By the Mobile Action Lab

OAKLAND--Have you ever felt like singing your heart out, but you didn't have the moxie to perform your vocals in front of a live audience? There's an app that lets you karaoke to your favorite song with the option of adding Auto-Tune, which corrects your voice to stay on key. Only when you're sure you have a masterpiece do your friends get to hear it. The app's called StarMaker Karaoke with Auto-Tune, and here's one of the company's founders, Nathan Sedlander, demo-ing how it works. 

Youth Radio invited StarMaker's other founder and CEO, Jeff Daniel, to our Oakland studios to bring us behind the scenes in the making of StarMaker. In addition to being potential users, we produce apps through Youth Radio's Mobile Action Lab. So our young minds are always seeking lessons from the pros on how to make our products legit. 

The Native Health Initiative (NHI) youth presentation titled “Youth Leading the Way” at the New Mexico Public Health Association’s annual conference on April 27th, 2011.
High School students will presented on their efforts to create healthier, more sustainable communities.

The following commentary was written by Belia Mayeno Saavedra, who leads Youth Radio's Community Action Project, a program designed specifically for Oakland youth who have had encounters with the criminal justice system or who are struggling to stay in school. Her position combines both of her professional passions: youth development and media production.

As a teacher, I get schooled by my students just about as much as I actually teach. They put me up on new music and new sneakers. But more than anything, they constantly (if not always consciously) remind me to check my privilege and figure out how to meet them where they are. Like this moment:

“Miss Belia, I’m not done with my assignment yet. Can I give it to you later today?”

“Sure. Just email me the word doc as an attachment.”

The student looked up at me from his handwritten paper like I was speaking a foreign language. I might as well have been. Turns out, he didn’t have an email address, was unfamiliar with Microsoft Word, and didn’t know what was an attachment was either.  The student explained that he only ever really got online through his phone- and the other young people in class said they mostly did too.

According a Pew Research Center study of internet access and the digital divide released in summer 2010, African-American & Latino users are much more likely to use their phones as a primary means to access the internet than white users.  Phones could be a good start to addressing web access inequities. But they are also much harder to use for functions which can help with school and employment, like tapping into academic research databases or writing and formatting a resume.

Which is why I was so happy to learn that Youth Radio is collaborating with Get Connected Oakland!, a citywide initiative to eliminate the digital divide and provide internet access, computers and tech support to underserved communities. In order to best meet impacted populations where they are, The Alameda County Housing Authority is working to get even more tech centers available to the 15,000 families who live in public housing in this county. And there are services focused on youth, like OTX West. They provide free computers for high school and middle school, and also equip the computers with tutoring software so that young people can step their learning game up outside of school. 

America Works focuses on supporting adults recently released from incarceration, and offers them free computers so that folks can use technology to cultivate alternative income, education and employment opportunities.

But it’s not only about education and employment. Information access and interpersonal and community engagement are key factors in challenging violence and abuse. As Nancy O’Malley, Alameda County District Attorney and founder of The Family Justice Center points out, perpetrators often use extreme isolation as a way to cover up and continue cycles of abuse. That’s why Get Connected Oakland! partner organizations also provide tech training and access specific to domestic violence survivors, commercially sexually exploited minors, and elders who’ve experienced caregiver abuse.

Facebook procrastination notwithstanding, at the end of the day, access to information is and always will be a matter of social and economic justice. So Get Connected here!

Mayor Jean Quan of Oakland, CA discussed the future of Oakland with local high school students and youth group representatives. The question and answer session took place at the Oakland Unified School District's television studio, KDOL. Youth Radio's Monica Anderson was one of the facilitators of the show.

An article was recently published in the Daily Nebraskan that painted a picture of how easy it is to obtain prescription Adderall - a drug often prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to increase one’s focus. While it makes sense that college and even high school students want to increase their focus and stay up longer to achieve better results, the Daily Nebraskan says it’s just, “Too easy.”

According to the article, it took less than a minute for a reporter to obtain Adderall from a random student in the stacks of the University of Nebraska Library.  In a similar experiment done at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism found a person who was selling Adderall in the University library in 56 seconds. 

The Center for Disease Control published a report in 2010 about youth behavior that finds one in five high school students has taken a prescription drug that wasn’t prescribed for them, but college students are left out of that statistic.  Adderall has also been linked to college suicides in the recent months. 

Youth Radio did an extensive report on the black market for Adderall on college campuses in 2006. The issue is sure to re-surface soon. 

The following was originally published on Minnesota Public Radio.

By Valencia McMurray, Minnesota Public Radio.

More than a quarter of American children experience parents physically fighting each other at some time in their lives. Early researchers into family violence often considered children to be "invisible victims", but that view is changing.

MPR reporter Valencia McMurray revisits an incident that happened in her family when she was six and has kept a hold on her family 14 years later.

St. Paul, Minn. -- My story begins Sept. 30, 1997, at 652 Bush in St. Paul. I remember being inside this house. I remember my father standing right here on this porch, almost exactly where I'm standing, banging on the door. He just wanted to talk. She didn't want to listen to him but I feel like she also didn't listen to us. Because we told her, "Don't go outside mom. Please don't go outside, mom."

"I should have listened," said my mom. "But I figured, it's going to be all right. The neighbors are all outside, and I just thought we were going to be safe. But we wasn't."

I remember his eyes were red. He was not himself. He was someone else. There was no love in that man.

"We sat out there and we talked and I told him that we couldn't get back together and I think that's what made him mad," said my mom. "Because when I got up and turned my back to come in the house, that's when he stabbed me and y'all was screaming and hollering."

I remember standing beside my sister inside. The youngest of my brothers was a few feet ahead of me and then the second oldest of my siblings, Jermaine who was 15, was trying to get through the screen door.

"It just looked like he was hitting her and then I saw the streetlights glisten off the blade," said Jermaine. He had to make a split-second decision. "I'm standing in the doorway and I was going to run through the back door and come around front, but I didn't want to do that and then miss something and it'll be the last time I see my mom alive."

By Belia Saavedra

As Congress starts the conversation about cutting the Federal budget this week, one of the controversial proposals is defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB.) CPB supports hundreds of public TV and radio stations across the country, and independent producers including Youth Radio where I was a teen reporter, and am now staff.

This funding is not only the force behind great programming such as Sesame Street and This American Life, but from my experience, it's changed lives.

We so often think about storytelling as a one-way act in media. The audience is taken on a journey, and we hope they emerge changed, or with a few more questions. But just as often, the story changes the teller too. Looking back, I can string together lessons I’ve learned through Youth Radio’s partnership with public media, and I realize how important some of those lessons are to who I have become as an adult.

When I was 17, as part of the Youth Radio newsroom, I did the narrative voiceovers for a Morning Edition series on National Public Radio called “E-mails from Kosovo.” In the series, I read messages from a teenager living in Kosovo during the armed conflict. She described the sounds of gunfire, and talked about how much she worried about her younger siblings, or the possibility that her father would be killed. And even though the circumstances of the war she was living in were markedly different than the undeclared urban war I saw in my own life, I began to recognize how our stories were related. It was the first time I really understood that the problems of violence were bigger than my block, bigger than my city. I was shaken out of my own grief and anger about what my community was living through and had to really consider what life looked like in other places besides my home. This is a big deal for a teenager- that humbling moment when you realize just how very small you are.

At this moment, Congress is considering serious cuts in funding for all public broadcasting, even though more than half of all Americans enjoy NPR, PBS and other public media web sites every month.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a major investor in Youth Radio.

Youth Radio has been a longtime contributor to public media through its development programs that encourage youth to tell their unique stories in collaboration with professional journalists. In this video, we hear from some of the young people who have worked for the organization to understand why public media is important to them.

To learn more about how you can help save public media, go to http://170millionamericans.org.

The following originally aired on KQED-FM.

By Robyn Gee

It’s Chinese New Year, which means it’s time for me to buy red envelopes. I always try finding the ones with the fat little pigs on them, because they make my family laugh. When you say our last name “Gee” with the wrong intonation, it means pig, which they find funny because we often eat too much. Chinese humor is sometimes insulting, sometimes self-deprecating, and often subtle. And I think it’s what people are missing about Amy Chua’s book.

Chua makes it clear that the book is a memoir, not a parenting how-to guide. And yeah, Chua goes too far. She forces her daughters to play the piano and violin - making them practice for hours on end and even withholding food from them. Only after her youngest daughter smashes a glass on a restaurant floor yelling “I hate you,” does Chua allow her to quit the violin. During Chua’s own childhood, the violin symbolized perfection, elegance, and achievement – Chua just forgot to let her daughters choose a symbol for themselves.

After seeing Chua at a book reading in Berkeley, I’ve come to think of the Tiger Mother as one big inside joke. She said repeatedly, “You either get it, or you don’t.” As a second generation Chinese-American, I get it.

When I brought home A minuses, my parents told me to stay after school to earn back the extra points. It was the same for my sister and my cousins. Our rooms are filled with karate trophies, student body president awards, piano certificates, and Honor Roll plaques. Was our freedom of choice taken away? Are we victims of tiger mothers and fathers?

On that point, I agree with Chua. In my family, none of us ever questioned whether our parents loved us. Though they may have pushed us and acted “tough,” the message that we were loved was consistent.

Let’s face it, there will always be discrepancies over the best ways to be a parent, but as long as your kids hear the message that they are loved, then you’re doing alright.

Previously:

• Raising Muffin
• UC Students Turnout for Budget Cut Protest
• Recession Affecting My Education

The following originally aired on KCBS.

By Rayana Godfrey

I’ve learned a lot from my school; like economics, literature, and theatre. However, this past month, I’ve been taught something that wasn’t on my class schedule – how to deal with death.

A few weeks ago, DeShawn Gene Grisby, a friend and classmate of mine, was shot and killed a few minutes after school. He was someone I saw every day, and all of a sudden he was just gone.

In class, constant thoughts and questions about Gene’s death made it almost impossible to concentrate on my teachers. But as time passed, my school taught us how to moUrn in constructive ways. Instead of just sitting around being sad, we made T-shirts with Gene’s face and football number. And an assembly was held in his honor, and the entire school was there. It was a turning point for me and my grief. I was finally sure EVERYBODY would remember Gene, not for his death, but for his life, and the impact he made on our school.

The way he died will never make sense to me or my classmates, but thanks to my school, Gene’s life will always have meaning.

Previously:

• Guys – A Lesson In No
• Neither Side Right In Gun Debate
• Raising Muffin