Expanding the Narrative Through Youth-led Community Media

Three years ago, New America Media set about the task of realizing an ambitious vision: to establish a network of youth-led, community media platforms in areas of California that some have called “media deserts” — swaths of the state without accessible, locally-based media platforms of their own.

Surveying the landscape, we saw that Richmond, a city where Latinos and African Americans comprise a majority, was without a bilingual newspaper for residents. We saw that the voices of farm workers in the eastern Coachella Valley – our nation’s fifth largest supplier of agricultural goods – were routinely missing from the regional, Palm Springs-centric news coverage being produced just up Highway 10. We looked and saw no publication that was amplifying the perspectives and opinions of young Californians living in and around Merced; no platform where youth living in the unincorporated communities south of Bakersfield – many of them the children of immigrants -- could tell the stories of their families, neighbors and peers; no platform for youthled community news in Long Beach, our state’s most ethnically diverse city.

Now, thanks to a dedicated group of editors, young content producers, community partners and financial backers who believed in our vision, New America Media has made those things a reality: YouthWire.org exists today as California’s first statewide network of youth-led community media outlets, united in the idea that a more inclusive media sector is vital to having a more democratic and just society.

The publication you hold in your hand, Calafia , is the first print edition to feature the work of YouthWire as a collective. As much as it is a showcase of the “best of” our statewide work from the last year, it is also a foreshadowing of the issues that are sure to be on the minds of California’s young people and their fellow community members in 2014.

Our stories, while produced almost entirely (but not exclusively) by young people, contain community voices from across the demographic spectrum: From elders who have dedicated themselves to urban farming in Richmond’s troubled Iron Triangle, to African American parents advocating on behalf of their schoolchildren in L.A., to Vietnam veterans in Bakersfield helping younger vets survive their PTSD, to a mother in San Jose who learned how to raise her kids after years of incarceration and is now helping others with their reentry, to a community worker’s ode to young men in Richmond who are playing a key role in reducing that city’s violent crime, to a teen mother’s struggle in Fresno to eat healthy foods – the stories collected in Calafia put a human face on some of the biggest public health and policy issues confronting our state.

Calafia is the queen who ruled over a mystic land called California, in an early 16th century work of Spanish fiction. It is thought that the novel inspired the name of our state. In a literary sense, it also provided California with its first narrative, one that has been evolving ever since. By fostering youth-led community journalism, we can help ensure that the California narrative evolves in a direction that is ever more expansive, and inclusive.

Jacob Simas Editor