Shift23 Media Creates Free Youth Education Series
Have a creative youth in your life who is just craving an outlet? You may need to look no further because Shift23 Media is creating a brand new summer education series for students and art enthusiasts alike.
Shift23, the creative team based out of New York City, is looking for ways to connect to the arts and community by offering courses that relate to media production to creatives of all levels of skill and interest. With a teaching pedagogy based on the stages from process all the way through project, courses will cover topics from film set sustainability to arts as resistance.
Starting on July 20, Shift23 Media will be offering 18 free online courses for youth ages 13 to 19, while also accepting donations to be split between New York’s Heavenly Angels Fund, the Colorado Freedom Fund, the Brooklyn Bail Out Fund, and a portion to help them fundraise what we lost from COVID-19 when we they forced to postpone a production and Kickstarter.
During the time of COVID-19 and social uprising, many parents and youth are looking for ways to get involved and engaged, and Shift23 Media knows how significant visual arts and images are in propelling messages to the masses. OUT FRONT connected with Ayla Sullivan, a co-founder of Shift23 Media, to learn more about the program, why keeping the arts alive during this time is important, and how significant having access to creative outlets is to young people.
Why do you believe that art programs are so important for youth to be involved in?
Fundamentally, art is a public good, it enriches our perspective, our communication, and allows us to feed and heal one another with story because our experiences can be seen and honored. Youth deserve spaces where they are empowered as full, complex human beings and can participate in a mutual, respectful exchange of passions. Art will always be the greatest facilitator for such important community interaction and personal expansion; it is a necessary component to the development of a child’s life, especially in a time of isolation and a nationwide uprising.
What is unique about Shift23 that is unlike any other art-based program out there?
At Shift23, we believe in making art the most accessible form of education. We do this work to truly be of service to our community and do not seek to profit off our stewardship. Accessibility to the arts includes free instruction, a welcoming and empowering space where truly everyone can learn, and a commitment to growing with our students to make sure we are anticipating and accommodating their individual needs to the utmost degree. Some examples of this are providing closed captioning services on our educational videos and using a hybrid pre-recorded/live instruction model that lets students take their course at their own pace.
Outside of instruction, we also believe in creating art to educate and/or affirm our audiences with critical and diverse narratives, exploring the nuances of race, gender, sexuality, class, and the world we live in together.
Another primary difference to many art-based programs is we are all under 30 years old, which makes us more readily accountable to our students, allows us to have fresh perspectives, and strengthens our commitment to our students and community as a whole. In other words, we just started, so we ain’t leaving!
At what age did you realize you wanted to be a creative for your profession and what barriers existed for you then in accessing those programs?
I started deepening my love for theatre and performing when I was ten years old and had my first theatre summer camp experience. At that time, I was the only Black person at my school and a scholarship student, so the financial barrier to summer camps always deterred me from attending, as well as knowing I’d be entering a “white” space where I’d be playing characters who never lived my experience or moved through the world in the way I did.
When I went to theatre camps throughout my childhood and adolescence, I always had to apply for scholarships, which made my summer experiences incredibly limited. It wasn’t until I was 16 and went to Perry Mansfield that I had Black women as arts educators or had a summer experience with a greater amount of people of color. As an educator now, I always want to make sure our courses have no financial barriers keeping youth, especially Black youth and youth of color, from having the arts program they deserve.
Related article: Youth on Record on How to Support POC Youth In what ways are you ensuring that the programs are inclusive to all youth, including LGBTQ and POC?
What do you hope the youth who enroll in the program get out of it?
I hope the youth have the opportunity to dream openly about themselves, the world they envision, and have tangible skills to create something new that they have complete and total ownership of. I hope they meet at least one new person they connect with and feel that they have a new community to engage with. Most importantly, I hope they have fun with us, even in quarantine!
We are committed to holding ourselves and our classrooms accountable in creating safer spaces of instruction. We do this through engaging with diverse art makers and theorists both in and outside the classroom, basing our educational pedagogy on true restorative justice principles for ourselves and for our students, and affirm the identities and experiences of our students from registration all the way to the end of our time teaching our courses. We are not only dedicated to creating classroom communities, but a greater network of intergenerational artists who support and champion each other simply because they met through Shift23 Media.
What type of equipment is needed for the program and what if the youth don’t have access to those things?
The only real equipment any student needs is Wifi access! For one of our courses, we send materials for a low fee (under $10) and we have a scholarship option available for those who need it, ensuring when we say courses are free, they really are free. Even for filmmaking courses, many students do not have to have expensive equipment to capture film, using cameras on various devices are always welcome. If they do not have access to anything that films, we can offer creative alternatives where they can use images and video from other sources to tell a story.
As software for art making can also be a financial burden, we will always work to make sure students can use free alternatives either online or through apps to make sure they can participate. Of course, we are committed to accommodating any type of accessibility needs and will work with any and every student on a case by case basis to provide support so they can be in community with us.
Photos provided by Shift23 Media
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