Students connect across cities and states to cover health, road safety solutions

April 21, 2025

By Jayne O'Donnell

Youthcast Media Group®

“What I personally love about YMG and why I keep coming back,” says Natalie Spina, “is the community that I’ve found within it.” 

That’s what Natalie, a Philadelphia high school junior, told YMG’s board members at our March meeting. 

Natalie Spina (Courtesy of Natalie).

Sure, the bylines are nice — she’s been published in Black News & Views and two more articles will publish soon — but it’s the connections that really count. 

Youthcast Media Group’s plan was always to grow first in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, where we got our start in 2017. But once the pandemic hit and we all went virtual, YMG expanded its recruiting outside the area too. YMG’s youth don’t always have the opportunity to even travel to other parts of their own cities, let alone different states or talk to people with different racial or ethnic backgrounds.

So it was particularly powerful when teens from under-resourced DC and New Orleans communities worked with Black and Cuban-American teens in Miami during our first virtual workshop in the fall of 2020. And that they all heard from local and national experts on trauma’s effect on health. One of the Miami teens did a story about a student with lingering fears of running out of food, as was common in Cuba where he was born. The DC teens reported on women — one who had grown up in foster care and another a trans sex worker — who had survived trauma to become powerful advocates. 

Natalie says she’s met people from Texas, DC and “from just about everywhere on the East Coast at this point.”

“It's just really nice to be able to talk to people from all these different places, places I've never been before, and hear their experiences, and get to read their stories,” about topics they’ve covered together, she said.  

Steve Parker, executive director of the Northern Virginia-based Harraseeket Foundation, says even connections students make near where they live are important. 

“We’ve learned from our Imagining Your Future workshops how important it is to create a safe space for students to feel comfortable sharing with each other about issues that matter to them,” said Parker, whose career training nonprofit is a YMG partner. “Building trusting relationships with other students, mentors and volunteers creates the kind of atmosphere that fuels deeper conversations, and learning from people who offer different perspectives and experiences.”

Natalie Spina speaking at the quarterly YMG board meeting.

Natalie, who has been promoted to be a peer “mentor editor,” is in her third journalism workshop with us. After she completed a workshop on the uneven access to college and career preparation in high school and another on solutions to gun violence, we asked her to assist the journalist-instructors teaching our current program on disparities in sports and fitness opportunities. 

Bringing students together from different cities sprang in part out of my own experience covering health policy at USA TODAY, where I worked closely with reporters at several of the other Gannett papers. I collaborated most often with Laura Ungar, then at the Louisville Courier-Journal, on articles like this one about Medicaid and experiences of people in our respective areas based on whether or not the insurance for low-income people had been expanded to cover them. 

Similarly, the 12 or so participants in YMG’s two-week writing boot camps and semiannual six-week fall reporting and writing workshops typically first interview national experts. Then, teams choose the angles that are most relevant and resonant to them and interview local experts, residents and classmates. That leads to stories like this one that ran in the Texas online publication, The Barbed Wire, on car passenger empowerment. When students in different cities work together it leads to powerful stories like this one on gun violence’s impact on mental health, published by the national mental health-focused publication, MindSite News. 

We’re working towards giving our students global connections too, thanks to my longstanding partnership with Ungar, now a science and medical reporter at the Associated Press. Ungar has connected college students in Kentucky and Missouri with others in India who are trained by Sujoy Dhar, a longtime Kolkata-based multimedia journalist for the past several years. Now, we’re planning to expand Ungar and Dhar’s collaborative work to include YMG high school participants in the U.S., such as Natalie. 

Ungar has worked with one of our current college interns, Sarah Gandluri, on two independent articles that have run in the Providence Journal and MindSite News - and is one of the many experienced journalists who teach our students. 

For her part, Natalie did also tout the instructors!  

“As somebody who's interested in journalism in my future, just working under people who know the ins and outs of the business, who understand what it's like to be in a writing room, who can just give me that knowledge as to what is kind of coming to me in my future, it's all just really significant,” she said. “I just feel honored to be able to say that I work with YMG because it has truly just made such an important impact on my life.”

Our community is sure happy to have Natalie too.