A month ago we told you about Youth Voices, a project that seeks to empower young people by combining spoken word poetry, digital media and narrative storytelling to cultivate the voices, stories and talents of urban youth.
In launching the project, Youth Voices sought the help of George "Rithm" Martinez, an award winning artist who, in the next few days will be traveling around the country to high schools give motivational talks to students. Today, we caught up with "Rithm" at SJC where spoke to about one hundred and fifty students about the importance of speaking out and making their own stories:
George "Rithm" Martinez, International Artist
"We want young people to feel like they have the ability to speak their minds, speak what we say truth to power and be able to shape the world them with their ideas, their stories and their media, so this campaign is to encourage them to use their talents, use their voices and join the global community of people who are going to change the world one day at a time with our own stories. The element of the spoken word is the writing part like you said so we are going to do writing workshops to show young people how to write their thoughts, how to develop the rhythm and the methodology of telling their stories with their own kind of language, at this particular launch week of youth voices it's going to culminate in a national tour - the youth voices tour, so I expect to be back in 2011 and the top of the year to do some more in depth workshops specially around the writing, not necessarily a lot of the media but just the workshops, the capacity building and I think we are going to culminate in a national tour toward the end of the year or 2012. This is a yearlong initiative that I am committed to being a part of. "
"You should break down these words and analyze the content, but I swear it will not be the same on this continent so what I suggest that we prepare our domes before we die first into the spoken word zone, see we cannot please all of you all all the time, some get caught up in aesthetics instead of checking the mind but if you look real deep you will find the science in these lines transcends space and time."
The Youth Voice project will be carried out for a two year period and is opened to young people of ages 16-22 residing in Belize City. If you'd like more information you can call 604-5571….
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