New Voice of Youth helps get kids’ ideas heard

For the past two years, New Voices of Youth has helped local young people get their ideas heard on issues important to them. Now this Pittsburgh Foundation program is teaming with the Heinz Endowment’s Breathe Project to encourage young people to create new clean air-related science, art, performance or service projects that will encourage their peers to make a change in this area. They may also submit ideas for projects that raise awareness about Pittsburgh’s air-quality problems or that improve the air quality. They can even submit projects that they have already begun at school.

The Web-based contest is open to students in grades 7-12. Submissions become eligible to receive grant funds of up to $2,500.

“Our air quality is among the worst for cities in the United States,” says Marily Nixon, Breathe Project coordinator, “especially for particulate matter,” as well as ozone levels and levels of toxics. “People who have been living in Pittsburgh for a long time remember when Pittsburgh was the Smoky City. Unfortunately, we still aren’t at a level where the air is healthy to breath for all of us all the time.” And these remaining forms of troubling pollution are relatively invisible to the naked eye, so unlike the sooty air of mid-century, “it is out of sight and out of mind,” she says. “We believe healthy air goes along with a healthy economy where people want to be raising their kids.”

What sorts of projects might be funded? Nixon points to youth-led efforts to give informational “tickets” to idling trucks about the pollution they create, and a flash mob last summer in Market Square whose participatns suddenly pretended to have breathing difficulties, then delivered a clean-air message to the lunch-time crowd.

“We do want to convey that the sky is really the limit,” she adds. “Students could submit a song they wrote relating to air quality. They could submit a photo essay that captures an aspect of air quality or its effect on people. They could come up with a clean-air walking tour of Pittsburgh or a clean-air program to implement in their school. They could propose a science project that would help develop information about air pollution in their neighborhood. We really hope students will use their limitless creativity to propose projects that will speak to other students, and the community at large, about what clean air means to them.”

Breathe Project and New Voices partnership

Breathe and New Voices will work to partner students with adult mentors, which might include representaties of a nonprofit focused on clean air issues, to help them undertake their project. A Student Advisory Council will judge the contest and suggest their own ideas for projects.

“We hope to see fresh ideas, excitement, creativity and imagination coming from the students, because they are affected by this pollution and they are going to be living with the air for a long time,” Nixon concludes. “They can take a new leadership role, advocating for change and creating change in this area.”

The deadline for submissions has been extended to May 8.

Writer: Marty Levine

Source: Marily Nixon, The Breath Project