Projects – NewVoices Media

2021-current

After almost amazing 13 years at ConnectED, I decided it was time to leave and pursue some new challenges. I’ve dusted off NewVoices Media (I had started it when I made Poetic License) and am now doing a range of consulting. I’ve also joined forces with a few partners to start Imaginable Media, a company that will be using rich media (VR, AR, mobile) to do some good in the world.

1998-2000 Poetic License

While I had been living abroad, most of the images and storylines I received about American teenagers painted a pretty depressing picture; apathy at an all-time high, no sense of history or current events – overall, a disengaged generation. However, the first time I attended a youth spoken word event (a celebration in honor of MLK’s birthday) every one of those images was dispelled. I witnessed young people from all points on the teenage continuum – from ‘cool’ kids and hip-hop heads to poetry nerds and outcasts. The stage provided a safe place from which they could speak their minds, find their voice, and have both validated by a cheering and appreciative audience. At that moment, I saw that there was a larger story that needed to be told; if done right, it could help to raise up and celebrate these young, inspiring voices.

I was incredibly fortunate to get a few small grants and then one large one from the Independent Television Service (ITVS), which helps fund documentary films for the PBS pipeline. It was an amazing journey and it culminated in a national airing on of Poetic License on PBS in April of 2000, with a companion website and an extensive educational outreach effort into the schools and after-school programs. (Watch the film)

1996-1998 Kops' Kids and Zeitgeist

Before leaving Europe I was asked to collaborate on a short video that was being produced in Hungary, entitled Kops’ Kids. The film was about a British playwright, Bernard Kops, who had written The Dreams of Anne Frank, a play about the Holocaust. The film followed Kops as he travelled to a small city in southern Hungary to direct students at the Gandhi School, an innovative boarding school that was seeking to educate the next generation of Roma leaders. Because Roma are so marginalized and persecuted in Hungary and throughout Europe, the young students could relate to the experiences of Anne Frank and overtime began to embrace drama as a way to tell important stories.

Inspired by his experience working with the students, Kops wrote a second play entitled Café Zeitgeist, that the Gandhi students would be the first to perform on stage. In preparation, the students spent a month in London working with various professionals in the theater as they honed their craft; it was the first time any of the students had traveled beyond Hungary, and it was an eye-opening and liberating experience for many of them. We produced a 30-minute film, Zeitgeist, which chronicled the project and the final performance.

2007-2021 ConnectED

Right before we dissolved Uth TV, though, Carl got an invitation to attend an advisory board meeting of an educational non-profit, ConnectED. As it turns out, they were developing a new digital media arts curriculum to teach in high schools and they were looking for various industry professionals to help provide input and feedback. That in itself was appealing to me. But the kicker was they were going to be meeting at Skywalker Ranch and would be spending the night in the lodge that George Lucas had designed at the ranch.

Although I wasn’t a Star Wars fan, I knew this was a rare opportunity and asked to join the group. After one of the other invited participants declined the offer, I was given the spot. In addition to being assigned to the Kurosawa Room at the lodge, one of the more memorable places I’ve ever stayed in, I was also introduced to ConnectED, the place where I would work as Director of Digital Learning and Media over the next 13 years. During my time there, I helped to create and oversee ConnectEd Studios, an online platform that hosts tools and resources for its clients. I also directed our internal media production efforts, including the successful Day at Work video series, which has attracted over 11 million views on YouTube.

2004-2007 Uth TV

I enjoyed my time at JustThink, and would have stayed longer but in 2004 I had the good fortune to meet Carl Rosendahl. Carl had founded an animation company (PDI) that he had recently sold to Dreamworks, and was looking to start a new media company. This company would be different in that it would be comprised of entirely youth-produced content. I signed on as the Director of Programming and set about finding and developing a national network of youth media makers to produce high-quality shows for the web and for TV.

At our peak, we had over 20 different web series in production, as well as two half-hour TV programs (Elements and Speak On It!) that aired on UPN in the Bay Area – all done by, and for, youth. It was a great run, and I’m super proud of the work we did, but we weren’t able to keep it afloat. Carl once told me “Being early is as good as being wrong,” and to prove his point, shortly after we launched Uth TV a little company called YouTube hit the scene, and I think we all know how that story turned out.

2001-2004 JustThink

While I had planned to continue to produce educational documentary films, in 2001 I was introduced to JustThink, an innovative non-profit organization that focused on teaching kids about media literacy. Its founder, Elana Rosen, was stepping down and they were looking for a new Executive Director. I had become very passionate about media literacy, and saw how critical it was to teach young people how to understand and analyze the media that they were being exposed to; in fact, many were walking around with a huge bullseye on their backs given that they were the next generation of consumers, and that the internet was just beginning to transform youth culture.

While at JustThink, we developed two multimedia curricula, one entitled Hidden Heroes, which encouraged youth media makers to look within their own households and communities to identify hidden heroes, and then tell their stories through media production. The second project, Flipping the Script, was a multi-disciplinary curriculum focused on hip-hop and its impact on youth and mass culture.

1998-1999 Master’s Program

After having traveled and lived abroad for the better part of the 90s, I decided that it was time to return to the US and figure out my next move. My parents were educators and I had planned to do something in education, but I also really enjoyed my work in media and wanted to continue to hone those skills. A few months before I left Europe I stumbled on a CD-ROM catalogue for educators – it had so many amazing titles and I sensed that this type of multimedia curriculum would powerfully connect with students. I knew immediately that this is what I wanted to do; the CD-ROMs harnessed the power of storytelling to help students learn and engage, and I wanted in.

So, at the end of 1997, I moved to San Francisco and enrolled in a Master’s program at SF State in Instructional Technologies. A semester into the program, however, I hit a crossroads: my good friend James Kass, who had founded Youth Speaks, a non-profit focused on teen poetry and spoken word, approached me and asked whether I wanted to do a documentary film focusing on the inspiring work they were doing with teens. It was too appealing an offer to pass up, and although I hadn’t done a feature-length film before, I figured I’d be able to figure it out as I went along. I dropped out of the Master’s program and began working on the film.

1994-1998 Marketplace

As I began to hone my radio reporting skills, I decided to branch out and do some freelancing as well. In 1994 I was fortunate enough to connect with the folks at Marketplace, the business and economics program that has aired on NPR since 1989. Because of the massive investment of western dollars into Hungary, Marketplace was particularly interested in what was happening in that country. I was able to report on everything from the influx of western investment to the opening of a Socialist Theme Park.

In 1996 I moved to Munich, Germany and in addition to Marketplace, I also began to produce stories for Radio Deutsche Welle. These included a look into the nascent home shopping trend in Germany as well as a profile on the innovative apprenticeship program that the multinational company Siemens had developed. Interestingly, this story presaged work that I would do a decade later working for ConnectED.

1992-1996 Budapest Day & Night

The start to my career was not driven by an intentional desire to work in media but rather as a way to continue to explore the world (I had traveled and lived in southeast Asia for the previous 18 months and had got bit hard by wander lust). This was the summer of 1992 and a friend of my mom’s was starting a non-profit that was going to work on various projects in Hungary. One of the projects was an English language radio show, Budapest Day & Night, an NPR-styled news program that reported on Hungarian politics and culture.

At that time, because of the massive and historic changes that had just swept through the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, there were stories around every corner. Hungary was a particularly interesting place to report on because for many years under the Iron Curtain it had maintained a quasi-private enterprise system, operating in what they referred to as the ‘grey economy.’ As a result, they had a relatively large entrepreneurial class and attracted nearly 90% of all western investment dollars in the first few years after the fall of communism.

I went over initially to help find sponsors for the program but a few weeks before the program was to start broadcasting, one of the young reporters got homesick and decided to leave, and I ended up taking her spot. Even though I had no formal media background or training as a reporter, I was fascinated by the changes taking place in Hungary and the region and quickly learned how to construct audio stories. The BDN staff was made up of 20-somethings, fresh out of college, and we were all pretty much making it up as we went along. We had wide latitude to focus on the stories that interested us, so I hosted a weekly political roundtable, reported on music happenings and local food, and generally pursued stories that were of interest to me, such as a piece I did on how Hungarians smuggled information, news, and literature out of the country during Communist times via Samzidat underground publishing.

Timeline

Budapest Day & Night

Marketplace

Kop’s Kids and Zeitgeist

Poetic License

JustThink

Uth TV

ConnectED

Current

NewVoices Media