Miriam: How do you see media awareness literacy as the important to the youth and to the membership of the Head & Hands?

Marlo: The whole question of media awareness and media literacy, and how that relates to the work that we do and the youth, who we work with, I think it’s really a gigantic question. I mean, a personal note here, I first accessed the internet in my first year college, which kind of seems like ages ago, and my brother, on the flip side, was building websites when he was in high school.

So just looking at how quickly media and technology is progressing, sort of as a culture, as an industry, as a sector, as a way of being, it’s a bit of a whirlwind just to kind of situate myself and ourselves in this domain. That said, I think, we’re taking a lot of tips from the youth in our community. So for example, at our drop in center Jeunesse Deux Mille we asked them what kind of workshops they wanted to do, and there were some invitations from the Quebec Writer’s Federation and from a local hip-hop studio to do some workshops. And what ended up coming out of that was a really sweet little video that the youth then decided to scoop and put on YouTube without the organizers of that whole workshop series being aware.

So, over a span of weekend, that little video just got massive attention, and we were talking like over, I think, 5,000 hits in the weekend or something. It snowballed, and it was a real eye-opener for me because I thought, “Wow, that’s just what we do. There’s this little video coming out of our center, and yet, it seems to be having a really major impact.” It was about addressing violence in our community and what it means to belong and certain issues that are really important. So clearly, using media is a very, very timely way to work with youth and youth are driving that process in a lot of ways, I think.

Another example recently is we had workshops that were provided by the Atwater Library Digital Literacy Project, and we were fortunate to work with the team there, with yourself, and we had youth from J2K and from YPP gain all kinds of new skills and put together some very personally moving projects. So it was a therapeutic act, and it was also a technical act, and I thought it was really cool to bring those two together, and to see how their confidence really was boosted because here they were sitting in front of a program they’ve never used and equipment they have never touched, maybe and at the end, they could say, “I did that.” So yeah, it’s important on that level.

I think also, as a team, we have varying degrees of media literacy ourselves, and I’m in the process of learning as a director, there might be things that my staff will mention, and I’ll have to ask what is that. I mean Facebook came into effect in the last 4 years of my existence as an ED here, and at first, I wasn’t anywhere near Facebook. What the hell is Facebook, right? And then, the next thing I know, Head & Hands has a Facebook page, and that’s what motivated me to start a bloody Facebook because I thought, “Well, if Head & Hands has a Facebook, I’d better be a friend of Head & Hands because I’m the director and it would look bad.” So anyways.. So yeah, there have been some interesting experiences in that way. We also have some staff who I’ve made sure to offer media training too, if for example, basic computer skills. They haven’t had the same access to learning as other people so to make sure that they are able to improve in those areas. When we talk about media, there’s so many different aspects. There's sound. There’s…Geez, I don’t know. It’s just like stuff…For me, media is like anything that we can create possibly like it’s such a…