RadioActive is proud to offer award-winning youth journalism and radio storytelling workshops throughout the year. Our approach is to provide interactive, collaborative workshops where participants learn the technical, social and emotional skills needed to amplify the stories that matter to them. Our philosophy is that youth voices are powerful and not heard often enough.
RadioActive’s intro to radio journalism workshop has been around for 16 years. Teens apply to be a part of the workshop, and are paid for their participation. In this 6-week intensive workshop they learn about journalism, audio recording, audio editing, interviewing, script writing and speaking on the air. They work with professional journalists at KUOW. They gain confidence and leadership skills in a supportive environment while collaborating with other participants to make radio stories and episodes for the RadioActive podcast and features for KUOW on topics they choose.
Through our community workshops, RadioActive serves nearly 900 young people a year at more that 25 schools and community organizations. In these short-term programs, youth discover public radio journalism, learn basic radio storytelling skills, and share their voice. We prioritize working with communities without ready access to media platforms and/or who are underserved by high quality arts programs. We have run community workshops for incarcerated youth, refugee youth, youth in low-income housing, and more.
In RadioActive’s advanced producer workshops, we work with graduates of our intro program to continue to build skills and producer original audio work. We also hire advanced producers to serve as mentors in our intro and community workshops, and to help out with outreach.