LAMP Favorite 

via Detroit Future Youth:

"Detroit Summer is [a] multi-racial, inter-generational collective in Detroit that has been working to transform communities through youth leadership, creativity and collective action since 1992. The Live Arts Media Project (LAMP) of Detroit Summer is a youth-led response to Detroit’s drop-out crisis, which uses music, poetry, media, and visual art to investigate community problems and generate community-based solutions. We developed a process of community media production that became an organizing campaign to transform education in Detroit. Our model of community media-based organizing includes:youth led investigation through essential question-asking, critical thinking through the editing process, and community visioning through creative expression. We use popular education workshops and formal surveys to produce both quantitative and qualitative data. This participatory action research process generates visions for change on the individual, community and city-wide level. We have developed a “rose and thorn” feedback loop process through which we interview all participants in our workshops, tours and other events. This allows us to remain accountable to our community as our vision and work evolves."

via Detroit Summer:

The 2010 LAMP will build the creative leadership and community problem-solving skills of 10 young people from Detroit. In the first phase of the program, we will take field trips to 10 neighborhoods throughout the city, where people are organizing community-based solutions to social and economic crises. From the stories we gather in those interviews, we will forge a narrative of “Another Detroit” that is happening in the midst of mainstream stories about Detroit. From there, we will go through a series of workshops with artists at the Allied Media Conference to turn the narrative into a mural design. We will invite the help of out-of-town visitors to paint the mural during the United States Social Forum. In July, following the AMC and USSF, we will produce interactive media and popular education tools to accompany the mural.