Last November, Vogue announced the end of Teen Vogue, along with the layoff of 70% of the Teen Vogue staff. Once a publication for celebrity gossip and beauty tips, Teen Vogue shifted into a political outlet with a youth base. With stories like “Donald Trump is Gaslighting America” and “Retracing the Steps of my Abortion,” Teen Vogue transformed into a platform encouraging teens to stay informed and have a voice.
While Teen Vogue may not exist anymore, local platforms like CU Community Fab Lab, The Urbana Free Library’s Teen Open Lab and Illinois Public Media’s Teen Summit 2.0: The Remix are here to provide students with that voice and creative space.
CU Community Fab Lab
CU Community Fab Lab hosts a creative space at the Urbana Neighborhood Connections Center for children and teens in grades K-12 to design, create and learn new skills. The Fab Lab collaborates with students to think up their own projects. Last semester, students chose to make zines, model bedrooms and their own notebooks.
Community affairs specialist Wayne Hardy has been working at the Fab Lab for eight years. Hardy has noticed a decline in skills that were once innate to him when he was younger. For example, many of his students didn’t know how to save project files when they first started at Fab Lab.
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“Kids need help,” Hardy said. “It seems like the older that I get, the more I see that the bar is lower and lower, and certain things that I knew how to do as a kid, kids today don’t (know).”
Hardy says that the Fab Lab allows kids to put a creative twist on education after their school day ends.
“I see my role as someone who is helping build those kinds of creative freedoms and those critical thinking components for kids, so that they can find the answers themselves,” Hardy said.
The Urbana Free Library’s Teen Open Lab
Similarly, the Urbana Free Library provides an afterschool space for teens to lead each other and experiment with new hobbies all year long. Teen Open Lab has printers, sewing machines, electric instruments and art supplies available for free use on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Patron services librarian Joel Spencer has worked in the adult and teen sections of the Urbana Free Library for 15 years. He founded Teen Open Lab in 2013.
“It’s important that the teens have a place that is a safe place to be, where they have some autonomy, where they’re not somebody’s student and they’re not somebody’s child,” Spencer said. “They get to sort of push out on the boundaries of what they’re normally allowed to do and be creative.”
Illinois Public Media’s Teen Summit 2.0: The Remix
Illinois Public Media announced its newest program, Jan. 27, Teen Summit 2.0: The Remix. This program is a reboot of BET’s original Teen Summit program that ran from 1989-2002.
The program will consist of a moderated debate among local teenagers, discussing musicology and the digital world.
“Teen Vogue was so forward thinking, how they were getting young people to talk about difficult problems,” said co-executive producer Malaika McKee.
Teen Summit 2.0: The Remix will challenge teens to not only speak their opinions but to “flip the script” and think from a different perspective.
“What we really want is for these teens to develop their civic-mindedness, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum,” McKee said. “We want people to have trained minds to do the hard work of democracy, because it takes a trained mind to make really good, deliberate decisions that are good for all of humanity.”
