Teen voices on mental health shine at second annual youth-led film festival

In the auditorium of Roxbury’s Eliot Congregational Church, young people and community members gathered amid swirls of cotton candy and the aroma of buttered popcorn to showcase the voices of local youth through a teen-run film festival.

The Aug. 22 event marked the culmination of Children’s Services of Roxbury’s summer Youth, Purpose & Partnership program, which runs after school from November through May with an expanded schedule as a summer program. It showcased teen-made films focused on youth mental health in a film festival with the theme, “Inside the Mind: Are We Really Ok?”

The theme and tagline for the event were selected by its teens, who also helped organize the event, run the registration and concessions tables and host the festival, in addition to developing and producing the films on display.

“This is the young people’s program,” said Harry Harding, vice president of innovation and strategic partnerships at Children’s Services of Roxbury.

Central to that goal, he said, is giving space for young people to have a voice.

“I think the youth perspective on any given topic is underutilized, not addressed, ignored or muted to some degree,” Harding said.

Those perspectives were on display in a short documentary that featured local perspectives and statistics around youth mental health, as well as a short film about connection with others.

Young people in the program said YPP has helped them use their voices and express themselves — on the screen and off.

Kassidy Silvia-Bush, a peer leader in the program and incoming junior at Madison Park Technical Vocational High School, said that every day, during the morning check in, the young people in the program have to answer an ice-breaker-style question in front of the group — for example, “If you had a superpower, what would it be?” — which helps them get comfortable speaking in front of bigger groups.

“It becomes habit and easier for you to do,” she said. “It’s definitely something I’ve learned from the program — something I hope everybody learns from the program — like using our voice.”

And it’s a skill she said she hopes she and her peers will take away to other parts of their lives to speak up for their communities.

Teens in the Children’s Services of Roxbury’s Youth, Purpose & Partnership program prepare concessions at the second annual YPP film festival, Aug. 22. The event, held at the Eliot Congressional Church, featured YPP voices and youth-made videos focused on mental health. PHOTO: Avery Bleichfeld

When it comes to mental health, Leureanny Fernandes, a rising junior at Boston Collegiate Charter School, said that she saw the film festival as an important opportunity for young people in the community to share their voices on a topic where they might not always be heard. For young people who feel like their mental health is dismissed, or who fail to acknowledge the challenges they’re facing, perspectives like the ones in the short film and documentary produced by the YPP teens may help them open up, Fernandes said.

“If they’re able to see other people going through the same things, if they’re able to get acknowledged, I feel like our film festival can help them be seen and heard and hopefully help them get the help that they need,” Fernandes said.

The event also highlighted other submissions from local youth. Nosakhare Ogbomo, a digital media assistant with the program, said that staff introduced the young people in the program to the basic skills and then let them loose.

“Tell them about the camera basics and editing basics and let them create,” he said. “That’s how you test out creativity, how you test out who knows what, who can build on certain things.”

It means that participants had the chance to lead the production of the two films. For example, Silvia-Bush worked on editing the short documentary; Fernandes worked behind the camera for the short film.

The “Inside the Mind” event is the program’s second annual film festival and reflects a shift in the program’s mission. Last year’s film festival focused on the dangers of social media. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the initiative centered on building better relationships between police and youth of color; when it launched in 1995, “YPP” even stood for “Youth and Police in Partnership.”

But in the early 2020s, Children’s Services of Roxbury broadened the program’s scope to help local teens gain skills for today’s digital economy and to build stronger connections across the broader community, not just with law enforcement.

The revamped program started with podcasting, then later expanded to film production, and festivals.

“This film festival is a culmination of all that experimentation and the history of the program, along with the young people’s input, to say, ‘We want to do more community events. We want to showcase our skills. We want to still keep some of the components from the leadership development and community engagement that were there before,’” Harding said.

Before Ogbomo worked with the program as a digital media assistant, he was a peer leader in the program, before it expanded its focus. Ogbomo said he’s seen the program grow at “a massive rate.”

“I think YPP is only going up from here,” he said. “Now that they implemented this, it can only power up.”

Although some of the teens may not have aspirations of making movies as a career — Fernandes said she wants to be a forensic psychologist, while Silvia-Bush said she’s looking to be an architect — they feel these new skills will serve them well.

“I feel like I can add into any resume that I have, any future job postings I have, it’s good to have in my toolbox and know that I’m able to do it,” Fernandes said. “I never thought I would be interested in this. But, actually going in it, it was really fun and really cool to do.”

Some of the program’s shifting landscape is quite literally seen in the YPP’s current operations space, which it rents at the Eliot Congregational Church in Roxbury.

The program moved when trying to cram 45 teens into a small conference room in Children’s Services of Roxbury’s headquarters on Dudley Street proved unwieldy. Harding said the space is temporary as CSR is pursuing a capital campaign to renovate its main space.

At the same time, Harding said, leadership for the program is still figuring out what it is and what it can be, “very much a program developing its identity in real time.”

“There’s still no creaks and cracks and things we have to mold and fix and work on,” Harding said. “But I think that’s also part of the beauty of it.”