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Neil: Introducing Neil | Producing Youth : Producing Media
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Neil: Introducing Neil

Transcript: 

Neil:

My name is Neil Botelho, and I’m currently 23 years old – as of two days ago! I have been working with Word for over a year now. Me and Lynn founded it last summer. It was kind of an off-shoot of another similar program called Literacy Through Hip-hop.

We’ve been working all year trying to set up an infrastructure of sorts for the program so we can continue to make it available, as well as run the program at James Lyng. In doing that, I’ve just kind of been the project coordinator position and administrative, and setting up partners work; pre- and post- programming. That’s been my role until now. It won’t continue that way until further notice!

Miriam: Can you tell me about the program that you did at Word this year?

Neil:

Yes. Actually, the program this year at James Lyng was a bit of a departure for us just because it was our first time doing a program where it was literally like us. There wasn’t a bigger name or a bigger support system behind us. It was just us doing this program, so we felt like we had a lot more – it’s interesting because there was a lot more restraints, but a lot more opportunity and mobility in that. I felt like it was difficult to have us get set up and get the support we needed, because we have other things going on. We ended up running it at James Lyng. I mean, it was also another older age group for us.

It was a new run of programming – we kind of changed the programming for the kids and for the context of each class. We would talk about current issues as well. We kind of totally revamped the curriculum from last year and made it specifically geared for these kids. There was that – as well, it was a bit different from our other runs because we didn’t have a partnership with a recording component; usually what we do is we get the kids to record and make their own beats, and then go out of the program with their own material. This time we chose to do a final live performance.

I think moving forward, Word is going to try and incorporate more performance in our curriculum and also media – we want for it to grow and have different stages, so have media and recording portions, have performance portions, have theory portions of the program. I think this past run has been really instrumental in shedding out those different elements that we want to develop more, moving forward.