Bay Area's 'Youth Speaks' Teaches Poetry's Power to At-Risk Teens

Journalists from the Center for Investigative Reporting spent months investigating the living-conditions at several Richmond, California public housing sites. After months of research, the journalists teamed up with teen poets from Youth Speaks, a Bay Area non-profit that aims to empower teenagers through exposure to slam, spoken word, and written poetries. PBS's NewsHour brings their story to light in this excerpted transcript. To watch the story unfold, visit PBS NewsHour. Way to go, Youth Speaks!

GWEN IFILL: Finally tonight, a story about storytelling.

Our colleagues at KQED in San Francisco are the television leg of an unusual reporting partnership that includes The San Francisco Chronicle, the Center for Investigative Reporting and the residents of a public housing project in Richmond, California.

JEFFREY BROWN: In many ways, it was a traditional hard-hitting news investigation.

WOMAN: He hasn’t had heat for more than a year. The housing authority says it fixed the problem in October.

JEFFREY BROWN: It took months of digging, combing through stacks of documents and interviewing sources, for the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Amy Julia Harris and her colleagues to flesh out myriad problems at the Richmond Housing Authority.

But this investigation had a twist, one that offered a different way of reporting the news, and describing what’s going on, through poetry.

DEANDRE EVANS: This is where rodents and roaches are like family because we share the same meals. We feel 30 below air from cracked windows. No heat from when Richmond wind blows.

JEFFREY BROWN: Deandre Evans, Will Hartfield and Donte Clark, all in their early 20s, grew up in Richmond. Last fall, they joined CIR’s Harris as she interviewed residents and documented living conditions at two dilapidated public housing projects.

What they heard and saw, the cockroaches, mold and other squalor, inspired the three to write a poem called “This Is Home.”

WILL HARTFIELD: I see barren hallways, broken cameras, uninvited guests. There’s no service here, as if a sea of people were cast away on an island to fend for themselves. The weather outside is frightening.

JEFFREY BROWN: It’s all part of a new effort called the Off/Page Project, a collaboration between CIR, a nonprofit, nonpartisan journalism organization, and the San Francisco-based Youth Speaks, which promotes writing and education and hosts a yearly poetry slam competition for young people.

Jose Vadi directs the Off/Page Project.

JOSE VADI, Off/Page Project: It’s trying to find new ways to tell investigative journalism in a new light, in a new form of storytelling, and also wanted to reach a younger audience and to have them kind of — have a conversation centered around them, around some issues that are affecting their lives and their day-to-day. [...]

JEFFREY BROWN: In reporting the Richmond story, CIR’s Amy Julia Harris says the perspective of the young poets brought something extra to her journalism.

AMY JULIA HARRIS, Center for Investigative Reporting: When I found out I was going to be working with poets, I had no idea how that was going to work.

And I took the poets in to talk to people that I had been talking to, and they were asking very poignant questions and said, you know, how are you able to live like this, and were asking really good questions that kind of helped inform my reporting. I thought the poets did an amazing job of just capturing the sentiment of residents, and contextualizing it in broader issues of neglect. [...]

View the video in its entirety here.