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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nSteve is the co-founder and director of Chicago Summer Stories<\/a> and St. Louis Summer Stories<\/a>. As the names imply, these are summer-based programs that help high school students in those areas tell their personal and community stories. They do so with an array of video equipment and software donated or loaned by such companies as Apple, LumaTouch, FilmicPro, and Saramonic. The programs are spearheaded by We Make Movies<\/a>, a Los Angeles-based non-profit geared toward building and empowering filmmaking communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the first in a 2-part article on the work Steve is doing to educate and empower youth to have a better future for themselves through the power of video storytelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In today’s social-media-crazed world, it’s more important than ever for people to understand how to distinguish truth from “fiction” (i.e., “fake news”). Perhaps even more important, how to tell stories in such a way that your audience can make those determinations. For the past twenty years, Douglass has committed his life to do just that among children in urban and suburban areas where kids don’t always have the best opportunities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Steve got his master’s in media literacy, which is the science of thinking critically about what you’re exposed to. He saw a great opportunity to teach kids in the Chicago and St. Louis areas how to use the language of filmmaking to tell powerful stories, but in a way that adheres to a strong sense of truth. “If we can marry content creation with media literacy, we’ll be that much better off,” he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n He started the program in the summer of 2018 with students and teachers from the Chicago Public School system and with the Midwest Media Educators Association (MMEA), the largest and most cohesive group of media educators in the country. He based it off what he taught in his program at Lake Forest High School and was originally a mix of juniors and seniors who met for six weeks at Flashpoint Chicago downtown. Ultimately, they discovered that the maturity level of the seniors was just a wee bit more acclimated to the kind of instruction he was giving than the juniors; so in 2019, they focused on just seniors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was really cool to see kids from the south side [of Chicago], west side, northern suburbs, southern suburbs all collaborating together,\u201d Steve says. \u201cAnd man, it was rocky. But we totally build off the tapestry of kids that we get. And that\u2019s one of the coolest parts for me as an educator is like seeing the room, understanding the room, understanding their interests, their passions, then coming up with a unique experience that really challenges them, but also unites them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Legacy of Media Literacy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n