The show may still go on (sort of) for Baltimore Youth Film Arts, a nearly 10-year-old program that trained and encouraged young people to tell their stories through film, animation, photography and writing.
Last year, the program learned it would lose funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts & Sciences. The news was devastating to many of the program’s more than 700 current and past fellows, especially those who said they planned to stay with the program until they reached the age limit of 29.
But the funding loss is inspiring founding BYFA instructors Charles Cohen and Alfonzer Harvin to think about other options.
Through Grassroots Media Makers, the duo hope to build a mobile nonprofit filmmaking and mentoring organization that travels to neighborhoods and empowers people in their own communities to tell their stories.
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“I came up in Baltimore City, and we didn’t have stuff like that growing up,” Harvin, 38, said of the shuttering BYFA program, which included a stipend for fellows up to about $300 for the duration of their workshops.
In particular, Harvin and Cohen hope to revive a program based on Off the Beaten Track, an initiative that taught young people how to document their experiences in different environments around the city, such as fishing, exploring museums and visiting horse stables.
“We just like doing the simple things and watching them blossom and grow,” said Earl Young, a longtime mentor and facilitator of the Off the Beaten Track workshop.
Justice Downing, who joined the last leg of BYFA workshops within the last year, said the program helped her grow.
“It brought me out of my shyness,” said Downing, who learned about cameras and horses in workshops and is now studying health science at Coppin State University.
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To get started with their new venture, Harvin and Cohen received a reparations grant from the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, designed to support programs that are building up Black communities. Harvin and Cohen will use the $50,000 grant to instruct a group of fellows on creating a short film about the first Black family that tried to move into Bolton Hill in the 1920s in the face of redlining and other inequities. They expect the project will enlist the help of eight to 10 young people as fellows and a couple of assistants.
“With this grant, we can hire actors, we can take the time to do the technology right, and we can do the research,” said Cohen, who has also written articles for The Baltimore Banner.
Before heading off on their new venture, Harvin and Cohen hosted one of the last workshops for BYFA, which ended last weekend.
In the downstairs meeting room of Patterson Park Library on Saturday, fellows explored the contributions of Baltimore-born Black astronomer Benjamin Banneker. They learned about his handwritten almanac and use of science and mathematics. Then they set up an impromptu lights and camera station for interviews with each other about Banneker in a hallway.
Robert Shearin, a fellow, said he hopes to take the art of storytelling with him even when BYFA ends because “there’s no real light on the city and how it’s portrayed.”
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Lucy Bucknell, who oversees programs and workshops as a principal investigator for Baltimore Youth Film Arts, said she was pleased to see Cohen and Harvin were going to continue shaping Baltimore storytellers, even if on a smaller scale than the original BYFA programming.
“In some ways I feel like they are picking up the mantle, but I feel like they helped design the mantle,” Bucknell said.
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