Voices International Newsletter

At Libertyville High School in Chicago, students in a media class designed pins to sell and posters to advertise. They are fundraising for their Brick by Brick: Schoolbuilding project and upcoming trip to Kenya!

Erin here, reporting live (almost) from the We Generation! Tour, sponsored by National Bank Financial. Garry and I have been running into a lot of different kinds of media recently, such as electronic media, print media and news media. No matter what the type of media, its purpose is to share ideas.

Garry and I had an interesting experience with electronic media the other day during our We Generation! Tour presentation. We were speaking at a school whose gymnasium only had space for half of the school’s students to hear our presentation. The other 450 were not going to be able to hear it.

The teachers brainstormed, and they figured out a way for every student to see the presentation: videotape the morning presentation and show it to the other students at a time later in the afternoon. And that’s what they did. The whole school was able to see the speech, hear our ideas and hang out with Garry and me, even though half of the students were never even in the same room as us.

Every single day, Garry and I see Youth in Action Groups harnessing the power of new forms of digital, print and news media. Carrying the message of social change, Youth in Action Groups design and hang posters, make PowerPoint presentations to classes, send articles to local newspapers, upload videos and post blogs.

The coolest thing about many new forms of media is that we can now communicate ideas and be affected by the ideas of others even without meeting them, just like how Garry and I spoke to an entire school even though half of our audience wasn’t in the room. The challenge is to make sure the ideas we are communicating through media continue to be sincere and effective.

We can’t wait to see how you’ll use media next to spread the word. Keep us posted!

Free The Children is the largest network of children helping children through education in the world, with more than one million youth involved in our innovative education and development programs in 45 countries. Founded by international child rights activist Craig Kielburger, Free The Children has an established track-record of success, with three nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize and partnerships with the United Nations and Oprah’s Angel Network.

The Many Media