Students build podcasts as part of Rising Youth Voices camp

• By Karen Hendricks/WITF

Through the summer, WITF welcomed dozens of children and teens for summer camps organized by our colleagues at Pennon Education.

That included a camp for middle schoolers called Rising Youth Voices.

One of the camp attendees, 13-year-old Shaan from Hershey, says he usually signs up for summer sports camps. But this year, the opportunity to learn how to create a podcast spoke to him.

Campers chose any environmental topic they wanted, and Shaan tackled a big one – food waste.

“I just think there’s so much wasted food, and then there’s people that could really benefit from it,” Shaan explains.

A recent family trip to India made Shaan more aware of wasted food, as he witnessed food waste being weighed, with corresponding costs added to diners’ bills at a hotel buffet.

Shaan dug into statistics on food waste, so he could write a podcast script full of facts.

“Forty percent of all food produced in the U.S. is wasted – so I thought that was pretty insane,” Shaan explains.

Shaan’s reaction to his research is something camp organizer Julia Lennox had hoped for. She’s Pennon Education’s Director of Digital Inquiry and Youth Voice.

“A major part of this [camp] is teaching young people to be critical consumers of information and also creators of information, especially in the media-saturated world we live in,” says Lennox. “But also understanding that youth and young people have a voice and something to say about a lot of the issues and topics that are happening all around them.”

Proving that point, all of the middle schoolers enrolled in the camp came up with their own podcast topics.

11-year old Joseph, from Harrisburg, focused on the environmental impact of data centers.

“If there’s more data centers, there’s more carbon dioxide,” Joseph explains. “People use a lot of water to cool down the servers, and the water’s not clean anymore once you do that, so then you’re just putting it back in the ocean and it’s hurting fish and animals in the ocean.”

After Joseph, Shaan and their fellow campers researched their topics, Lennox says the next step was critical.

“How do you create or take this big topic and turn it into a story? And then either connect it to your personal life or to local issues around you. And then how are you integrating pictures, audio clips, video, things like that to create a coherent story?,” says Lennox.

It was a week-long process that involved feedback and hands-on instruction from WITF’s journalists, audio engineers and editors.

“It can feel like a messy process at first, which I think is part of the beauty of digital creation because then the final product is essentially putting all those pieces together,” explains Lennox, who previously worked as a middle and high school social studies teacher.

The final projects (take a listen in the audio version of this story) included podcasts about invasive spotted lanternflies, Pennsylvania’s flood risk, and a satirical take on carbon emissions – since humans emit carbon dioxide, as well as Shaan’s podcast about food waste and Joseph’s piece on the impact of data centers.

“Did you know that a digital device that fits in your hand actually takes a ginormous data center with so many servers, just to run your phone? And when more people use AI, there are more buildings being built for AI in many places,” Joseph explains in his podcast.

Shaan weaves his thoughts together with information about the staggering amount of food that goes to waste across the nation.

“Looking at our world today, I see so many people wasting food because they take too much. Then I see other people who can’t get enough food and are starving. I believe all that wasted food could be so beneficial to those in need,” Shaan says in podcast project.

When it was all said and done, Shaan had one more reflection – and perhaps newfound respect for professional podcasters: “I didn’t know the editing was going to be so hard,” Shaan says with a smile.

Additional Rising Youth Voices Camps will continue to be offered through WITF and Pennon Education for both middle and high school age groups.