Update from Munsieville's young journalists

Our GSK PULSE volunteer Carola Michielsen caught up with the Youth Voice Journalism Academy students last week - here is an update from her meeting:
Last week I spent some time with some of the journalists of the Youth Voice Journalism Academy (YVJA), a year-long course that trains the young people with journalism skills, in order to develop literacy, accountability, self-confidence and leadership, whilst engaging the young adults in constructive activity. The YVJA aims to inspire the whole community by writing articles about relevant news or topics that concern the community or by the video diaries that the participants make which tell about their lives in Munsieville.
One year ago 20 young adults from Munsieville started this training. Some of them got jobs, moved or just dropped out so that by mid-October 2011, 10 of them will complete their curriculum. I met some very ambitious and talented participants (see picture). They are willing to make the best out of the course and are searching for ways to create more awareness in the community. They showed me their portfolio and I was really impressed by the quality of their work. Palesa was even asked by Caxton magazines to write an article for their magazine. She wrote an article on the origin of the word “kaffer”, which nowadays is used frequently by young children as a curse word but they have no idea where this word originates from. With the article, Palesa is trying to make the children aware so that they can rethink when they use this word. The students also made a HipHop magazine "Element" that looks very professional and trendy and is over 40 pages long!! They are eager to have this printed and have plans to discuss it with Caxton magazines, one of the companies they visited during their monthly site visits. This company has no magazine yet for young adults and this could be their first one and more importantly this could be the first magazine coming from Munsieville.
The students told me that they find it very difficult to create awareness about their work in the community and I challenged them to think about it - they came up with great ideas for creating a monthly newsletter and organising an exhibition of their work for the community! I think that the journalists I met last week do have talent and do believe that they can improve life for the young people in their community. With the right encouragement and support Project Hope UK will be able to help these young ambitious journalists achieve their goals and make their vision come true!!
Thanks for reading!