Overwhelming evidence has shown that girls and young women need more information technology training in supportive environments. Research shows that parents, teachers and other adults typically expect girls not to perform as well as boys in all areas of technology, regardless of their true potential, demonstrated abilities or interest in learning. Our Girls! Action! Media! program brings on-site media empowerment workshops to girls and young women in community-based organizations. This workshop fosters leadership development and community activism while teaching skills that nurture artistic expression and critical thinking, and can lead participants to careers in media and technology. Each workshop series develops both media literacy and production skills, allowing girls to use media to explore their own lives and the world around them. Participants critically examine the role of media and representations of women, then determine and create their own video, website or other media project that explores issues relevant to their communities. The workshop culminates with a media event organized by participants where they can present the project to the public and facilitate discussions about their issues. This distribution and the international video distribution through Beyondmedia allows the young women to participate in a public dialogue in universities, organizations, community groups and film fests around the world. Girls! Action! Media! workshops engage all aspects of young women's lives and provide a safe space to explore personal and social change.

"We're here, we're disabled, get used to it!" Beyondmedia is now partnering with Access Living, an independent living center for people with disabilities, and their young women's group, the Empowered Fe-Fe's. The Access Living Empowered Media workshop is the first ever media curriculum focused on the needs and concerns of girls with disabilities. For 16 weeks, members of the workshop will critique media stereotypes of women and people with disabilities and learn video, sound recording and interview skills. The 10 members, age 16-25, interviewed speakers and marchers at the first annual Disability Pride Parade in July '04 and are currently doing storytelling exercises to develop the voice of their own experience. These interviews will all be woven together to express the alternative, personal and politicized views of these diverse young women with disabilities. In a climate where young people with disabilities are experiencing a 43% high school drop out rate, with little job training and severe unemployment, the Fe-Fe's are mastering digital technology skills, exploring new careers and "showing the world that [they] can be on TV as much as anyone else".

(from access living)

"We're trying to show that we can be on TV as much as anybody else. I don't have to be Halle Barry, I can be myself."

"In TV and movies, I don't like how they portray people with disabilities because they make it look like we cannot do a lot of things but we can."

"Everywhere people see us as objects - if they see us at all. Being in this workshop is the first time I have ever felt in control of my image."

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A 17 year-old soccer playing Latina tries to make a video, "How to Start a Gay-Straight Alliance in Your High School," and runs smack into her principal's homophobia instead. After taking part in the Girls! Action! Media! workshop at Horizons, 16 year old Zaida Sanabia partnered with Beyondmedia to make this sobering and heartfelt documentary on school and family life for queer students. This Beyondmedia video is currently in distribution locally and internationally, and is used as a training tool on LGBTQ youth, school safety and homophobia. Zaida Sanabia, now Beyondmedia's Youth Staff and the video's producer, conducts an ongoing program of screenings with discussions in high schools, drop-in programs, universities and organizations around the Chicago metropolitan area. A Fish has also shown on cable television and at 15 film and video festivals throughout the US and beyond, garnering two first-place awards. Recently Zaida received Chicago Foundation for Women's Ripple Affect award as "a shining example of the triumph of women and girls when given the opportunity." Beyondmedia is currently working on the spanish translation of A Fish. top

Beyondmedia Education is partnering with youth media producers and the Coalition for Education on Sexual Orientation (CESO) and Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN) to create a multi-media toolkit on issues facing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer / Questioning (LGBTQ) youth in Illinois public schools. Can LGBTQ+ Schools=Safe? focuses on sexuality-based discrimination and anti-gay violence of LGBTQ youth in Illinois schools, and shows how to start a Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA). The project includes a 2-part video/DVD produced by LGBTQ youth, a study guide and an interactive website with information and downloadable art, writing, and audio interviews with queer students. The toolkit will equip young people, parents, teachers, individuals, schools and agencies in Illinois to create strategies for change around the health and safety of LGBTQ students as well as provide a forum for youth to connect and express themselves. Video screenings and discussions will be held for the Illinois State Board of Education and in community organizations and schools. Youth Program staff Zaida Sanabia, who began working with Beyondmedia on homophobia in schools when she was 15, will work with other LGBTQ students to represent the issues relevant in their own lives, through their own eyes. top

The Chain of Change project will organize approximately 24 groups of youth across the state of Illinois to individually and collectively strategize how to end violence against women and girls, thinking about their own roles in this work and relative to other communities.

As these video segments are created, Beyondmedia will upload them to the Chain of Change interactive website, enabling the participating groups and the general public to track the development of the project. The website will also facilitate discussion among these 24 groups about the work that is being made in an effort to strengthen bonds between these groups and to raise awareness of violence against women and girls, in all its complexity. top

This 8-session weekly workshop, scheduled to begin in August 2007, will build media skills and literacy in a group of 20 young women in trouble with the law. These 16- and 17-year-old youth “act out” for a variety of reasons, including familial neglect, physical or sexual abuse, and lack of other opportunities. This media workshop will help young women in detention to “speak out” about these same issues as they explore new ways to respond to their environment and take action in their lives. The project will include critical discussions of media, including television and print news reports of young women in juvenile detention, “reality” television, and popular radio. In addition, local documentary filmmakers will screen and discuss their work. Through skill-building exercises that link to each discussion of media, participants will learn concrete video staging, interviewing, reporting, sound, and editing skills. The process will culminate in the creation of a number of independent short video pieces to be screened within the center once the workshop and editing has concluded. top

Beyondmedia's second collaboration with Brown Eyed Girl, a new Chicago agency serving girls in foster care which features a facilitated five-month-long video workshop from September 2007 to March 2008. Girls will explore autobiography, identity, and their experiences in foster care, resulting in the creation of a short documentary video. This project builds on a former facilitated workshop in the Spring of 2006, in which girls created an exhibit of documentary photography with an audio installation. top

Between March and August of 2007, Beyondmedia will be facilitating a six-month video workshop for young women between the ages of 16 and 18 at the Muslim Women Resource Center to train them in video production to produce a short video on Muslim immigrant youth identity. Tentatively titled "The Faces of Islam", this video project will explore societal attitudes towards young Muslim women and how these attitudes compare and contrast to these young women's perceptions of themselves. top

This multi-media oral history project was produced with the high school-aged, low-income, African American and Caribbean members of Family Matters' Sisters of Struggle, using video, audio, and digital still photography to document the disappearing voices of their community in the rapidly gentrifying Rogers Park. Workshop members have since facilitated screenings for the community at Gale Elementary Community Academy and the Rogers Park Windows Alive public art exhibition. Our View from the Red Line is now a part of our ongoing national distribution. top

Beyondmedia Education collaborated with Horizons Community Services' Youth Program on a year-long media workshop, beginning in April 2001. Horizons is the midwest's largest social service and advocacy organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and HIV/AIDS affected communities. Horizons aimed to expand their limited programming for girls and young women by offering a young women's after-school media workshop, facilitated in partnership with Beyondmedia Education. A goal of the workshop was to create a safe and affirming space in which young LBTQ women who are demographically diverse can come together, build a community and work on a common project. The workshop also trained peer educators to maintain the project after the workshop was completed. After analyzing the role of alternative media and discussing what challenges and resources are relevant for young lbt women, the workshop members produced a zine titled Broad and a video, Not For Girls Only: The young women's drop in program. The video addressed the harassment of queer youth in high schools and featured interviews and solo poetry performances by the participants while the zine had health information, art, and essays.

(From participants at horizons)

"Now I can't watch TV in the same way that I used to; I always have to analyze it!"

"The two weeks I've been here - it makes my life easier to be in. When I walk out of here, it builds up my confidence, being who I am...there are a lot of misguided young women, lesbians and bisexuals who need this kind of support, the surroundings of so many positive women"

" I like the fact that we are the ones deciding what we want to do, or what will be heard by us."

"I enjoyed the environment in which we could address body image, gender and sexuality issues both with independent documentaries and our own discussion."

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Beyondmedia Education's Girl World Media Workshop was a year-long after-school program with Alternatives that began in 2001. Alternatives provides innovative leadership and advocacy opportunities to lower-income girls and young women on the north side of Chicago. Beyondmedia Education collaborated with 19 girls, aged 14-17, in the Girl World Teen Group to produce a video, GIRLS' THEORY: ME-SEARCH RESEARCH. In their own voices, the girls cover topics such as violence, stereotypes of women, sex, relationships, reputation, and the future. The young women critically examined representations of teenagers and women of color in mainstream media and took to the streets to interview the public about the subject. As a result, their smart, hip video merges personal discussions about the daily struggle to be a righteous sister with the mixed blessings of the world at large. top