No Place Like Home: A Youth Video Exchange Project:
According to FEMA, over 362,000 people were displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Over a year and a half after the hurricanes struck the Gulf Coast, over 60,000 temporary housing units are still being occupied. The trauma of the hurricanes and the subsequent stress experienced by the youth and their families is taking a toll. Scattered or broken families, tension in over-crowded classrooms and uncertainty about their future continues to weigh heavily on these youth.
To aid in the relief of emotional trauma and resulting behavioral problems afflicting youth in the Gulf Coast region of the United States, FilmAid, in collaboration with local partners and Barefoot Workshops, is offering young people displaced by the hurricanes a unique opportunity to reflect on their experiences through a therapeutic and empowering process of visual storytelling. FilmAid is providing basic video and photography training as a means for youth to share their experiences and reflect on their fears, frustrations, hopes, and dreams. In addition to sharing their stories locally and regionally, FilmAid will connect these youth with their peers from other parts of the world who have also experienced displacement. In this way, young people will have an unparalleled opportunity to participate in a cross-cultural dialogue about what it means to be displaced in the world today and how their peers elsewhere are coping.
Background & Objectives
In June, 2006, FilmAid partner Barefoot Workshops held a video and photography workshop for 21 students at Bay High in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, in which displaced teens learned how to document and tell their stories, exploring what happened to them during Katrina and how they coped with the devastation.
The students at Bay High then met with youth from our New Orleans-based partner Students at the Center (SAC) in a groundbreaking brainstorming session during which the youth’s videos, and those created by FilmAid’s refugee students in Kenya, were screened and discussed. A dynamic and engaging dialogue emerged around the surprising commonalities that the students felt they shared with these youth half a world away.
FilmAid is now bringing together local Baton Rouge youth with high school-age evacuees from Renaissance Village – the largest of the FEMA parks - where almost 600 trailers are housing 3,000 people. The youth will receive training in video and digital storytelling and to participate in this video exchange program. All youth will have the opportunity to explore their own and their peers’ experiences of displacement, in a supportive and safe environment, by creating visual media that is easily shared. This program will offer evacuee and host community youth a unique chance to collectively address some of the tensions that have arisen between the two communities.
The resulting videos will be shared not only with the teens’ immediate communities, but also between each of the groups in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Kenya, and finally with the broader national and international public. Reaction/response videos will be made by each group, resulting in a video-based dialogue on topics of concern to youth who share the complex and challenging experience displacement.
The objectives of this project are to:
To learn more about this project and see some of the youth’s work thus far, click here.
Watch three Bay High School students speak about their thoughts and experiences 20 months after Hurricane Katrina.The Scars of Katrina - Featured on MSNBC.com.
Special Thanks
Partners:
courtesy of Barefoot Workshops
courtesy of Barefoot Workshops
Videos produced by the youth will soon be available. Please check back again shortly.
