Building the Message: Making the L.A. River a Better Place

Youth Voices is working with students from the Los Angeles River School to re-imagine the L.A. River and the surrounding communities as part of the Northeast Los Angelels Riverfront Collaborative. The students have formed teams to explore and investigate their communities, map assets, collect and share stories, data and community input for their projects. All the while they are learning and expanding their knowledge of digital media and civic engagement. Follow their work hereand on Instagram and Twitter by using #kcetyv.

Our project is about making the L.A. River a better place for people to visit by helping to clean it up and working with the community to keep it clean.

The overall response from community residents to our project has been supportive. Everyone wants to improve the river.

It has been a fun experience, but it has also been a challenge because we had to think through all our ideas and explore different possible solutions for everything. We learned that we need community input and we need to have everything planned out. This can be hard to do but it's important.

Our project remained the same from the beginning, we always wanted to work on cleaning up the river. Our idea has just grown more with the help of the people we interviewed.

We feel that if we show people how important it is to keep the river clean they will join us and take a role in making the river a better place. We will invite community residents to share their input and suggestions at the meetings we organize. Our next step is to organize an actual date to clean up the river on a regular schedule.