Wildfire Community Listening Sessions

The Wildfire Youth Media Initiative at the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy invites you to attend wildfire community listening sessions to record your story with high school reporters from the Pacific Palisades and the greater Altadena area. The events are an opportunity to share your resilience, hopes, and memories, guided by specific question story stations and in company with many members of your community. Anyone who was impacted in some way by the wildfires are welcome: survivors, neighbors, friends, students, journalists, volunteers, community organizers, and more.

We encourage you to come with any objects of particular meaning to you since the wildfires, such as items you found in the aftermath, aided in your recovery, or helped you live or work through this experience.

Each listening session will be organized around five question-based story stations:

• Lost and Found: What did you lose in the fire? How have you replaced what you’ve lost? What, if anything, have you found?
• Lessons Learned: What should we take away from this experience? As individuals, neighbors, city, state, or country?
• Memory: How do you remember entering your community? How long were you there? What was special about it?
• Need: What do you need right now? What does your community need? 
• Future: What do you see in your future or the future of your community? How would you like to see your community built back?  

In addition to the story stations, we have two unique recording spaces. High school students who were impacted by the wildfires are considered “peer storytellers,” and they will have a separate space to speak with the Wildfire Youth Media Initiative high school reporters. We will also have a separate recording space for individuals whose work was profoundly impacted, even if they may not live in the affected areas –– including journalists, philanthropic leaders, community organizers, business staff, volunteers, etc.

The event will be recorded for podcasts, short-form videos, and other content produced by our high school reporters, for publication by USC and potentially other public media outlets, including KCRW and LAist. Interviews will also be preserved as a digital collection, held potentially by USC and the Los Angeles Public Library.

About the Wildfire Youth Media Initiative

The Wildfire Youth Media Initiative at the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy (CCLP) is a four-week summer program for 18 high school reporters––nine from the Pacific Palisades and nine from the greater Altadena area.

Working with USC faculty at the Annenberg School for Journalism and Communication, the students will be trained through on-campus workshops and on-site visits to the Palisades and Altadena to collect communities stories of both the incident and its aftermath. The community listening sessions, one for the Palisades community and one for the Altadena community, are designed for the students to gather stories from community members for an oral history project – to be deposited at the Los Angeles Public Library – and for media that may appear in a range of formats – on podcasts, social media, and public media outlets.

The initiative is intended to serve as a replicable model for other communities affected by natural disasters, providing a framework for high school students to help document and tell their communities’ stories.

This program is part of CCLP’s Local News and Student Journalism Initiative. The program director is Rebecca Haggerty, professor of professional practice of journalism and associate director of the journalism (BA) program. The program coordinator is CCLP Junior Fellow Talia Abrahamson. CCLP is led by Geoffrey Cowan, former director of Voice of America (1994-1996) and former dean of USC Annenberg (1996-2007), who is a university professor of communication and journalism.

For more about the Wildfire Youth Media Initiative, please visit our webpage.