Armed with a degree from Columbia’s Teachers College and the desire to make creativity fun again, Calton founded HarlemLive in 1996, a web magazine run and edited by high school students. From the start, students who wanted to use computers for the first time came in droves to write about issues like business, education and teen pregnancy. Nevertheless, for years, the group stumbled, financially and administratively. After several moves, the organization was forced out of its loft space on 125th Street because it could no longer afford the rent. Calton knew that the organization’s money had to go towards education and decided to move the program into a donated space. In January 2008, Calton reorganized the group, determined not to abandon the kids as he had once been abandoned. In prior years HarlemLive depended on stipends from institutions like Columbia University to finance the program. The organization now has an advisory board with influential volunteers from the world of finance, media and academia. Funding has increased from under $100,000 at inception to more than $230,000 in 2008. Calton has also hired two alumni of HarlemLive as his first fulltime paid staff to draw in interested students, donations and maintain the program. Located in the basement of 135 W. 123rd Street, primarily African-American and Hispanic students come to HarlemLive to gain real-life journalism experience. Equipped with Mac Computers and an editing suite for TV production, HarlemLive students produce their own website and a local access channel. Students cover events, people and issues throughout New York City. Adult mentors edit students’ work and help them build confidence in their writing. Recently the number of adult mentors has increased from three to 12. Calton is pleased by what he sees. With his own work shunned as a child, he resigned from his creative ventures and as he grew older he felt the same way about the education system. No teacher seemed to ever desire original writing, instead only heralding and reviewing already published works. He realized this particularly when he became a teacher himself. “It felt like we were trying to take the spark out of kids,” he says. These days he is putting the spark back in. There is no censorship in what students can cover in their work.
“If we didn’t give students a chance to write about what they want, they would stop coming,” says Director of Operations Gisely Colon, “We try to stay abreast about what they do in monthly staff meetings or when they put their story ideas on the storyboard.”
Read the whole article: The Columbia Journalist
Visit: HarlemLive Online
Posted on April 3, 2008 by D. Bell