New
January 2010:
Click here to listen to New York Times magazine editor Paul Tough talk about Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone
News about our literacy initiative to build reading, writing and listening skills for children 8-12, What Happens Next??
Audio from Remington Youth Radio Project.
Click here to listen to audio from our community partners.
Click here for “Recordings from Baltimore” from our archives.
Click here to hear Baltimore School Superintendent Andrés Alonso speaking about schools and change
The Baltimore Community Radio Coalition (BCRC) is a collaborative project of faculty at Goucher College, Loyola College, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and members of the Baltimore community.
Children, youth and young adults in many Baltimore neighborhoods face daunting challenges to their emotional well-being, education and safety. Public health interventions target these challenges on many levels: they seek to reduce the challenges themselves, and increase the capacity of individuals and communities to overcome them. However, communities need means of communication to act cohesively. Modern media -- newspapers, television, radio, even the Internet -- are increasingly targeted at a regional or national level. Information that originates and is received locally is needed to disseminate accurate information, provide a sense of ownership and build support for common causes. In that sense, community radio is an infrastructure intervention – it seeks to provide a means by which communities can organize formally and informally to improve living conditions.
At the same time, children and youth need opportunities for intellectually engaging activities that build on their strengths, teach them new skills and provide them with the potential to to play active roles in their communities. The skills involved in community radio -- developing story lines and focused arguments, learning interviewing and speaking skills -- are associated with academic success and with developing a positive image of youth in the community. Thus, community radio complements other interventions aimed at youth literacy, violence prevention, school-retention, appropriate use of health care resources, and career development.
We have been working with youth media projects since 2000, initially with funding from the Open Society Institute. Some of the audio programs produced by students in our "Uniquely Spoken" project have been posted on the public radio web site, PRX (the Public Radio Exchange) and have been used by public radio stations from across the country. Another Uniquely Spoken collaboration was with the “Theatre for a New Generation: Encounter Program” sponsored by Baltimore's Center Stage. Uniquely Spoken recorded the Encounter Program's Poetic Convergence: Baltimore Youth Poetry Festival, March 4, 2002.
We currently work with several community sites in Baltimore. The Dallas F. Nicholas Sr. Elementary School in lower Charles Village is equipped with a small studio (funded by a grant from the Radio and Television News Directors' Foundation). An after-school radio production activity for students (supported by the Community Schools Initiative/YMCA of Central Maryland) is planned for fall, 2009, at Wolfe Street Academy.
BCRC's youth-generated material is featured on The Community Radio Hour on WLOY, Loyola College's internet radio station. WLOY can also be heard on 1620 AM in the vicinity of the Loyola campus in Baltimore and in lower Charles Village.
With the support of a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Faculty Research Initiatives Fund grant, we have installed a training studio in Hampton House on the BSPH campus. The studio houses basic recording and editing equipment for use by students, faculty, and community groups.
Contact us: via Larry Wissow, Lwissow at jhsph.edu
Click
here
to listen to audio from our community partners.
Photo by Harvey Nelson