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Earlier this year, two girls found the body of a murdered youth on their way to school in Visitacion Valley. This little known San Francisco district has had a history of neglect, poverty and violence, and in recent years has seen a rise in gun related youth homicides. Unfortunately this scenario is not limited to Visitacion Valley, but is occurring in other cities in California and across America. The recounting of the girls' discovery serves as the launching point for a Youth Radio probe into the impact of violence on the lives of youth attempting to grow up in the Valley.
The development of the Visitacion Valley Video Project was a unique opportunity for Youth Radio to extend beyond its core competencies in radio journalism, media training and community building.
As a youth media production organization our intent was to produce a video documentary that would capture youth voices and perspectives usually not heard in the Bay Area’s mainstream television. As a community based non-profit organization, we sought to build partnerships with youth service organizations, community leaders, residents and youth that would allow us to bring our media production skills to an underserved community and hopefully assist in efforts to create awareness and dialogue about critical needs.
Beginning Winter 2005, a Youth Radio field producer, Andres Cediel, along with a team of Youth Radio students began a community-mapping project to identify some of the most compelling voices in the Valley. Through a series of informal interviews, audio, photo and video documentation, the team identified a core group of young people who had witnessed and/or experienced violence first hand as well as community leaders who were on the frontlines.
Three important themes emerged through our interviews and conversations:
• The levels of violence in the Valley seemed to impact every young person we encountered – as a victim, witness, or having direct relationships to a victim.
• Community leaders and health professionals implied that young people were particularly vulnerable to a kind of “post-traumatic syndrome” due to the ongoing violence in the Valley.
• There was an overwhelming sense that the City in general was unaware or uncaring about the conditions in the Valley; resident’s concerns were not being heard or addressed by the City government.
To date we have created three major media assets related to this project:
• Visitacion Valley photo gallery – images gathered during our field production
• An audio commentary originally featured on KQED-FM (PBS affiliate, San Francisco, CA). Broadcast Date: 04/07/05
• A six-minute news video documentary, Voices from the Valley, featured statewide on California Connected (KCET/PBS affiliate, Los Angeles, CA). Broadcast Date: 09/30/05
As we enter Phase II of our project, we
hope to deepen our understanding and expand our coverage of issues impacting young people in the Valley.
In addition, we are currently researching the viability of using our collected video footage and photography resources as the basis for an instructional/interactive DVD curriculum on video production and community documentation.
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