About Youthcast Media Group®
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Achieving change, one story at a time
We are Youthcast Media Group®
Our mission
YMG teaches high school students from under-resourced communities to produce multimedia journalism that highlights solutions to health and safety disparities where they live. They harness the power of their voices to creatively reflect, engage and empower their communities. In doing so, they also increase their college and career readiness and their agency.
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Our vision
YMG envisions an engaged and empowered network of diverse youth who confidently and accurately communicate through print, visual and social media about health, wealth and safety disparities that affect their communities.
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A Note from Our Founder
Youthcast Media Group® (YMG) launched in March 2017 (as Urban Health Media Project) to train diverse high school students from under-resourced communities how to produce multimedia journalism on health and social issues. Since then, we’ve trained more than 450 students to report and write social media scripts, news briefs and full-length feature stories - about 100 of which have been published in 30 media outlets. Some of the same students - and others who are more creatively minded - recorded and edited videos after learning to use CapCut software and created catchy graphics after mastering the Canva program.
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​We’ve kept much of our focus on the social determinants of health, including the food insecurity, housing and transportation disparities in many of our students’ neighborhoods. In 2023, we expanded our focus to include road safety, especially distracted driving, thanks to ongoing funding from the Governors Highway Safety Association. We’ve covered the shortage of mental health counselors in schools, the effect of climate change on health and learning to drive with ADHD.
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​Several students from our first cohort have graduated from college; one is an on-air TV reporter in North Carolina while another runs a community storytelling project in Los Angeles. Others are at schools including Morgan State University, Harvard, The New School, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and the University of Miami.
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​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​We’ve run virtual reporting and writing workshops about housing insecurity, climate and poverty’s effects on health and the impact of gun violence — and always include solutions. We work in person with the journalism classes at Bard High School Early College DC and Annandale High School in Northern Virginia. Articles from our workshops, in-school classes and independent projects have run in publications including the Miami Herald, USA TODAY, Bronx Times, MindSite News and the Washington Blade. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
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We also teach students how to create accurate, grammatical and engaging social media posts on the topics we cover. We’re particularly proud that our social media work on distracted driving is part of a toolkit available to state highway safety offices in every state! We work hard to avoid bias - or even the appearance of it - just as I did during my 28 years at USA Today. But we’re more than willing to elevate teen voices by sharing facts that can save lives.
We recently received 89 responses to our biggest alumni survey to date - a 30% response rate! - and loved what we heard:
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88% said working with YMG helped them in a future high school or college course
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71% currently pursuing a college degree
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14% pursuing a journalism degree/journalism career
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35% earned a college scholarship - several that were full rides.
We’ve now trained high school students from 18 states including D.C, with the largest concentration in Philadelphia, Miami and Hartford, Connecticut, along with the area of our (virtual) headquarters in Washington, D.C. We’ve come a long way from our launch with a $300,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and we can go even further with more grantors, students, partners and pro bono help. Want to talk about how we could work together? Email me at jodonnell@youthcastmediagroup.org. I’d love to hear from you.
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Jayne O’Donnell
YMG Founder and CEO
Here I am, with Mike Doyle, founder of Northern Virginian Families for Safe Streets, and (l to r): Zoe Ligairi, Co-Editor-in-Chief of the students newspaper and student reporter Jasmin Dinh. We had just done an interview about pedestrian injuries and deaths in Northern Virginia - and the area around the school.
That’s Robbie Woodland (third from right, rear), the DC Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for the area that includes Bard High School, before she did an interview with the class on road safety in the community. That’s me in the front right and Bard journalism teacher Donna Desormeaux on the left in the front. We’re surrounded by a few of our terrific Bard j students!
