Multicultural Milwaukee, Multimedia Explorations, Fall 2009

This semester Film 150 tried a bit of a different approach in our course multimedia work. Our blog in fact combines the work of two different 150 sections and engages with three different community groups: Our Next Generation (our primary partner), Growing Power, and St. Michael's Church. We began our semester learning about the community around Our Next Generation and several earlier posts on student blogs feature interviews and photos from the neighborhood around 35th and Lisbon area, where ONG is located.

Jesse Egan's first blog featured an interview and photo essay in conversation with a Burmese immigrant family and the challenges that they faced.

Jesse Egan also has some great photos from his work with Our Next Generation, an organization dedicated to helping urban youth by providing a range of academic and real world skills. Jesse kindly shared his slideshow for our main page.

Many of the Film 150 students went beyond documentation of their work and volunteered with organizations through tutoring as in case on ONG (Stephanie Wojtanowski and Dustin Witter's images of ONG's Homework Club and mission statement are below),

or with the activist urban food group, Growing Power, as Josh Bryan documents in his video (part 1 here):

or participation in neighborhood clean-up and soup sales as part of St. Michael's work with predominantly Southeast Asian immigrant communities as Andrew Tilley's slideshows document,

It was a diverse and rewarding look at a few of the community groups hard at work in Milwaukee, and I think you will find the individual blogs of the students engaging reading.