The Road Less Traveled

Happy Holidays.

The last few months have been an up hill battle for Media in Motion and the project that we publish, Young Voices. We have successfully published three issues and we are in the process of our fourth issue, but financially things haven’t been so smooth.

Allow me to give you a bit of a recap. Our first issue was fully paid for, and we also covered the expenses associated with three additional staff members by drumming up advertisement support. Since our first issue things have been a little uncertain. We applied for a few grants, but didn’t want a break in our publishing so we moved forward. Our second issue was produced purely by a volunteer effort. By the time it came to our third issue many of the students were back to being paid by Waterbury Youth Services through Workforce Connection money. But the entire project wasn’t covered, including the costs of printing and my modest part-time salary, and support staff.

We received news in November that several of the grants that we had applied for had been denied. While I was disappointed that we didn’t receive the grants we had applied for, I knew I needed to move forward. This project is very, very important to me and I am desperately making sure that there continues to be a youth newspaper in this city because the youth in this city definitely need a voice and an outlet. I’ve had many meetings with several community leaders, and trying to figure out new partnerships and gaining additional support. I’m not sure what the future of this project will be, but I am aggressively seeking out support from the community in an effort to keep moving forward and publishing.

This project is a $17,000-$24,000 project at bare minimum, and it ultimately seems like it will take a full grassroots effort to raise this money. There may be some restructuring in terms of how often we publish, as things get tight financially. Regardless of what we have to do, rest assured that there will be a youth newspaper in some capacity. I’ve returned to Connecticut and to Waterbury, and I’ve committed to making this project work. There will be a Young Voices in 2008 (by the way our next issue is scheduled to hit the street January 16).

As we stabilize our newspaper project, Media in Motion has some other exciting projects that we want to move forward with in the coming year. My goal through Media in Motion is to introduce communication to youth and to empower them through that process.

If you want to help us in our efforts, please feel free to contact me at 203-500-3891 or qdonnell@msn.com.

Happy Holidays!

-quajay