To provide advanced media training connected to social activism to low-income high school students from districts across New York City.

In addition to having little opportunity to receive this kind of intensive training, students in these high-poverty schools have few chances to raise their awareness of serious and immediate social concerns and to develop action plans to respond to them.

Based out of Urban Arts Partnership’s state-of-the-art media lab, the media activist project connects students to vital social issues through advanced training in filmmaking, digital editing and professional-level production and promotion. Funds raised will ensure that students will work with experienced and dedicated teaching artists and professional equipment.

The digital age represents an exciting time in history, in part because it has given voice to under represented and disenfranchised communities. Urban Arts is devoting much of its future programming to expansion within digital media, including the MediaLab program, principally because of the lack of accessibility for cultural expression among our underserved constituents, and the opportunity to empower youth as emerging citizens, budding scholars and producers of their own heritage. In this way, they will begin to make sense of a difficult world, and define and direct their place in it.

View a sample clip of last year's project, In My Shoes.