ACE Spectrum

Alpha Parent Center ACE Poetry Contest Winners Announced

Posted by Martha Sessums on May 16, 2017 in ACE Learning Center, ACE School Report, Continuing Education, Uncategorized | 0 comments

By Riley, ACE Poetry Contest Mascot, Alpha Public Schools

We’re eating treats for the winners of the ACE Poetry Contest from the Alpha Parent Center.

These poets are great. Not only because the poems are good and very personal reflections (something that we dogs do all the time – that’s why we look so pensive,) but because English is a second language for these poets. And I get that. Do you know how hard it is for a dog to learn it’s owner’s language? And all they want to do is talk, talk, talk. Too many words. And they rarely listen to us. Just tell us to be quiet.

Well, these poets are not quiet. In fact, a couple of them are sharing their poems out loud. You have to listen to the video where they’re reading their poems. That’s right. Out loud. And in English. Like slam poetry. Pretty cool. Pretty spectacular!

So without further extra words, here are the winners of the Alpha Parent Center ACE Poetry Contest:

 

First Place:  Jenny Zepeda

Here’s her poem: Jenny’s poem

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Second Place: Aide Valdovinos

Here’s her poem:

 

Everyday a Traffic Day

 

Every day is a traffic day

And my kid’s school is far away.

My son is always going late

Even when they haven’t ate.

 

I’m having a lot of stress

And this trip to school is a mess.

Every day I drive in the freeway

This may not be a great day.

 

Third Place: Guillermina Orozco

And here is her poem: Guillermina’s poem

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you for the great work poets.  Arf!  Arf!  And remember, treat yourself to a poem!

 

 

 

 

Meet The Eight: KALW Audio Academy 2018 Students Announced; Summer Journalist Volunteers Chosen Too

Posted by Martha Sessums on May 15, 2017 in ACE Learning Center, ACE Partners, Continuing Education | 0 comments

By Ben Trefny, News Director, KALW Public Radio

It’s my pleasure to introduce you to the next Audio Academy class at KALW! Here are some quick sketches of the incoming students:

Atemu Aton – Oakland-based professional jazz musician and music educator for over two decades with deep experience in audio engineering and recording

Marisol Medina Cadena – Documentary filmmaker with roots in LA and the Bay and a self-described research and archive nerd with an interest in recognizing and interacting across difference

Asal Ehsanapour – Graduate of USC’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism with a Bachelor of Arts in public relations who has worked in marketing for the past several years

Amber Miles – Multimedia consultant for City College and a former KPFA news intern with a background in documentary film, ready to make immersive and collaborative radio stories

Zeina Nair – Musician with experience in performance, songwriting, recording, and audio production who earned her MFA from Mills College

Christine Nguyen – Pediatric gastroenterologist at both Stanford and Santa Clara Valley Medical Health Center who is interested in reporting stories about San Jose

Lilia Vega – DJ and the former news director at KALX who’s interested in reporting stories pertaining to LGBTQ and Latinx communities

Bo Walsh – Beatmaker from the southeast side of San Francisco, right near KALW, with a passion for sound design and local storytelling and a background working with teenagers

These eight people made it through an extremely competitive application process. As our program has matured and word-of-mouth has spread, the Audio Academy has become an important and in-demand training ground. We’re really looking forward to working with the next class and helping to bring their voices to the public! They’ll get started around the end of August.

At the same time that we selected those fellows, we also processed applications for our summer journalism program. It doesn’t include the same level of hands-on training as the Academy, but it does provide 12 people with the chance to work in our newsroom, contribute to our public interest work, and build skills as reporters and producers with our award-winning and attentive staff.

Meet our summer journalism volunteers:

Anjali Bhat – A UC Davis student, former Capital Public Radio community engagement Intern and NPR Next Generation radio fellow interested in stories about the Latinx community

Andy Bosselman – Recently transitioned from working in advertising to freelance journalism, reporting for the SF Chronicle, the SF Examiner, and Streetsblog, among others

Racquel Gonzalez – San Francisco-based USF Media Studies senior who co-founded the Trump101 podcast about student life under Trump and is photo editor of the University’s newspaper, SF Foghorn

Gabriel Grechler – San Francisco-based USF Politics major who co founded the Trump 101 podcast about student life under Trump and is opinion editor at the University’s newspaper, SF Foghorn

Sonja Hutson – Former KQED intern with spot news experience and a UC Berkeley student, coming from a semester abroad in Germany, interested in in-depth feature reporting

Zoe Lew – A Salinas native and former KUSP and KQED intern excited to make longer form stories in the immigration beat

Max Miller – Former San Francisco resident who’s been living in New York working as an urban planner and working on creative projects including reality TV production

Marina Poole – Duke University graduate from Redwood City with a background in documentary production and an interest in storytelling from diverse communities

Ariel Plotnick – Graduate student from the UC Berkeley School of Journalism with a focus on radio and a history reporting on Richmond

Jesse Rhodes – Teacher at the Chinatown after school program and producer of Man-ish: a podcast that explores the meaning of masculinity

Corrine Smith – General assignment reporter with KPFA and a Bay Area local who got way out of town to attend college at the University of Miami

Laura Wenus – Currently the Managing Editor at Mission Local and a former Your Call intern. She’s also a licensed pilot!

Those impressive folks will be coming in for a two-day orientation beginning at the end of May, and they’ll work with the current Audio Academy class to get their feet under them.

This is an exciting time at the station as we welcome new and passionate people. Looking forward to telling you many more stories about their work!

Note from ACE: We welcome the Audio Academy students and the summer journalism volunteers.  We look forward to hearing your work, and getting to know you better.  Good radio journalism, like that practiced and taught at KALW, is important.

See How KALW Makes Noise with Membership Drive and Stories That Earn National Coverage

Posted by Martha Sessums on May 8, 2017 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

By Ben Trefny, News Director, KALW Community Radio

I’ll start out with the joyful noise that KALW is in its spring membership drive. Now for a lot of stations, this can be drudgery, with people interrupting shows, going on and on, guilting the audience into donating. But at KALW, our general manager Matt Martin had the idea several years ago to not interrupt what listeners hear at all, just sneaking in a few words about what the station means during regularly scheduled program breaks. This attitude is part of the culture of the station – to do our work with great respect for the community as our partner. And I always look forward to drive time as a chance to directly talk with our audience. It’s fun! And I encourage you to set your clocks and check out what we do between 5pm and 6pm, Monday through Thursday, when Crosscurrents, the show the Audio Academy helps produce, comes on the air.  Here’s where you’ll find us!

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Speaking of the Audio Academy, the team has been busy producing stories. Here’s what’s been getting on the air:

– Josiah Luis Alderete and Cari Spivack each reported with a lot of heart and sense of sound on the May Day demonstrations about rights of immigrants

– Claire Stremple reported a heartwarming story about an outdoor program for people with disabilities

Also, from our current class, the final collection of stories profiling KALW’s neighborhood, San Francisco’s Portola District, will be broadcast in just over a week. That includes stories from Josiah Luis, Greer McVay, and Beatrice Thomas.

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Some of our alums have also been busy with KALW work:

– KALW’s cost-of-living reporter Jeremy Dalmas (’14) made a new version of a story he originally produced for NPR about a plan for a sliding scale for government fines, and after some strategic Reddit sharing, it went viral on our website

– KALW’s transportation reporter Eli Wirtschafter (’16) made a fast-moving feature about the now fully operational bike path on the eastern span of the Bay Bridge. He got his first NPR headline spot on the air last week – a piece about new AirBnB regulations in San Francisco. And he repurposed a story he made with KALW about traffic apps for the national show Here and Now.

– Chris Hambrick (’15) produced a story about hip hip artist Tahaj Edwards with an East Oakland resident named Tony Daquipa as part of our collaboration with the community reporting project Oakland Voices. Tony performed that story live on stage on Sunday, April 30, in our Sights & Sounds of East Oakland show at Castlemont High School.

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Here are some thoughts from current Audio Academy fellow Jeremy Jue, who is working on a whole show about different kinds of transitions people go through in the Bay Area:

I can’t believe it’s almost over – that for the last seven months I’ve been learning how to produce radio stories and in June my time as an Audio Academy fellow will be wrapping up. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve struggled a lot too. It wasn’t that long ago that I found myself nervously walking along International Boulevard in Oakland recording vox for the opening montage of Crosscurrents. Now, I’m working on my own show. That’s kind of crazy. I think that it’s been hard for me to recognize while in it, but when I take a moment and look back, I can see the progress and steps that I’ve made. Each story has become a little bit easier. I’m gaining confidence and working on different kinds of stories. I still stumble plenty, but I’m learning by doing and figuring out what works for me. Discomfort is the challenge, but finding my voice is the reward.

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One of our alums, Ted Muldoon (’15), recently left the engineering jobs he’d been doing at KALW to cross the country and take a full-time production position working on podcasts with a major daily publication. Here’s what he had to say about that transition:

This week I started my job at The Washington Post, and among the slurry of emotions I wash down every morning as I walk to work, the most pronounced is sheer astonishment. Five years ago I was a window washer in Minnesota, and then I found KALW. It marked nothing less than a personal and professional watershed for me. The opportunity, experience and mentorship I received at KALW through programs like the Audio Academy is unparalleled. I knew nothing entering KALW – I had quite literally no journalism or audio engineering experience – and in three years time I was a well qualified audio professional. I challenge you to find another organization with programs that enabled people better than KALW. Because so far as I’m concerned, that’s a plain impossibility.