New Mexico Media Literacy Project | nmmlp.org

Digital Justice for Us! is a youth initiative that brings together urban youth from various community, cultural, and social justice organizations across Albuquerque to tackle issues of injustice in the state of New Mexico by creating media for community power and policy change. DJ4Us! projects teach media production skills to young people in Albuquerque in preparation to collect audio and video stories from throughout New Mexico on a variety of media justice issues.

The first project was initiated in response to the widening digital divide New Mexicans face in terms of access to broadband (high speed internet). The project’s mission was to collect internet stories from rural youth lacking broadband in order to inform the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan. The Digital Justice for Us! broadband project began with a training at Young Women United. Seven youth from Albuquerque Partnership, Young Women United, Media Arts Collaborative Charter School, and Native American Community Academy received media justice and media production training from Steven Renderos, a filmmaker/DJ/media justice organizer from Main Street Project in Minneapolis. MLP staff also assisted the young people in editing their own internet stories. The DJ4Us! internet stories below have been submitted as public comment to the FCC to inform the National Broadband Plan and support Universal Broadband and Network Neutrality.

Media Literacy Project’s goal for the second year of Digital Justice for Us! will be to once again collect stories from rural youth, but on the topic of cell phone access. MLP is currently in the process of creating curriculum on cell phone literacy. Rural communities face many barriers in accessing decent cell phone service and are often left struggling to connect. Customers are often faced with confusing bills and promises of better service that don’t get met.

Digital Justice for Us! is funded in part by the New Mexico Community Foundation’s Youth Initiative.

For more information on DJ4U contact Candelario Vazquez at cande@medialiteracyproject.org or 505.828.3312.

> Read Candelario's blog post on Digital Justice for Us!