A town hall meeting concerning the Columbia Links program’s latest investigative initiative, “Lost Boys Black & Brown” will be held at 618 S. Michigan Ave. at 5:30 p.m. Nov. 12.
The intended message of “Lost Boys” is to shed light on the higher probability Chicago Black and Latino youth have of being impoverished, expelled and incarcerated as opposed to white teenagers, Columbia Links Executive Director Brenda Butler said.
In a press conference last Wednesday, Butler discussed Link’s Investigate Team, a group of six who created and will share their findings on at-risk adolescents and the “cradle to prison pipeline.”
“We have to break the pipeline,” she said.
Columbia Links, founded in 2006 by the Columbia College Chicago’s Nancy Day, chair of the Journalism Department, and professor Curtis Lawrence. Butler described the program as a journalism and news literacy course for the city’s high school students.
The students in the program, who are mentored by journalist graduate students as well as professionals, come from Chicago high schools ranging from at-risk to college-prep, she said.
“We’re finding out that even kids who go to selective enrollment schools actually need support in their writing skills and understanding what journalism is all about and what news literacy is all about,” she said.
Butler explained the challenges the students in Links face trying to investigate and write their stories, including entering gang-infested neighborhoods and finding expert sources that will call the teens back and take them seriously.
Link’s town hall meeting last year for their 2012 story, “Don’t Shoot, I MUST Grow Up,” investigated gun violence as a public health issue. The story received attention from Chicago publications such as The Sun-Times and DNAinfo as well as the head of the Chicago Police Department, Garry McCarthy.
McCarthy met with the students in Links after reading their essays and listened to the teens while sharing his new strategies against gun violence.
The town hall meetings hosted by Links force government officials and police officers to pay attention to the teenage voice, Butler said.
“That was the first time the Chicago Police Department began to listen to young people, to teenagers,” Butler said about their 2012 meeting. “Everybody was writing about teenagers, but no one was listening to them.”
This year, WBEZ’s South Side reporter Natalie Moore will be moderating the town hall, according to the Columbia Links website.
More information about Links and their upcoming town hall meeting can be found at their website, www.columbialinks.org, or at columbialinks.tumblr.com.