oh hi my name's claire garrett and i'm an assistant professor at yale university in the fine arts the partner one thousand photography and i've had the pleasure of working with m m r t i the multimedia resources and training institute over the last year on program development for youth and media m m r t i is located in the heart of the bailey gasser school district jackson in twenty third and it's a wonderful facility it's got great technology it's got up to date software it's got wonderful little studio got a ton of equipment and all that's great but what's really great about it it's got these fabulous programs to teach you media teaching camera operation teaching journalistic techniques teaching sound teaching editing teaching lighting and they have a steady stream of young people and even adults as well i believe that come in and they learn how to do media and learn how to be a voice for their community so there's some wonderful things going on here it's open to the public and i highly encourage you to take advantage of this incredible research our resources m m r t i so i think the photography and video and the arts in general are wonderful tools when you're working with you one of the purposes of this summer's youth media workshop was to engage the youth in their own communities to understand their communities history and to understand that they themselves are capable of being a great asset as a voice for the community so to teach kids creative expression through the photographic guides and through video allows them to see themselves differently i think and they definitely allows them to explore their environments and see their own environments and new ways so there's nothing but good things about them also it's a lot of fun i think also when working with a group of youth and with video expression but also photography and you're doing documentary work you learn that they need to rely on one another each recognize each other's strengths and they also each recognize their own strengths and they step in and they learn to work as a team members and they step in to make a project happen so we witness a lot of that was a lot of work we are expectations of of our of our participants were really very high in six weeks who needed to teach them photography when we were the teach them documentary and writing skills we needed to teach them the history of their neighborhood these guys had to learn all about being and creating narratives and they did it in six short weeks so that was a really thrilling i think when you challenge young people and give them something interesting and then you respect their their abilities to excel then they always do that they tend to excel so that was very exciting one of the quick things for me as a faculty person working at c l university is when we're very urban university we're right in the heart of capitol hill right in the heart of the city and we're just a little bit north like a ten minute walk from us the terrace and seven aversive and three years ago launched this great initiative called the youth initiative and the idea is that the university can use its educational resources its faculty its knowledge its knowledge base its student body and that we can make a substantial difference in the life of the young people within the bailey gets or school district area seattle so we've made this big commitment called the national and there's several different different ways i think that an issue initiative has grown in the last three years and one of them of course is a large involvement with the programs in their communities working with you to be able to work with them and to learn from their experiences and to work with them and pour their resources all together towards a similar girl i just really exciting there's no way that i think the finance department or or i by myself could do anything like the summer program nor would i want to do that by myself but working with our community partners i think really allows our community partners to expand their programming because they're working with each other maybe in new and exciting ways and they're working with the university and university students and mentors and faculty so i think everybody kind of benefits expression hopefully the youth that participate in our programs so that's one of the things that the youth initiative is sort of about is the connecting university with communities and helping community partners who are already doing great programming to do even more of it to to help enable them to grow and to expand th one of those