What is “Our Voice Our Time”?

The Our Voice, Our Time Project, is a video voice project that provides youth and young adults the opportunity to express their feelings and thoughts about their neighborhoods, communities, and the City of Birmingham, AL.  Through the use of the immediacy of video, the project is a proactive approach to empower youth and young adults to act as recorders and catalysts for change, in their own communities.

The idea is to give youth and young adults the chance to talk express their opinions, thoughts, beliefs about what is happening in their community.  The project is built around four central questions:

  1. What is good about your community?
  2. What is holding your community back?
  3. What do you want to see happening in your community that currently is not happening?
  4. If you had the opportunity to speak with a school official, what would you tell them about education in Birmingham?

By capturing the video responses, organizing them according to themes, and releasing them through various media channels, the OVOT project will provide a firsthand account of youth and young adults experience in their community.

The goal is to engage youth and young adults in conversations about what they feel and think about their neighborhoods, communities, and city to empower them as well as to create an alternate narrative for elected officials, people who want to be elected officials, business leaders, community leaders, and the media.

The assumptions that this project is based on are:

  • Our youth are a vulnerable population
  • Their voices are often not heard
  • Our youth have knowledge and expertise about their community
  • They have to be engaged to create sustainable change in their communities

The Outcomes:

  • Include youth in the conversation about the future of Birmingham
  • 500 plus youth being involved in civic participation
  • A website that visually documents and presents the voice of the youth
  • Final whitepaper/presentation that provides results and trends
  • Creation of a traveling/permanent exhibit and/or documentary

Your Voice.  Your Time.