Youth media training offers all participants -- learners, facilitators and organizers -- an opportunity to negotiate relationships, experiment with holding social power, and do constructive work on their sense of self, in the context of a socially oriented creative project. The opportunity to work outside of institutions that impose agendas and goals from above their head is important to a young person’s capacity to be comfortable within a variety of social situations and happy with their own identity and choices. The ‘social’ work done during media training is as important as nurturing critical skills, addressing social problems or trying to unpack mass media’s grip on our imaginations and desires.

That being said, funding for such projects is usually situated around issues of pre-employability, skill-building or social agendas such as school drop-outs, gang violence, public health et al. Rather then working with local organizations to develop programming that is in line with residents needs, funding structures are addressed to ideological constructions of youth and social problems. Since such funding structures do not acknowledge or celebrate the inherent (agenda-free) benefit of youth media projects, much of what makes these projects special and successful ends up falling off the radar in reports or evaluations.

James Lyng Students and Matt

Furthermore, because it is hard to portray the often private or personal benefits that accrue to participants in these projects, funding for such programs remains elusive, as if governments and foundations are unwilling to support community-learning programs until there is a proven benefit such as high employment numbers or reduced gang-violence. Workers in youth media projects struggle to create programs that respond to participants’ needs, while also reflecting the requirements of an agenda driven grant structure. The present structure of creative project grants that address specific ‘social problems’ is unsustainable in the long run, as it does not allow for the establishment of long-term community learning programs in the absence of “measurable outcomes”. It is my belief that unless young people’s creative work and community learning activities are supported for their own sake, in a way that allows both participants and workers a measure of security and confidence that their efforts are supported by the wider cultures in which they exist, it will continue to be difficult to get youth media programs to “demonstrate” the measurable benefits that are often taken as the rationale for the development of such programs in the first place.