Youth Outlook: Fighting for the Future
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YO! Youth Outlook is an award-winning literary journal of youth life in the Bay Area. Featuring in-depth reporting pieces and first-person essays, comic strips and poetry pages, YO! is the communication outlet for youth who feel their voice and visions need to be seen and heard. YO! is a bridge to the world of youth expression. YO! chronicles the world through the eyes and voice of young people – between the ages of 14 and 25. From reporting pieces on Palestinian American youth in the Bay Area to interviews with gospel hip hop bands; from photo essays by homeless youth to journal entries from temp workers in Silicon Valley, YO! offers a unique window into California’s youth subcultures. YO! has a national distribution of 10,000 glossy magazines printed quarterly, a national TV show on LinkTV and MHZ Networks, numerous partnerships with local and national radio broadcasts including San Francisco’s own KMEL, and an annual expo of youth communicators – from graffiti artists to filmmakers to incarcerated youth. YO! stories also run nationally and internationally over the New America Media wire. |
by Melanie Feliciano
I started hanging out in the offices of Youth Outlook in March 2001, and two months later, I was the magazine’s managing editor and web mistress. I learned a lot about leadership, patience, mentoring, PHP programming, the value of diversity, and the importance of non-profit media.
Eight years later, after a full term of Republican destruction, I am back, this time to help the magazine survive this economic downturn (especially since I spent most of the Bush era learning how business and capitalism work).
Obama’s administration is all about CHANGE. It’s a bunch of marketing crap if you ask me – I know that “everything old is new again” (were 80s styles ever cool?? Regardless, they’ve been back for a while, if you haven’t noticed). The universe just keeps repeating itself, and as soon as you realize this, the world isn’t going to change much. Death, destruction and taxes will always prevail.
Yes, a very pessimistic point of view, so what if the CHANGE happens inside of YOU? You know that slogan: BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE.
I’ve been experimenting with this concept via yoga. Yes, I know…ANOTHER FAD!! Here in the west it is, but if you think about its origins (3,000 years old) and the fact that India has been a relatively peaceful nation for centuries (before Westerners came along), perhaps there’s something to this way of life.
Where am I going with this?
Right about the time I started working for Youth Outlook, I paid $10 for 10 days at Funky Door Yoga on Polk Street in San Francisco. It was a fantastic deal, so I made sure I went to at least one class a day…until the 7th day, I was exhausted. I called my friend, Marina, who had signed up at the same time, and said, “Yo, girl…are you going to yoga today?”
“Ummm,” she hesitated. “Are you?”
“I was thinking of taking a day off,” I said.
“OK, see you tomorrow,” she laughed.
Even God took the seventh day off, why shouldn’t two little Latinas as well?
Anyways, Bikram Choudhury is yoga’s most successful capitalist for a reason. He whet my appetite for yoga with a very low entry fee…got me hooked, and over the course of eight years I’ve tried Ashtanga, Iyengar, Chakra Flow, Budakon, Kundalini…blah, blah, blah. Bikram was the gateway drug, and if I were to calculate how much money Bikram and all the others have made from this initial $10 investment…well, hmmm. Let’s say I took two yoga classes a week ($17 x 2 = $34). Multiply that by 52 weeks: $1,768 x 8 years = $14,144. And that’s just little me.
Can you see now why yoga is a $5B industry?
So, I am starting an experiment today. I am donating $100 today to Youth Outlook Magazine (and getting another tax deduction for next year).
My hypothesis is that this donation will multiply 130x within 6 months if I can find 130 other “believers” in the power of youth media. It’s an experiment. And I’m a mad scientist, remember?
