Recipient of the 2008 Judith Lee Stronach Baccalaureate Prize
Project
Youth Multimedia Literacy & Production (Y Media-LP)
Yoram Savion-Royant will work to create a new narrative of crime and punishment that promotes restorative justice. Tapping into the creative and healing power of youth, he will develop and lead a sustainable employment program in media literacy at the Youth UpRising community center in East Oakland. His young trainees will produce professional multimedia articles for the Oakland Tribune, the Alameda County Behavioral Health Services, and other public interest websites. Focused on increased policing, widespread institutional failures, and mass incarceration, their stories will document the lived experience of urban youth, highlighting not only the problems they encounter but also their solutions, thus imagining possibilities for social change. The Oakland Tribune has been publishing stories by Savion-Royant's team as part of its 2007 Homicide Report and 2008 Pieces of the Puzzle project.
Biography
In December 2007 Yoram Savion-Royant earned a bachelor of arts with honors in his individual major, "New Media, Art and Social Change." Now a media instructor, he laid the groundwork for his Stronach project while a McNair Scholar, reporting his reflections about the Youth UpRising’s mission in the Spring 2008 issue of the Berkeley McNair Research Journal. Yoram credits his bilingual upbringing between France’s Brittany and California’s Bay Area for teaching him how local community issues connect to the global struggle for change. He put this awareness into action by helping to rebuild the Ninth Ward of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005 and while studying for four months in Senegal, West Africa on an academic scholarship. He explores similar themes in his creative projects, including his film Grounded, which was selected for the 2007 Juried Exhibition at San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts, and a video about TURF dancing that he produced with his students for the 2008 exhibit “Cool Remixed” at the Oakland Museum.
Related links
Savion-Royant and his students at Youth UpRising
TURF video by Savion-Royant's team
KQED review of “Cool Remixed”
Turf Feinz Dance Crew
