Hey everybody, so I wanted to update you on all the incredible progress we have been making on developing the communications capacity of the youth climate movement - with Fired Up: Youth Action TV. It has been a huge learning curve, starting with blogging and YouTube video and moving into the world of TV production. However, Fired Up Media is starting to produce our first TV content. We partnered with LinkTV’s Earthfocus, with the support of Focus the Nation and Clif Bar, to introduce the youth climate movement. Watch EarthFocus 9 now!

We gathered archive footage, learned how to edit, compose, and identify TV quality film…but this was only the beginning. The big success was producing the content at all! With our next segment, we are getting more ambitious and are sending a team to UN climate negotiations, to tell the story of young people trying to build a global movement to build a sustainable world.

As to whom will be seeing it…Link TV is the first nationwide television channel dedicated to providing Americans with global perspectives on news, events and culture. Currently, the channel is available as a basic service in more than 31 million U.S. homes that receive direct broadcast satellite television (DBS). Pretty exciting, as the channel is available in 1 out of all 4 US households.

Also, this isn’t the only project we have been working on! Check out the Fired Up Online Organizing Wiki.

Fired Up: Youth Action TV is a funded project of Project Slingshot, awarded by Focus the Nation and funded by the awesome folks at Clif Bar.

Hey, everybody. So, in the effort to expand the knowledge base and resources for all the youth climate bloggers and activists out there, we have launched the Fired Up Media Online Organizing Wiki. It will try and showcase the best resources, materials, links, and lessons learned from the new media and online organizing work we have been doing. So please check it out and if you like it, contribute!

The address is in the right hand sidebar, but you can find it here: wiki.firedupmedia.org

See other related posts here:

Introducing Fired Up Media
Project Slingshot Winners Announced!
Focus the Nation and CLIF MOJO Award Three Innovative Young Leaders [pdf]
Focus the Nation
They’ve been Slingshot-ted

Cross-posted from It’s Getting Hot in Here, originally by Minna Brown of Focus the Nation.

Millions of people are celebrating and rallying for climate action this Earth Day, but we’re also seeing how dedicated young people are to spending more than just one day working to pass legislation and find community solutions to global warming. Today, Focus the Nation and Clif MOJO are proud to announce three projects that will be examples of that determination to make positive and sustainable change through Project Slingshot

After weeks of deliberation, the Project Slingshot judges have zeroed in on three projects to propel from ideas into action this summer with grants of $10,000 each. With 45 great applications full of ideas on how to spark more youth action on climate change, the judges didn’t have an easy job, but the winners stood out for their commitment to innovation and to broadening this movement in tangible ways. The lucky three are:

Maya Donelson, Graze the Roof, San Francisco, CA, will integrate local organic food production and the efficiency gains of a green roof with an edible green roof at Glide, a diverse San Francisco church and nonprofit located in the Tenderloin District serving low income and marginalized people. Students from Glide’s Training and Employment Services Youth Build Program will construct and maintain the garden.

Richard Graves, Fired Up Youth Action TV, Washington, D.C., will produce five minute news segments covering youth issues ranging from education, to politics, to jobs and the economy, to entertainment and culture - all through the lens of the most important challenges facing young people: the impact of global warming and the construction of a cleaner, more just economy and society.

Jesse Hough, Sunnyside Neighborhood Energy Project, Portland, OR, will run a summer “think-and-do tank” institute that will engage students to help advance an innovative, community-owned, thermal district energy system utilizing low carbon energy supplies to provide space heating and cooling and domestic hot water to a mixed residential/commercial neighborhood of Portland, Oregon

These projects will serve as replicable models for all of us to become more involved and Maya, Richard and Jesse will be sure to keep getting the word out about how their projects are going.

[Editor's Note: This is what I posted on It's Getting Hot in Here to announce who we are and what we are up to.]

So, if you are regular reader of It’s Getting Hot in Here, you may have noticed that I have been a little absent recently. Why, you might ask, as what could be more exciting than sharing information with the youth climate movement? Well, I have been working on a project behind-the-scenes that I want to share with you all.

I have been working on launching Fired Up Media. Let me take you for a spin. Fired Up Media just won Project Slingshot for our Youth Action TV proposal, so we are terrifically excited and want to tell all of you about what we are doing!

What is Fired Up Media? Fired Up Media is a growing network of videographers, editors, and journalists reporting from the front lines of the youth climate movement and disseminating through the Fired Up Virtual Newsroom. The network has grown out the diverse media projects of the youth climate movement, such as It’s Getting Hot in Here, I Shot Power Shift, and CSSC TV.

Fired Up Media is harnessing dynamic advances in digital communications and new media, creative social entrepreneurship, and existing youth media on and off-campus to build a revolutionary media network. Read more here.

What do we do? Fired Up Media is launching two major projects this summer, Fired Up: Youth Action TV and Fired Up Africa.

Read more after the fold.

Fired Up: Youth Action TV

The Concept: Fired Up is a periodical 5-minute video news segment on climate change, energy, and activism produced by a network of young producers/editors from around the country.

The Story: Stories will cover youth issues ranging from education, to politics, to jobs and the economy, to entertainment and culture - all through the lens of the most important challenges facing young people: the impact of global warming and the construction of a cleaner, more just economy and society.

New Media Story Submission and Selection: Fired Up will solicit stories from youth groups and organizations from around the United States in the format of a 250-500 word narrative and an accompanying photo. Stories will be published online on the Fired Up website and syndicated to It’s Getting Hot in Here - dispatches from the youth climate movement. Fired Up’s reporting teams will select stories of particular merit and interest. Once news segments are produced and aired, they will be uploaded to the web and posted to Fired Up affiliate sites along with the original story that inspired the episode.

Fired Up Africa

Fired Up Africa is an international media training program aimed at telling the African youth perspective on climate change. This division of Fired Up Media will partner with One World and the Earth Journalism Network to provide African youth with the technology and the training to create video, audio, and written pieces for distribution to online and traditional media outlets. The development and implementation of low-cost media technology will expand communications capacity for youth community-based sustainable development projects around the globe. By creating a network of incredible youth leaders from across the world trained in new media technology, and working with other divisions of Fired Up Media to widely distribute media outputs from this network, we can ensure all voices of the youth movement are heard.

So what do we need from all of you to make this a success?

We are going to need everybody’s incredible stories, once we are up-and-running, but in the interim - I would love to talk with anybody who is interested about our big idea, whether you want to profile it, you are interested in joining, or following the project - Subscribe to Fired Up Media by Email. Lastly, we need what every new project needs - money - or more exactly: pledges. We are hoping to match the $10,000 project slingshot award with individual donors. If you are feeling generous, please donate. If you have a project or funding idea, please contact me, richardb.graves[at]gmail[dot]com.

Ok, I have had great admiration for Alex Steffen of Worldchanging for a long time. I hope that occasionally he stumbles across It’s Getting Hot in Here and likes what he sees.

I can go on….but he wrote a very, very sharp critique of the WE campaign that I wanted to highlight a scrap of.

“There seems to me a risk that the We Campaign could end up as a $300 million pancake. What would I suggest they do differently? …

4. Fire up the attention philanthropy. Much amazing, inspirational work goes unnoticed. The campaign could fund an amazing, unprecedented network of filmmakers, podcasters, bloggers, animators and journalists and connect them with scrappy media relations people who know how to get noticed in both the old and new media. If that network focused on highlighting the people, from all walks of life and all parts of the nation, who are trying to solve climate change in innovative ways, the multiplier effect (both in the media and for the people working on the solutions themselves) could be massively larger than anything a TV ad can do.  Source.

FIRE UP the attention philanthropy. Does this sound like he gets Fired Up Media or what? Even if he hasn’t heard of us yet, it is time for us to talk!

I am focusing on someone who I have been following for a little bit, Edward Burtynsky. He is a photographer who has specialized in stunning images of altered and manufactured landscapes. He has taken these photos that simply stun the viewer.

Here is the first image I ever saw of his, on the cover of Granta.

However, I was watching a talk that he gave for the TED conference when I thought that he was on an amazingly similar wavelength to the efforts of Fired Up Media. His images are global, believe in the power of art and media to inspire change, and he believes that sustainability will come from this generation and he wants to reach a young audience.

When Burtynsky accepted his 2005 TED Prize, he made three wishes. One of his wishes: to build a website that will help kids think about going green. Thanks to WGBH and the TED community, the new site, Meet the Greens, debuted at TED2007. His second wish: to begin work on an Imax film — and this work is now ongoing. And his third wish, wider in scope, was simply to encourage “a massive and productive worldwide conversation about sustainable living.” Thanks to his help and the input of the TED community, the site WorldChanging.com got an infusion of energy that has helped it to grow into a leading voice in the sustainability community. Source: TED

Here at Fired Up Media, we have some amazing young photographers who would love to take this work to the next level. I think that perhaps it is time to try and have a talk with him and see if we can figure out how to make both of our wishes come true.

This year, the UNDP has asked Peace Child International to go further to involve youth on addressing Climate Change and we invite you to create 30 to 90 second videos on how climate change affects you and what you feel should be done about it.

There are three ways you can contribute:

1) If you have access to a camera and editing equipment, you can start the process of creating your video. They can be short, dramatic pieces, scripted and acted out by you and your friends; or a documentary cut together to make an impactive statement about what you feel to be a key aspect of climate change. Or a mix of the two. The finished videos should be uploaded to the Climate Change YouTube group.

2) If you have a camera, but no editing equipment, you can send us the footage, along with a script of how you would like it to be edited. We here at Peace Child will do the editing process depending on your concept and material of sufficient quality.

3) If you have no camera but a concept, write a script: we – and the UN – will review all of them and select the best 4-5 scripts, send you a camera to shoot it – and send your footage to us to edit the tape into a finished movie.

Please feel free to get in touch with Adam at media@peacechild.org if you do not have access to the equipment but want to contribute to the project.

You will be able to view all the videos on the Climate Change YouTube group (http://www.youtube.com/climatechange) comment on the videos and choose your favorites. The best 15-20 videos submitted will be edited into a single 30-minute show introduced by a celebrity host. It will be distributed by the UN to broadcasters around the world in time for International Youth Day – August 12th 2008.(more) Link.

A cool opportunity from TakingITGlobal:

 TakingITGlobal recently partnered with Adobe on the Youth Voices Project, which included running workshops in ten different countries: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, Mali, Kenya, Russia, South Africa, and Sweden. During these workshops youth discussed and created images focused on Climate Change. Share your own unique perspective on the theme of ‘Climate Change’ by submitting artwork to the TakingITGlobal Youth Voices Contest in the Global Gallery! This contest is open to all TIG members, and by participating your artwork will be featured on the site!

Other benefits of participating in the Youth Voices Contest include:

The winners of the contest will receive a TIG gift which includes a copy of Adobe Elements 6.0 software!

The potential of having your artwork included in an upcoming TIG Magazine publication on Climate Change - which will be featured at international events starting with the World Youth Congress 2008 in Québec City this coming August! (More)

Now our site is ugly for some good reasons…that if you have such a talented crew of web designers…why do a job halfway when you should do it right? A beautiful website takes time and effort. We have plenty to do already getting going and if we make a site at all, it should be amazing or bare-bones in my opinion. However, we also don’t have the design ephemera that is so important for materials and site development - graphics, images, etc. Amanda has volunteered to help out a bit with a logo, but if anybody else wants to step up - that would be awesome.

So the takeaway? We got too much stuff to do to make this site look pretty right now, but when we do it - lets make it right.

[Editor's Note: Under Site Development]

This site is a placeholder for Fired Up Media. Site Development will commence upon return of the team from the UN Climate Negotiations in Bali. See Bali Buzz or It’s Getting Hot in Here for more information.

Fired Up Media is a new media network – by and for youth – that is nimble, global, with full-spectrum capacity to cover the most important story of our time, the impact of global warming and the construction of a clean energy economy powerful enough to build a more just world.

Through the training of a global network of youth climate activists and writers in powerful new organizing and communications tools, Fired Up Media will empower the global youth climate movement to face up to the challenge of our and all future generations.