Hey everyone! I’m looking forward to thinking together about how to best support youth-created media. My name is Brittany and I am the Radio Station Manager at ZUMIX, where I’ve worked for about two and a half years with great young people.  At ZUMIX, we create produced audio stories about our neighborhood and a full program of youth-hosted radio shows that air on our station, 94.9 FM.  One of my favorite parts of my job has been building our radio studio inside of East Boston High School, where English Language Learners have been sharing their english writing and speaking on the airwaves.  I’m interested in how incorporating a creative element, like radio, into classroom curriculum can increase students’ interest in their learning and connect their work to their families and the community outside of school walls.  My students at Eastie have produced some important bilingual persuasive essays about immigration, mental health service provision, abortion, soccer and social media, as well as interviews with peers, interpretations of scientific results, and playlists of their lives’ soundtracks.  My life is better for hearing their perspectives, and I’m glad we have a tool to share them with the greater Boston community.  I would like to think more about distribution, so that their work is most impactful in reaching the right audience — policymakers, teachers, local organizers working to make a change, neighbors.  Outside of work, I do a lot of listening [to ZUMIX Radio] and other music, and do some running and piano playing.

Radio Arte is a big inspiration to me — a bilingual, latino-owned youth radio station in Chicago that aired community-based content from 1996 to 2011.  They are like ZUMIX Radio’s midwestern aunt, who we want to grow up like.  The good news is their twitter is still live, where I was able to find this fun cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VPczDpinV8