Our Stories: DC Elementary School Youth Council Podcast
By: Saadia Ahmad, DC Elementary School Program Coordinator
Photos courtesy of AALEAD Staff
As a youth worker, you are always amazed by the brilliance, compassion, thoughtfulness, and kindheartedness of young people every single day, and the most recent project by our DC Elementary School Youth Council was nothing short of that.
This year, the theme of AALEAD programming was Ignite: where youth got opportunities to discover their passions. Throughout the year we talked about what ignites us and how we can apply that to different social issues that we are passionate about. As our closing project, we wanted to do a project where our narrative could be heard. We wanted to share how different yet similar we all are, in hope to eliminate misconceptions and break racial & cultural insensitivity. Our 4th-grade youth council decided to create their own podcast, where they shared their personal stories. These stories are their personal accounts, stories that have impacted them and their families to be who they are today.
“I am more than one identity, I am Latin Asian American”
– Vinh S.
In the beginning of the podcast, you hear Vinh’s voice who tells us about how being biracial can lead to experiencing unique challenges when it comes to his identity. Throughout this podcast, you will hear such stories and stories related to migration to the United States and challenges that our youth and their families faced during this transition.
Our youth took a 3-day workshop at the Mount Pleasant Neighborhood Library, on how to create their own podcast, where they learned about interviewing techniques, how to record using a digital voice recorder, incorporating royalty free music and editing the audio on the Audacity software.
The podcast is in an interview form between 6 of our youth council members, where they got to ask each other these 6 questions:
- What is your story?
- How did you feel when you moved here? Did you or your family face any challenges?
- Who has been the most influential person in your life during your transition? (A hero or a mentor)
- Would you be a different person if you grew up somewhere else?
- What (cause/belief/goal) are you passionate about?
- What message would you like to put out in the universe for friends with similar stories as yours?
