Escuchar, Compartir, Comunidad (Listen, Share, Community)

Click here to download "Audio Visual Journalism: Lesson Plans for Community Media," by Juan C. Dávila, September 2019.

The Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas is honored to be part of a yearlong journalism project titled Escuchar, Compartir, Comunidad (Listen, Share, Community) in partnership with KZSC radio and the Digital NEST (Nurturing Entrepreneurial Skills with Technology) in Watsonville, California for 2018-19. With funding support from the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County and UC Santa Cruz’s Chancellor’s Graduate Student Internship Program, this project aims to equip, train, and mentor a new team of young broadcast journalists from Watsonville, California.

By partnering with the Digital NEST, a Watsonville-based non-profit seeking to bridge the digital and media racial/ethnic divide, we will be working with young adults who rarely get the chance to access the mass media and see their lives accurately reflected there. This project will be providing professionally-designed, expert-led, hands-on training sessions, along with production and editorial support by a dedicated team from the Huerta Center and KZSC.

These new citizen-journalists will produce English/Spanish bilingual programming for broadcast on KZSC’s 20,000-watt signal at 88.1 FM, which reaches tens of thousands of listeners every week in Santa Cruz, Monterey and San Benito counties. KZSC and Huerta Center will also distribute podcasts of project content on all major platforms (iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher), and will publish all the digital and social media content generated by the project to our websites. Please be sure to return to our website to listen to the amazing work these young people produce throughout the academic year.

KZSC is a non-commercial, educational radio station that for 50 years has provided public service programming to Santa Cruz county — with a steadfast commitment to featuring voices too often left out of the media. The Huerta Center, now in its 26^th year, is dedicated to connecting the university with the local community by supporting research and other initiatives in Santa Cruz county exploring questions related to citizenship, class, economics, education, culture, indigeneity, labor, language, place, human rights, politics, and representation — subjects that are quite salient in south Santa Cruz county.

This collaborative project will empower new civically-engaged leaders of media. Escuchar, Compartir, Comunidad will train two cohorts of young people from the Digital NEST and we hope this project opens up new professional opportunities in broadcasting and journalism for them. This project also aims to serve as a model for university-community partnerships we hope to see replicated with other University of California radio stations and research centers.