What is Coast 2 Coast?
Coast 2 Coast is a collaboration between youth from diverse coastal communities worldwide, sharing and exchanging personal narratives expressed through their own photography, film, art, and words with a global audience.
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The overall goal is to sustainably facilitate more audiovisual workshops in more diverse coastal communities worldwide, continuously adding more storytellers to an ever evolving creative database.
Coast 2 Coast’s Indiegogo Campaign will kickstart the initial project to partner kids from Southern California, New York City, and Northern Peru and fund audiovisual workshops by the Lobitos Cinema Project (LCP) and Proyecto Iris giving participants access to digital cameras, audiovisual equipment, and safe-spaces to learn!
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Lobitos Cinema Project Audiovisual Workshops
In partnership with Coast 2 Coast, the Lobitos Cinema Project (LCP) facilitates free audiovisual workshops with participating youth in the fishing, oil, and surfing community of Lobitos, Peru. Youth develop their voices as powerful tools through storytelling and introspective skills where they are able to convey their insights, observations, impressions, objectives with creativity, and intentions.
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Lobitos Cinema Project TUMBLR
http://lobitos-cinemaproject.tumblr.com
In collaboration with Coast 2 Coast and LCP, the Lobitos community is supported by the nonprofit, WAVES for Development. WAVES creates life-enriching experiences in coastal communities through Education initiatives that develop youth into healthy & empowered adults and Surf Voluntourism that engages travelers & transforms their views of the world and themselves.
Funding raised will further support our collaborative partnerships with community-based grassroots Audiovisual + Creative Arts Projects in Lobitos:
PROYECTO IRIS
PROYECTO IRIS applies photography a reflective tool and channel for the dissemination of stories and participatory photography workshops and photo walks as designed to engage and empower youth as self and community advocates.
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Coast 2 Coast's online space provides a platform for youth to share their voices with a global audience. These stories are the shared experiences of adolescents growing up within different socio-economic contexts along diverse coastlines worldwide.
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THE GOAL: Coast 2 Coast Creative SPACE in Progress:
https://coastcoast-project-swe2.squarespace.com
Participating youth hone multimedia skills to document their experiences, cultures and communities, and collaborate with youth around the world through the online platform in which they share and respond to one another’s creative works.
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Coast 2 Coast is designed to spark and nurture meaningful, creative conversation among youth from different social, cultural, and economical backgrounds, allowing participants to view their environments from different lenses, lights, and angles. Coast 2 Coast strives to ignite youths’ imaginations, bolster creative spirit, and widen everyday concepts of what is possible by their own abilities through professional and accessible creative learning, media–based educational workshops and projects in both participating locations. Coast 2 Coast’s mission is to facilitate opportunities for youth from radically different backgrounds to realize the power of their individual and collective voices as a tool for positive social change in their own lives, communities, and beyond.
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Coast 2 Coast is a project of Beyond the Surface International. Beyond the Surface International (BTSI) is a 501(C)(3) nonprofit platform for youth empowerment projects in marginalized communities worldwide using surfing and creative-learning initiatives as innovative mediums for positive social change. BTSI develops safe space learning environments where youth can enjoy the freedom to explore their talents, interests and capabilities. BTSI facilitates innovative learning projects utilizing a free-progress education model to empower individuals to question socio-cultural norms and be courageous agents of change in their communities and beyond.