It's official: Summer has been over. The weather's getting cooler, the school year is back in full swing, and we're closer to Thanksgiving than Labor Day. The best part of the fall, though? The second annual special, A Voice at the Table from 瓜神app's Youth Reporting Institute! The special will feature stories from our seven youth reporters that highlight the importance of preserving our history and how that's in tension with the needs of today.
The 2024 YRI cohort wrapped its summer with a listening party at Motorco Music Hall in Durham. This year, purple lights and comfy couches jazzed up the stage in the style of a reality show reunion. Each of the youth reporters got the chance to reflect on what they learned over the summer before a short Q&A with guests in the audience. The most exciting part, however, was the chance for each reporter to tease snippets from their upcoming stories.
First to the stage was mentor Chris Williams, returning for his third year with the Youth Reporting Institute. Although he didn't have his own specific pitch to work on throughout the summer, he took a large role in helping produce youth reporter Tanya Wang's non-narrative piece. He helped Tanya as she interviewed 19-year-old Carter Suffridge about how Brightpath, an outpatient mental health facility in Wake Forest that helped him overcome battles with suicidal ideation. He said putting a story together without narration was challenging, but the way Tanya approached each interview elicited responses that helped portray the humanity in each interviewee's experiences.
"We're sitting here getting your story. We don't want to just use you as the poster child and put you as another statistic," he said. "You already got through it; you have the valuable knowledge. So let's sit here, make you the person that you are, and let everybody hear your story."
YRI's second mentor, Parys Smith joined YRI for her third year, which gave her another chance to uplift authentic voices from her community. As a rising sophomore at UNC-Greensboro, Parys was able to fully immerse herself in the world of the N.C. Association of Educators teachers' union. She attended trainings and a door-to-door campaign to recruit new members in July. She says one moment with Bryan Profitt, the vice president of NCAE, was especially enlightening.
"The stuff that Black and brown students face on a day-to-day basis due to their skin tone is a slow bullet for them," she remembered him saying. "So if y'all are willing to advocate for your students when there is a real shooting or a real problem at hand, then y'all should be able to address the problems that Black and brown students are going through, verbally or systematically."
In the spirit of passing the mic, YRI program directors Kamaya Truitt and Allison Swaim let Chris and Parys take the lead to host the rest of the show. This was a consistent theme for all of the youth reporters throughout the summer. The youth mentors led workshops while helping students develop content for YRI's social media channels. During the first week of the program, Smith led a workshop about different interview techniques. After honing in on best methods, several reporters shared personal interviewing styles that previously helped them get the answers they needed most. One thing all their tactics had in common? Adapting when things went awry to keep the story on track.
Chris led the next workshop on collecting scene sound, and it ended up putting the reporters' quick-thinking to the test again. Trying to make a story only with the environment around them, the reporters put their mics to the rushing water, the Durham Freeway's bustling traffic, and the whipping of flags in the wind to capture a day at the American Tobacco Campus. After trying to scrape some sound into a cohesive story at the last minute, the planning that helped many of the reporters craft their stories throughout the summer seemed like a breeze.
One of the best examples of flexible storytelling was Appalachian State senior, Andrew Rice. After three years working for his school's radio station, Andrew was ready to pivot when leads ran out for his first pitch on Boone's historically Black Junaluska community. Luckily, Andrew was able to pivot with the Friends of Geer Cemetery. The group included volunteers and descendants working to get Durham's historically Black Geer Cemetery on the National Register of Historic Places. By the end of the summer, Geer had qualified and was officially added to the list.
"Finding Geer Cemetery was so important to really narrow down my story and show that there is an inequity in the preservation movement," Andrew said. "Yes, part of it is socioeconomic, but also a large part of it, and a part that became the focus for me, was a racial and ethnic barrier."
These social justice issues drove much of the youth reporters' work throughout the summer, especially in reporter Max Tendler's story. Bringing her experience as the editor-in-chief of Durham Academy's student-run newspaper, Max was able to explore how people in Durham navigate its car-centric human geography. Her reporting brought her to the busy intersection of 15-501 and Mount Moriah Road, a Zoom conversation with a professor from London, and the office of Durham's "Vision Zero" Coordinator in charge of eliminating the city's traffic fatalities. Her work quickly showed how dangerous parts of daily life navigating the city can be for people traveling outside of cars.
"I've lived here for so many years, and I've driven past these intersections and these streets over and over and over again," Max said. "It was fascinating when I started to look around and notice 鈥� well, why is it so difficult to get around the city without a car? ... Why are those people over there struggling to get across the road?"
Max's story was one of the first times in YRI's history that an interview was conducted with someone overseas! Getting Dr. Mindell's outside perspective on Durham's geography was enlightening. She gasped out loud seeing the intersection people walked across every day. Another first this summer: the news intern program!
This year, Twumasi Duah-Mensah and Maddie Policastro were the first two news reporting interns while also working with YRI. They got the chance to shadow reporters navigating the fast pace of daily coverage, and they learned about the time and care needed to create a feature-length story.
"The tools that I got from YRI helped me advocate for myself even in a fast-paced newsroom that has certain standards," Duah-Mensah said.
The entire team got the chance to collaborate with other 瓜神app programming for podcast tapings. Parys worked the soundboard on a special taping of Due South, while an interview on Embodied left all the youth reporters thinking about how to handle tough topics like caretaking. Overall, YRI was focused on increasing each reporter's access to new opportunities.
Along the lines of increasing access, a lack of fresh food motivated Twumasi to report on the first Black-owned grocery store in the small town of Norlina. He spent his summer with LaTonya Andrew-Hunter and Darius Hunter, the store's co-owners. He learned about their experiences increasing access to fresh food in lower-income areas with Gangsters to Growers, maintaining Black farms alongside one of their former suppliers, Baba Barker, and watched them actively teach the store's customers about the food they put in their bodies. Even more significant is that this grocery store is the first Black-owned grocery store in Norlina. That's the same town where two men were lynched following a gunfight and an argument over rotten apples in 1921.
"To be the first Black business on that strip, that's also good for our community to see as well. That may be healing," Hunter said. "I see that in some people's eyes like 'I can, I'm coming in here now 鈥� I'm coming on the strip now.'"
Speaking of empowering Black communities, our final reporter, Maddie Policastro, brought us to Chapel Hill's Northside neighborhood. Maddie first became familiar with the neighborhood as a student at UNC-Chapel Hill, and spent much of the summer learning how the university is taking action to preserve the historical community. Maddie explored how loud parties, rising taxes, and an overall lack of communication can strain relationships with long-term residents while also offering ways for students and locals to connect as a solution.
"So many people have so many rich stories and histories, and they've lived there longer than I've ever even been alive," Maddie said. "I think it's just so important to go out and learn from everybody, because everybody has so much to say, and they also want to learn from you."
If you liked reading about these stories, you'll enjoy hearing about them even more! Be on the lookout for the full stories and articles on the YRI homepage. Also make sure to follow our Instagram and Tiktok, @wuncyouthvoices, to keep up with more behind the scenes content!
