and I can relate to their experiences,” said David Ibarra, a Spanish-speaking media educator who was trained in EVC’s Credible Educator program. David, who was a teacher's assistant in his native Ecuador, said he values the different approach EVC takes towards teaching, following an educational model that centers youth culture where there is no hierarchy between students and teachers. He has seen how this approach makes EVC a safe space for immigrant youth to thrive. “Treating students as equals with no judgment is so important to build a connection. You build trust,” he said, and “when you create trust they do better.” Joining the Resistance EVC meets migrant youth where they are, at their lived experiences, languages, and identities. They are encouraged to use research, community engagement, and film production to challenge systems of oppression to redefine their own stories and the communities around them. The EVC approach is particularly useful for helping young people from many different backgrounds find community and ground themselves in a homeplace. Each young person comes with their own experiences and understandings of structural oppression. Many come looking for the American Dream and are surprised to find structural challenges in their new home that look a lot like the structural challenges that pushed them out of their home countries. “When I first arrived, I expected New York to be the perfect city,” Mously explained. “But being in this program, meeting other students, has helped me pay attention to the issues around me and how I can watch out for my community.” Others, like Nyla Collado, the daughter of Puerto Rican and Dominican parents are made well aware of systemic oppressions at an early age. Having a very difficult time navigating high school during the pandemic was an eye-opening experience. She described being treated as a number rather than as an individual because of the system. “I know that there are teachers and people inside the system who care, but the system itself doesn’t care about specific people. It cares about test scores,” she explained. Both Mously and Nyla got to learn from each other’s experiences as they worked together on The Grass Isn’t Always Greener, one of the many films where students connected the immigrant experience to life here in New York. They have also produced films about xenophobia and the American Dream, among other pressing issues. Spanish speakers are encouraged to produce films in their own language. But most importantly they have all learned from each other's experiences, overcoming language and cultural barriers, through working together on films. Validating each other and accepting feedback is one of the mantras in the program. The sense of collaboration, collective resistance, and care for each other drives them to contribute to changing their communities. That’s the case of Francis Junior Genao Rodriguez, a Dominican immigrant, who helped produce the film In My Mind or In The Other Eyes (2023) about body dysmorphia together with Richelle Placencia, also Dominican. “It’s an experience I will never forget,” he shared with excitement. He wrote and performed a rap song in Spanish for the film with a message for young women to love themselves. “I like to make music. I also play instruments, so when I made this music and people listened and liked it, it made me really happy.” Franchesca Thomas, whose family comes from Honduras, said she has grown equally passionate about films and about issues affecting immigrants. She was a producer on the film The Grass isn’t Always Greener. “It was hard for my parents because, as immigrants, it’s hard to be accepted and find jobs,” she said, sharing how her own father faced hostility at work for being an immigrant. “They should respect immigrants because they are humans too.” Before coming to EVC, Frachesca had never seen films made by young people like her. “It’s a great experience. We see things differently because we are young and we want adults to take action.” She had the opportunity to go to Albany to promote the film The Grass isn’t Always Greener. She felt scared, but she was still willing to work to change people’s minds thanks to what she’s learned at EVC. Learning from each other, caring about their issues and collaborating together in raising awareness about them has created a bond between this group of students, despite coming from different countries, different communities. Their common language is the passion to produce films about issues affecting them and their growing immigrant community in a space where they feel safe.

by Steve Goodman, founding executive director emeritus This is the third in a series of guest blog posts written by EVC’s founding executive director emeritus, Steve Goodman, on EVC’s early years. Read the preceding blog post in this series here. On the last day of the inaugural class I co-taught with teacher Liz Andersen at Satellite Academy, the students gave me a memorable gift: a bright red t-shirt with “Satellite Video Master” printed on it in raised white letters. I couldn’t have been happier and more grateful. I still have it all these years later. But the truth is, I was far from being a “video master.” I was just starting out on my journey as a filmmaker and educator. The “masters” were the experienced educators I had the great good fortune to be surrounded by along the way. I was determined to spread the success of that class and teach as many students as I could. I knew that I could connect with just 25 students each time I taught a class. But I figured I could reach exponentially more students if I taught teachers who would then bring video production into their classes. Developing teachers' skills became my plan for spreading EVC’s educational methodology. My timing was perfect. EVC’s founding in 1984 coincided with the flourishing of the progressive education movement in New York City. The New York City Office of Alternative High Schools and Programs had just been established under the leadership of Superintendent Stephen Phillips. This expanded on the first wave of alternative schools started by teachers and community activists in the 1970s. Ted Sizer founded the Coalition of Essential Schools the same year, and Debbie Meier launched  Central Park East High School a year later. These schools followed the same kind of student-centered, interdisciplinary, collaborative, project-based learning practices and principles that EVC used, and this made them fertile ground for collaboration. Alternative-school leaders Alan Dichter, Alan Baratz, Mark Weiss, and Nancy Mohr actively supported our work with their teachers and students. Fueling this momentum, a new arts education funding program from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) made it possible to bring EVC’s video programs into additional alternative schools. After that inaugural class, I began working alongside various teachers at Satellite Academy’s Forsyth Street and Chambers Street sites, and then at Bronx Regional High School. Filmmaker and media educator (and former college roommate) Dave Murdock soon joined me and expanded our work, teaching classes in Pacific High School, Boys and Girls High School, and Julia Richman High School. As we worked in these schools alongside teachers and put VHS cameras in their students’ hands, the students soon began producing a great variety of creative projects. Students in a Julia Richman High School English class created a video called “The Living Dictionary,” in which they acted out the meanings of vocabulary words in  comedic skits. For example, in one skit exploring the vocabulary word “dilemma,” a student faces a “dilemma” when he promises to take his girlfriend out on a date but is then invited by a friend to go to a Yankees game on the same night.) Teachers began to see the power in putting cameras in their students’ hands so they could document the world outside the school walls. Teachable moments arose out of these young filmmakers’ seeing people and places around them with fresh eyes, learning to ask probing interview questions, and engaging in unexpected conversations with people on the streets of their neighborhoods. Chambers Street students took their cameras a few blocks from their school to the Manhattan courts. They interviewed the director of the Andrew Glover Youth Program, which provided alternatives to incarceration for justice-involved youth. Bronx Regional students interviewed people about the homelessness and abandoned buildings in their surrounding neighborhood. Visiting Grand Central station, it was a revelation for students to simply point their cameras up and notice for the first time that there were stars painted on the ceiling.  Julia Richman High School students filmed and discussed the meaning of a Francis Bacon quote–“knowledge is power--carved above the main entrance of their school and which they had passed unnoticed day after day. Boys and Girls High School students traveled from Brooklyn to Harlem to document the places where Malcom X had lived and worked, and they documented community oral histories from people who had heard him speak. Summer Intensives Dave Murdock began running summer documentary workshops at EVC, and these workshops extended students’ school-based learning experiences. We helped students not only investigate their own neighborhoods but expand their horizons by taking them on trips to other communities. Some students won scholarships to attend the summer film program at the State University of New York Buffalo. Other youth came with me to a summer documentary camp I started in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee. I also took two students with me on a trip to Minnesota to document the Hormel meat-packing strike, where we ran into presidential candidate Jesse Jackson and documentary director Barbara Kopple, who was filming what would become her award-winning documentary, American Dream. (We were tear-gassed with the strikers on the picket line there—but that's another story.) EVC’s goal in collaborating with and mentoring teachers in the classroom was to make ourselves redundant by developing teachers' skills to the point where they would no longer need EVC. This was easier said than done. Even experienced teachers in schools with inspired school leaders were rarely able to continue teaching video independently without us. Codifying the Curriculum We learned that we needed a more systematic program for teacher professional development. We identified the bundle of skills that were  needed to facilitate our video projects, and it became clear that while technical skills, such as camera operation, sound recording, and editing, were absolutely necessary, they were only the beginning. Our fundamental goal was to support student-centered inquiry and expression for sparking community explorations, investigations of critical issues, and amplifying youth and community voices. To accomplish this, we needed to teach educators our approach to student-centered pedagogy. We began to take a more systematic and multi-layered approach to our professional development work. We addressed teachers' expressed needs, concerns, and institutional constraints. Partnering with the New York City Writing Project at Lehman College in 1989, Dave Murdock and I launched our first multi-week summer video institute for teachers. Principal Nancy Mohr of University Heights High School on the Campus of Bronx Community College gave us free use of classrooms. My now former partner Suzanne Valenza helped to forge this collaboration, as she was an English teacher at University Heights and also an active member of the Writing Project. That first summer,the teachers made projects about the Bronx Zoo and the on-campus school Hall of Fame. We designed these intensive summer experiences to give teachers sustained time for learning away from the pressures of school. Working on mini projects, they experienced as both learners and media makers some of the same challenges and successes their students would experience. The learning process carried them through collaboration with others as they planned, shot, and edited their video inquiry projects, exploring issues of their choosing. New York City Writing Project leaders Marcie Wolfe and Ed Osterman collaborated with us to integrate daily journaling as a method for teachers to reflect on their experiences. We collected the teachers’ journal entries, production notes, and pictures and created a scrapbook recording each group’s summer experiences. These scrapbooks are now a part of EVC’s archive. Often, on the first day teachers would feel overwhelmed by the challenge of using the video equipment. Here is what two teachers wrote in their journals at the beginning of their workshop: “I have a fear of making a video. My lack of mechanical ability is my biggest fear. I felt awkward handling the equipment…” “Sending kids out on their own into the field I’m sure would cause me anxiety. Not feeling 100% sure of their technical abilities (like my own) I would feel nervous that they might encounter difficulties which they could not solve.” Over time, teacher journal entries began to reflect their increased comfort with the technology and the collaborative production process: “Today the camera became more of a friend than it felt like yesterday. Combining both the mechanical and the spiritual aspects of the camcorder required a great deal of thinking, planning, and concentration.” “I felt so excited about holding the equipment, making or capturing images, and hearing myself speak.” “Individuals trying to interrelate for a common goal. Can this work? Egos are cast aside (supposedly), so that at the end individuals who started are now one. Group dynamics thus refutes the laws of mathematics; in group dynamics the addition of many becomes a single entity.” Thanks to this early professional development collaboration, daily journaling and reflection would be an integral part of EVC’s approach. It helped us to expand our understanding of literacy. We made new connections between written and visual expression, and used printed and spoken words and images for storytelling, inquiry and creative expression. Student-Centered Approach in Era of Standardized Testing As New York City’s small schools movement grew, so did New York State’s data-driven regime of standardized testing, surveillance, and social control. School administrations increasingly asked to use our video projects to help teachers improve their students’ attendance and test data. While we worked within these constraints, we kept the focus on our guiding principles: developing teachers’ capacities as student-centered educators. And so, we sometimes came to think of ourselves as bringing a Trojan Horse into the gates. We gained entry into a school as a video program, but once inside we would also teach the “hidden curriculum” of lifting up student and community voices, and doing the deeper work of student-centered teacher change and school reform. In this way EVC was doing systems-change work from the inside. In some cases, simply helping teachers obtain the bureaucratic permission to take their students out of the school building to interview people in the surrounding community was a pedagogical victory. We also helped teachers to increase student engagement by relaxing control, to feel comfortable navigating the local community, and to trust in and learn from their students and people in the community. In the age of increasingly rigid standardized testing and curriculum, these practices could seem radical. Beyond Summer Institutes: Teacher Network and Mini Grants To expand our support for teachers, we started an EVC teacher network where they could remain connected after attending our summer institutes and returning to the classroom. We had periodic gatherings at EVC where they problem-solved, shared lesson plans, screened some of their students’ latest videos, and socialized. We also awarded teachers mini grants for video equipment and special projects. Bronx Satellite teacher Pam Sporn used her grant to take her students to Mississippi. As a media-literacy critique of the film Mississippi Burning, Pam’s students undertook a remarkable  documentary project about the murders of Civil Rights workers during Freedom Summer in 1964. Pam and Middle College High School teacher Mario Chioldi, who both attended the first summer institute, then team-taught our second summer institute in 1990. Their teachers made projects about consumerism and sneakers and overcrowding in urban housing. I was inspired by the teachers we worked with who remained dedicated to a student-centered approach, despite being stretched beyond capacity, pulled in many directions, and working under sometimes dehumanizing institutional constraints. Teachers consistently told me and other EVC staff how invigorating it was for them to learn to work in partnership with their students and to facilitate their self-expression. As one told me: The major thing I learned was not to stifle a young person’s vision or dream. And not to put so much adult thinking into their production...this was an opportunity for me to actually step back and let them do it. To be patient and let them explore their own gifts and that was the major thing for me...something I had to fight myself to do.

We are thrilled to announce our honorees for EVC’s 40th Anniversary Benefit! Each of these four extraordinary individuals, in their own way, embodies what EVC strives for when we work to have an impact and make real, positive change. ALUMNI TRAILBLAZER AWARD Jeannette Santiago Director of Programming, Manhattan Neighborhood Network (MNN) Jeannette Santiago was born and raised in East Harlem, New York. Her passion for community media began in high school when she was asked to produce a documentary about teenage delinquency. Her path led her to Educational Video Center (EVC), where she honed her skills in field production and documentary filmmaking. Jeanette and her peers made the film Mind Over Destruction on racial bias in the media in 1992. Following her time at EVC, Jeannette seized an opportunity at ELA Studios, a hub for public access show production. In 1994, Jeannette's journey came full circle as she joined Manhattan's public access channels as a tape librarian, immersing herself in every department and absorbing everything about community media. Through hard work and dedication, she ascended to the role of MNN’s Programming Director, where she worked on the creation of thematic channels, daily shows, and initiated MNN’s presence on social media platforms. Thirty years later MNN is still a place where she continues to thrive and contribute meaningfully to community media’s mission to promote creative expression, independent voices and community engagement. EDUCATION IMPACT AWARD Suri Singh Principal, Pathways to Graduation Bronx Born and raised in the Bronx, Suri Singh is a proud son of a Dominican mother and Trinidadian father. After graduating from John F. Kennedy High School, Mr. Singh graduated from Messiah College located in Central Pennsylvania. After years of working in college admissions and as a youth and young adult pastor, he returned home to begin a career in New York City Public Schools. He is currently in his 10th year as Principal of Pathways to Graduation in the Bronx and enjoys coming to work each and every day. He comes home each day to his wife and daughters who are the loves of his life. COMMUNITY IMPACT AWARD J.T. Takagi Executive Director, Third World Newsreel J.T. Takagi is the Executive Director of Third World Newsreel, an alternative non-profit media center that works in educational distribution, production, exhibition, preservation, and training, emphasizing media by and about people of color, other marginalized communities, and social justice issues. An award-winning filmmaker, Ms.Takagi’s directorial credits include North Korea: Beyond the DMZ, She Rhymes Like A Girl, The #7 Train: An Immigrant Journey, Echando Raices, The Women Outside and Homes Apart: Korea and Bittersweet Survival, the latter two made with Christine Choy. Also a sound recordist, her credits include the 2018 Oscar-nominated Strong Island, Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, and many PBS films. In addition to this, Takagi teaches at the City College of New York and the School of Visual Arts and works with several Asian American community groups. CREATIVE IMPACT AWARD Alex Rivera Filmmaker Alex Rivera is a filmmaker and 2021 MacArthur Fellow whose work explores themes of globalization, migration, and technology.  His first feature film, Sleep Dealer, won multiple awards at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival.  Rivera’s second feature, a documentary/scripted hybrid, The Infiltrators, won the NEXT: Audience Award and the Innovator Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.  Rivera’s work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Rauschenberg Foundation, the Open Society Institute, Creative Capital, and many others. He studied at Hampshire College, was the Rothschild Lecturer at Harvard University, and is currently an Associate Professor of Filmmaking Practice at ASU’s Sidney Poitier New American Film School, based in Los Angeles.

By Marlene Peralta and Dare Dukes with Isabella Araya, Chris Caraballo, Maude Carrol, Raelene Holmes, Christain Moore, Ines Morales, Carol Román, Alexus Stewart, and Yhenni Vogue. “Described by bell hooks, ‘homeplace’ is a space where Black folx truly matter to each other, where souls are nurtured, comforted, and fed. Homeplace is a community, typically led by women, where White power and the damages done by it are healed by loving Blackness and restoring dignity. She argues that ‘homeplace’ is a site of resistance. Understanding the gutting of dark communities’ homplaces is critical to a teacher’s analysis of the community in which he or she teaches.” —Bettina L. Love No matter the years, no matter the change in demographics, alums keep coming back to Educational Video Center (EVC). They describe the welcoming feeling, the judgment-free zone, the collaborative space, and the opportunities for social justice leadership as some of the many reasons EVC feels both like a nurturing and safe family and a site of resistance—a “homeplace,” as bell hooks called it. While hooks defined “homeplace” as a uniquely Black site, EVC’s manifestation of homeplace embraces the heart of hooks’ definition as it encompasses the intersectional experiences of a spectrum of youth from communities that face oppression, including youth who are Black, brown, queer, trans, and working-class. At a recent Alumni Advisory Council meeting, council members, all Educational Video Center (EVC) alums, spoke freely about their love of EVC and why they stay connected to the organization, even decades after they left the program. (The Alumni Advisory Council serves as a board of  intergenerational alums with the goal of holding EVC accountable to the populations it serves.) Despite participating in EVC programs over 10 years apart from each other, Alexus Stewart, a 2018 alum from Brooklyn, and Ines Morales, a 2005 alum from the South Bronx, feel the same way about EVC: community and collaboration grounds the creative and resistance work. “It’s the way we go about creating films,” explained Alexus when discussing what makes EVC unique.  “We create community first, then we create film. We are all putting ourselves outside of our comfort zone while doing something we’ve never done before, but we are all doing it together and creating a bonding experience,” she added. Relatedly, Ines said, “Those bonds wouldn’t have normally happened outside of EVC.” Allowing Youth to Create a Space They Want and Need This sense of community, safety, and empowerment EVC’s young people feel is by design. EVC arose in 1984 at the intersection of the community media movement, the alternative schools movement, and interrelated, people-centered educational pedagogies that emerged from international anti-oppression work in the 60s and 70s. (For the full story of EVC’s founding, see “The Roots of EVC.”) EVC’s unique framework meets young people where they are, centering their wellbeing and cultivating their power in a highly collaborative space of healing, learning, and social justice leadership development. In this loving, playful, rigorous, and non-hierarchical learning environment, both youth and educators become co-learners, building knowledge and power as collaborators grounded in mutual care and respect. For Christain Moore, a 2023 alum, EVC helped him develop his passion for filmmaking. “EVC puts us in charge; they  give us the freedom to tell the stories that we want, to do what we want, everything is centered around us with the guidance of the staff," he said. “I didn’t really know much about film or anything like that, and because of EVC  it has become one of the greatest passions.” Alexus said she appreciates the fact that she was allowed to make mistakes with no judgments. “EVC is such a positive experience because the judgment-free zone and the educators there allowed students to create a space we wanted and needed.  Even those students whose English wasn't the best, want to be here,” she added. Resistance: Tools for Change Raelene Holmes, a 2012 alum from Harlem, went a bit further: “For me putting yourself as a subject of a documentary you become so vulnerable, and you put yourself out there but with everyone around you going with you on this journey.  That creates an everlasting bond.” Raelene refers to documenting her own family’s plight in the film Breathing Easy, in which she addressed how toxic mold in her family’s public housing apartment had been affecting their health. The film follows their fight with the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) to fix these issues. Raelene said that creating films like this Breathing Easy made her interested in fighting for social justice. “In order to create change, a just society, in order to raise awareness, you need to speak up and show your audience why policies need to change." Breathing Easy did, in fact, create change. In 2015, two years after the start of an advocacy campaign featuring Breathing Easy as an education and organizing tool, NYCHA relented and agreed to renovate her family’s apartment. (It went mold free for years but unfortunately the mold returned after further neglect by NYCHA. The fight for adequate housing continues.) Critical Literacy: Rewriting The World The young people with whom EVC works are smart, resilient and hungry, yet they have spent a lifetime bumping up against harmful systems and structures, including being bombarded by media narratives depicting them as broken, two-dimensional antagonists on someone else’s heroic journey.  EVC youth seek safe space to heal, learn, and ultimately throw off these harmful narratives that they have often internalized. EVC’s unique collaborative research and production process cultivates “critical literacy,” the capacity to read, write, and rewrite the interwoven stories that make up the fabric of self, community, and world.  To be critically literate is to be aware of and understand society’s narratives, see who promotes these narratives and why, understand how power is consolidated and extracted through these narratives, and grasp how one’s personal story is supported or harmed by dominant narratives. EVC gives young people a mic and a camera, and they, with EVC’s support, learn to rewrite how they are represented in the media by telling their stories themselves. Ines Morales, a 2005 alum, says EVC filled an important void. “With the curriculum and everything I feel like you learn so much about yourself and about your community; things that you probably would not learn in school.” Isabella Araya, a 2020 alum, says that the curriculum makes it really fun to confront hard pressing issues, especially for people like her who were really shy when she started the program: “It really focuses on the positive aspect and how we can have fun and make change. That makes it a safe space for me.” EVC’s critical literacy focus helps youth learn about themselves, each other, and the issues that impact their communities. This process, in turn, helps them link their personal lives to the subjects of their films and the learning process. As this happens, they begin to see themselves as experts in their own right due to their unique lived experiences. Maude Carrol, a 1998 alum, said she was very fortunate to have learned about critical literacy as a way to identify injustice and find ways to dismantle it. “EVC was the first place I learned about critical literacy as a concept of talking about stereotypes in media and how to use critical thinking when you are looking at films and the news and media in general,” she  said.  “Having that understanding going into filmmaking and making documentaries is really important because then we can start to dismantle and approach some hard hitting subjects that are important to youth and identify the injustice and take it apart.” Meeting Youth Where They Are Many alums appreciate how EVC creates space for young people, no matter their demographic, who come to EVC. The youth, in turn, learn themselves to meet others where they are, in their unique identities and experiences. “It didn’t matter where you were from or your background was or how you were doing academically; you were still invited to participate with open arms,” said Chris Caraballo, a 2006 alum. Alexus shared that the diversity among students is an asset she has learned a lot from. “I think It's also really unique because, me personally, I went to a school where there wasn't that many kids who recently immigrated to the US and to come to EVC and have friends from Brazil  and from Yemen, it was a really eye-opening experience to be able to connect with those individuals and ultimately create films with them.” For Isabella Araya, a 2020 alum from Queens, one thing that caught her attention is how powerful intergenerational collaboration in the program is. “There are generations of people that are connecting because they feel supported,” she said. “it’s really apparent how much they care and keep in touch.” An example of that intergenerational connection unfolded during the 40 year anniversary kick off event when Carol Román, an alum from 1990, came to the podium accompanied by Christain Moore, an alum from 2023. Carol said Christain was next to her to offer support because she was “extremely nervous” to speak in front of a large audience. This small act showed a very powerful bond between two people from two generations 20 years apart. Thriving through Belonging: Building Leaders Speaking of dismantling oppressive structures, Maude Carroll said, “Just giving us a platform to ask questions is a huge act of resistance.” She went on to say that youth are given the mic. Any topic that is relevant to their lives is fair game, especially  “controversial” topics that question inequitable structures. Young filmmakers decide what gets covered and under what rules with the collaboration of EVC staff members. They learn and ask questions without the fear of punishment, retribution, or ridicule.  For instance, in 1998 Maude collaborated on Waiting to Inhale, a film exploring the possible legalization of marijuana. The film turned out to be decades ahead of its time. She said, “Talking about marihuana in the 90s was a big deal. You could get arrested for smoking it, and the fact that we were able to explore topics like that was really bad ass.” Yhenni Vogue (nee Rodriguez), a 2017 alum, agreed: “We can use film and our voices for good and bring awareness on issues people put under the rug, which empowers students.” And she is right. Central to EVC’s mission is building young leaders to make positive change in their communities. Making Their Own Rules The work of the Alumni Advisory Council, created under Executive Director Ambreen Qureshi’s leadership, is a true testament to the idea that EVC is a homeplace that crosses generations, cultures, and identities. The Council is an intergenerational safe space for alums to hold hard conversations and to create systems that help design the kind of just world EVC wants to see. Its members represent alums from all decades of EVC’s lifespan, including some members who were at EVC decades apart. One of the Council’s projects is to create equitable licensing policies for EVC’s digital archive of youth media, which is slated to launch soon. The goal is to create a ground-breaking, people-centered system for licensing films that guarantees the safety for the folks featured in the films and allows for equitable compensation. At EVC, co-learning and centering students' needs and aspirations are key to helping them reconnect to their innate love of learning and, ultimately, helping them build power and inspiration to dismantle the oppressive structures harming them and their communities. Alumni like Ines, Alexus, Maude, Chris, Yehnni, Christian, Isabella, and Raelene passionately attest to how effective EVC has been to transform their lives. The depth and richness of their experience at EVC keeps them coming back

by Steve Goodman, founding executive director emeritus It was a hot day in July. I was at a block party in the Bronx. The flier read: Tenants Association Presents: Our Children are in Danger! Come See a Movie on Grant Avenue About Youth Crime, Unemployment, and Gangs in our Community. The organizers invited local political leaders to speak. And they invited me to screen a documentary. People milled around in the street, and the DJs played the latest hip hop songs from the Bronx. (It was 1981, and while we didn’t know it at the time, hip hop would soon become a global phenomenon with Grandmaster Flash and other Bronx DJs leading the way.) To play the video, my colleague, Maryann DeLeo, helped me set up the Sony portapak deck and portable monitor we had brought.  We inserted the reel and threaded the ½” tape around the spools in the deck.  Someone had removed the cover plate at the base of a nearby street light, so that’s where we plugged in our extension cord. That is what people did in those days to get electricity in the streets. When the time came, Brenda, the Tenant’s Association leader, called people away from the music, food, and piragua shaved ice cart to gather around. I sat on the hood of a car and cradled the portable monitor in my arms. The screen flickered with scenes familiar for this audience: grainy images of children playing in rubble-strewn lots and women filling buckets with water from the fire hydrants because the gangs had stolen the plumbing pipes from the abandoned buildings where they were living. Many had seen the buildings burning throughout their community, and experienced the forced displacement from their homes, the lack of jobs and youth centers, and the overcrowded, underfunded schools with nearly 40% dropout rates.  Many also knew of youth depicted in the film: the young man named Shotgun, his fellow gang members, and the 14-year-old victims who had been murdered on the block—Vanessa Topping and Evelyn Dingle. Vanessa’s mother had spoken about her daughter’s struggles in school. She had been suspended seven times in one year, but Bea hadn’t been able to transfer Vanessa to a better school. The transformative potential of video was evident on that hot summer day in the Bronx. I was part of the community media movement. My idea to produce and screen videos with and for the people who were in them was rooted in community media collectives and centers that had sprouted up in the 1970s across the U.S., Canada, Latin America, and beyond. Community media-makers were using video as a catalyst for grassroots dialogue and organizing, affording audiences like never before the chance to see their lived experiences and the injustices they faced with fresh eyes, and to take action in response. One of the guiding principles of these movements was to insist that documentation of and research into injustices be collaboratively conducted by those in the community most impacted by those injustices. The collective demand was: “No research about us, without us.” I was also inspired by the literacy campaigns and teaching methods of liberation theology and of Participatory Action Research and Popular Education, which I’d learned about through my travels to Mexico and Cuba, study-group readings of Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire, and solidarity work with the liberation struggles of the time in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Southern Africa. One of the guiding principles of these movements was to insist that documentation of and research into injustices be collaboratively conducted by those in the community most impacted by those injustices. The collective demand was: “No research about us, without us.” And if community members should be their own researchers and claim their data, then community members should also be their own documentarians, filmmakers, and journalists and be in charge of the telling of their stories. Community members should hold the cameras, ask the questions, and shape the narratives about their communities. These ideas brought a contradiction into sharp relief for me.  I was a white middle-class kid with a camera, living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, not far from Columbia Journalism School, where I had studied and learned how to tell other people’s stories. I was asking critical questions, but still holding on to the tools of documentation and expression for myself alone. The video I screened at the Bronx block party had documented a slice of life where the youth had been failed by all the institutions around them—government, youth agencies, and schools. But Bea Topping’s perspective went deeper: she saw things firsthand. She saw how interconnected the systems of schooling and incarceration were and how they had treated her children as disposable. She called for systemic change. “The sad thing about it is– they keep tearing the buildings down, they really don’t have no place to go, no place to be. It’s no centers or anything in this area where the kids can go and have fun.…If people would get together it would be better for the children. And maybe this thing wouldn’t have happened.” What Bea Topping had said increasingly resonated with me. The young people who I had documented in the gangs and in the streets, the kids who came to watch the screening on that hot day in July, they should have cameras in their hands. Yes, they should have a place to go, where they could feel safe and supported, empowered to question, investigate, document, create music and art, and have fun together; a place where their ideas, concerns, voices, and dignity were front and center. They should have an alternative to gangs and to the dehumanizing schools, and in some sense, a way to honor the two Bronx girls whose lives ended at the hand of gang members. I began to heed that call by teaching video at Forsyth Satellite Academy, a small alternative school (now called “transfer school”) for students who had not succeeded in the large traditional schools. Many were struggling learners like Vanessa and Evelyn had been, and also Shotgun who had dropped out of school and joined his first gang by the time he was 15. Working part-time for DCTV at that time, I walked back and forth between the DCTV firehouse in Chinatown to the school in the Lower East Side, with cameras and portapaks in hand. These walks gave me time each day to plan and reflect on the churn of community and student-centered projects that were taking shape. In my first class, co-facilitated with English teacher Liz Andersen, I proclaimed, “There are no teachers or students in this class. We’re all teachers and we all will learn from each other.” I proudly put the cameras in the students’ hands. I noted in my journal that things didn’t always work as planned: “The equipment utterly and totally failed to work properly.” The biggest lesson for me was my students’ resilience, inspiration, creativity, and willingness to tell their stories: To my surprise and delight the students were undaunted. They didn’t give up or lose interest…. We decided to talk about what kind of projects might be pursued.  A loud and at times frantic brainstorm session ensued.… Among the best ideas was Lisa’s: a project on group homes and institutions for kids. She had lived in one and knew several of them around the city. The film the young people ended up making about group homes. “Memories of Mandelay” was the first student video project that I facilitated. Shot with black and white ½” tape, it included re-enactments of students smoking in the school bathroom and arguing with the school principal (played by a student wearing a tie), as well as scenes shot in a group home in Queens, where a staff member and group home residents also participated, after some encouragement. We screened the film at a group home, and afterwards the students led discussions on the mistreatment of youth in such facilities. In later semesters, the students helped teach English classes by writing and recording their own raps and skits, such as one called the “Double Negative Lesson.” In after school and weekend classes, called “NY Newsreel,” students produced short portraits of people they met on the streets on their way to school—people struggling to survive the drug epidemic, rampant alcoholism, and homelessness in Reagan’s America. In my notes from a teacher study group on Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed led by site director and mentor Stephen Shapiro, I jotted down: The teacher must trust and respect the student enough to learn from him/her… and then true dialogue and learning can take place.... Every word we utter in the classroom must insist that change is possible…. [Our teaching must connect]  “school” with community, learning with living, thought with action. Working with these young people, my worldview as a documentary journalist transformed into the lens of a radical teacher. I was coming to understand what it took to create a student-centered documentary workshop, a space where students could truly be co-creators of knowledge and art. At the same time, I searched for funding, wrote proposals “to establish an Educational Video Center, serving inner-city high school students...[providing them with] the skills and equipment they need to collectively make documentary projects about the day-to-day problems they face at home, in school and in the streets of their communities.” By 1984, just three years after I had cradled a portable monitor in my arms for an audience out on the streets of the Bronx, I had laid the groundwork to bring out into the world this place called EVC, a place rooted in youth-centered principles and practices of documentary teaching, learning and action for social justice.

by Steve Goodman, founding executive director emeritus This is the second in a series of guest blog posts written by EVC’s founding executive director emeritus, Steve Goodman, on EVC’s early years. Read the preceding blog post in this series here. The group of students reviewed their storyboard one last time, then walked together down the school hallway, careful not to get tangled up in the various cables connecting the recording deck to their camera, microphone, headphones, and battery belt they were carrying. Another group of students took up their positions on “the set” as actors playing students smoking and drinking in the girls’ bathroom. Once the tape was rolling, the student playing the school’s dean kicked in the bathroom door and proceeded to bust the students inside. This was a memorable day during the first video class I taught back in 1981 at Satellite Academy, a public high school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The film that the students were working on would come to be called “Memories of Mandelay.” Satellite was designed for students who had been poorly served by New York City’s large traditional public schools. Students transferred to the alternative school for a range of academic, social-emotional, and in some cases, court-ordered reasons. When I met these students, most were struggling to graduate but happy to be going to high school in a small, more supportive environment. There were 18 students in the class that I was co-teaching with English teacher Liz Andersen. DCTV, one of New York’s first community media organizations, loaned the class a black and white, reel-to-reel Portapak (a popular Sony video recording deck) and an editing deck, housed at the DCTV firehouse studio in Chinatown. The community media movement was a little over a decade old. DCTV was part of a flourishing group of video collectives and centers in Lower Manhattan, including Global Village, Young Filmmakers, and Paper Tiger TV, among others. These organizations were hives of activity and provided free and low-cost access to video production and editing equipment, as well as training workshops. Media artists working at DCTV produced and screened work across numerous genres, including experimental video art, guerrilla TV, domestic and international documentary films, and news analysis shows. The Lower East Side and East Village neighborhoods surrounding Satellite had become a vibrant scene for music, art, and video. Graffiti tags, street art, and murals were everywhere. The barking dogs and radiant baby figures of street artist and activist Keith Haring started appearing on buildings and subway stations throughout the neighborhood—he even came into Satellite and drew one of his pieces on a school blackboard. Another local street artist, Jean Michel-Basquiat (who attended City-as-School, where EVC now has its offices) would have his first solo show the next year. Many Satellite students were also street artists in their own right and were increasingly known for their tags and throw-ups, their raps, and their gravity-defying break-dancing. Some students came to school as walking art exhibitions, showing off their original colorful spray paintings on the backs of their denim jackets. (The twin plagues of crack and AIDS would soon come to ravage the art world, the community, and our school, as well. We would lose two beloved Satellite educators to AIDS, Stephen Shapiro and Steve Chevastick.) “Memories of Mandelay” grew from the students’ own interests, questions, and experiences. First they brainstormed ideas and then co-created a plan for the project. This methodology became foundational to EVC’s teaching practices. The pedagogical approach became more widely known as “youth-centered” or “student-centered” with the growth of the youth development and small schools movements in the 1980s and 90s. Once EVC landed on it we would never waver from this principle. The students’ initial brainstormed list of project ideas is a snapshot of what was on their minds at the time: Atlanta murders of Black children Problems of old people Hidden talents of people Hells Angels Satellite students in group homes Street performers – jugglers, magicians Court systems Rikers Island Child Abuse This list reflects a mix of what the students had experienced themselves—events in their families, communities, and neighborhoods—and topics they simply wanted to learn more about. Once they generated this list, we set about the task of narrowing it down. I advised them that while some ideas were exciting and important, we had to consider their practicality since we only had six weeks to create our video. For instance, traveling to Atlanta, documenting the Hells Angels in their nearby clubhouse, or interviewing youth in Rikers Island presented significant logistical challenges, so those topics didn’t end up receiving many votes from the class. The idea to explore people’s hidden talents never developed into a film, but we did use it to inspire a practice session in which youth interviewed people in the streets. I noted in my journal: There was interest in the group homes project. But there was also resistance and I wasn’t quite sure why. They kept saying that no one would talk. No one would ever open up about all the bad things that went on. Finally I asked if anyone knew someone in a home or had been in one themselves. Two hands went up…. One student, Lisa, said that she had lived in a group home, and she knew of several such homes around the city. She also knew quite a few students who lived in homes now. We could interview some of these young residents, and some former residents, and we could also interview their families. When asked her reason for wanting to make a video on this subject, Lisa said, “To show how fucked up all institutions are!” Lisa’s own lived experience—her personal connection to these institutions and potentially to others who had lived in group homes—gave substance and authenticity to this project idea. That settled it: the students would focus their film on group homes. Next, we drew a storyboard, sketching out what the arc of the story might look like. I prompted the group: How would we begin? Well, the kid has to do something bad to be put there in the first place. Like robbing a store? I suggested. A student draws a stick figure holding a gun in the storyboard’s first panel. No, they have to be on drugs and then steal to pay for the habit. So panel one had the title: “Doing something bad.” What next? I asked. They have to get caught. A bust scene! Five minutes earlier, the students had said no one would ever talk about their experience. Now they were clearly speaking from, and of, their experiences as they contributed to the “fictional” story. We continued building the story. They felt since it would be impossible to record a student “doing something bad,” they agreed to act out those scenes as kind of a flashback or reenactment showing how the student arrived in the group home. Then they would interview an actual student living in the group home and use this audio over the reenactment. The idea of creating a non-fiction documentary began changing into what students imagined as more of a hybrid. They would dramatize a story of a composite character drawn from Lisa and other students’ real-life experiences. I noted: …We thought of juxtaposing the acted-out scenes with the real ones. For example, an interview with a social worker cut next to the kids’ version. And then showing the tape of the kids in the home and taping their reaction to how real or unreal the tape’s depiction is. In this way, we would expand the traditional roles of director and producer to include not just the youth making the video, but also the youth who were the video’s target audience. Inspired by Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire, the idea was for the youth audiences in the group home to critique, on camera, the reenactment, and compare it to their own reality. Brazilians Boal and Freire were a drama practitioner and an educator, respectively, whose widely influential books, Theatre of the Oppressed and Pedagogy of the Oppressed, described their drama and literacy theories and practices for empowering poor communities to become active participants in their liberation from oppression. The next step would be for the youth in the group home to suggest how they would have made the reenactment differently and what other solutions they believed could be found to the challenges they shared in common. This approach, as I journaled, was about “breaking down the barrier between spectator and participant and push[ing] everyone into the arena as participant-producer.” But I digress. I’ll rewind back to the action again. According to my notes: The students really rose to the occasion. We acted out two scenes: the school bathroom bust and the confrontation with the mother….The group who was acting went to the bathroom armed with tobacco-filled joints, wine bottles (with water in them) and a radio. Lisa was to be the central figure, the girl who gets in trouble and goes to the home. Felicia was to play her mother who is called in to see her. And Marcus was the dean who busts the kids. Miguel held the light…. We began the scene over starting from before the dean kicked in the door. And this time the camera was facing the door…. Some shots of the kids drinking and smoking and partying were taken and then on the cue word “pass the joint” Marcus burst through onto the “set.” Once he entered the bathroom and the door closed behind him the kids were left alone to shoot the scene…. The scene ended after Lisa, caught drinking wine, refused to obey the dean’s orders and emptied the bottle into her mouth only to spit it out into his face. The camera clicked off and we went off to watch what was shot. In the story, emotions escalated to a boiling point when Lisa’s mother, played by another student, arrived in the principal’s office. This was the last straw, and Lisa’s mother was sending her to a group home. The improvised argument between Lisa and her mother was very powerful and very real. When it was over, the staff and students who heard the commotion and now filled the office burst into applause. Everyone hugged. Telling how Lisa ended up in a group home was the first part of the story. Showing what her life was like behind the closed doors of an institution was the next part. After calling group homes in New York City and Westchester, we finally found one that would allow in our student actors and camera crew. The house mother welcomed us into the group home, and even acted in some of the scenes. I wrote: Today was another incredible shoot…. We actually went to the group home out in Queens…. The most marvelous part of the whole day was the interaction between the Satellite students and the home residents. At first the residents were timid; a bit overwhelmed … But as the story unfolded the residents participated more and more until finally they became an essential part of the story—especially in the group home scenes…. The climax of the story is when Lisa’s best friend in the group home overdoses on pills after being abused and bullied there. Lisa leaves and returns home to her mother. The footage of “Memories of Mandelay” was logged and edited. We planned to use the tape to spark discussion among group home youth residents. But screening it at one near the school proved more difficult than expected. At first they told us that the dramatized suicide scene made it unsuitable for the youth to see. They finally agreed to show it to a handful of residents and a heated discussion ensued about the institutional conditions for youth there. The students also presented it to Satellite’s full student body, who gave us generally positive feedback and thought our version was realistic. After the Satellite school screening, the students returned to their classroom for their evaluation. It would be many years before EVC began using evaluation rubrics and our signature process of portfolio assessment, but Liz and I had decided that the grading process should be shared by the students. We created a circle for discussion. I was struck by how direct and honest the students were. Each student reflected on their learning and participation, proposed the grade they had earned, and accepted the judgment of the larger group. Not only had we pulled down the wall between producer and audience, we had pulled down the wall between student and teacher. I had aspired for this first class to be a documentary workshop, shaped by the limits of equipment and school-based conditions, and team-taught with an academic subject teacher. As it happened, it became the foundational model for what EVC later called our Professional Development Program. Over the next semesters, I taught more interview-based and vérité-style documentary classes, but still with a youth-centered goal of supporting the youth producers and youth audiences in a self-directed transformational experience. To underscore the transformative and participatory foundation of this method, I called the next Satellite class the “Living Television” workshop—an homage to the depression-era Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) and Federal Theater Project’s Living Newspaper, and the Latin American Living Theatre that had used interactive community theater for entertainment, education, and consciousness-raising. Over the years, student dramatizations and reenactments became a regular part of EVC documentaries. The half-inch tapes for “Memories of Mandelay” haven’t survived the past four decades. My fragmented notes leave many questions unanswered. Yet, I’m struck by just how courageous the students in this first class were in investigating and expressing the often painful truths of their lives. And it's clear from my reflections that their dramatized story provoked critical discussion and questions about our students’ experiences that were too often hidden behind the walls of institutions, and unknown to most adults. In this sense, this experimental docudrama, shot with a shaky black and white camera and dim lights, gave expression to youth struggles and resilience amid institutional abuse and cut a path that later EVC students could build upon and use to flourish.