Walk through the doors of the cavernous 5,500-square-foot YOUmedia space and your senses are overwhelmed immediately by the whirring of 3D printers, the shouts of middle schoolers locked in a tense game of Mario Kart, and ecstatic rhymes in the recording studio from a young artist who, years later, you’ll swear you knew them way back when. On a typical school day afternoon, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, it wouldn’t have been unusual to see 100 teens stream into—of all places—the Harold Washington Library downtown.
Alex, a 17-year-old living on the south side, remembers the day he first walked into the YOUmedia lab of the Harold Washington Library his freshman year of high school. He originally came for the computers and 3D printers—”just overall expensive stuff that I couldn’t afford”—but felt moved by the warmth of the mentors. “It’s like that friend you make on the first day of school where you know you’ll be friends,” he says. They became invaluable not only for their expertise in STEM and the arts, but also for their life advice.
Before YOUmedia was an institution, it was an experiment. Founded in 2009 as a MacArthur Foundation-funded partnership between the Chicago Public Library and the Digital Youth Network (DYN), an educational project centered on media arts, YOUmedia was built on a simple premise: “HOMAGO.” It’s an acronym based on a theory by Mizuko Ito, a media technology professor at the University of California, Irvine, that youth learning spaces should allow kids to do three things: hang out, mess around, and geek out.
Over time, YOUmedia evolved from a space into a community. Not only has the program produced fashion shows, podcasts, literary magazines, and more, it’s also given students agency. “It gave you experience in so many different things, but without the expectation that you needed to be good at it or that it needed to be graded,” says one alum.
Mentors and current librarians attribute this lack of urgency to City Hall politics. Carving out millions for these grant-funded programs would’ve taken a lot of political gymnastics, so it was cheaper and more expedient for the Chicago Public Library Foundation to continue courting philanthropists and corporate donors like Allstate, Comcast, and Boeing to fund public programs. “We questioned how much they were really fighting [for us],” says one mentor.
In mid-May, library branches began to reopen. One mentor says that at first, it was a relief they weren’t called in to work so early in the pandemic, given uncertainty about the virus. On the other hand, the grant staff says they hadn’t been informed that their branches were opening, and instead heard from other staffers.
