This is your snare drum.

That’s the drum you’re going to keep the beat on the most.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

What it takes to be great is you have to make sacrifices.

It costs less to be responsible.

Good job.

When I was growing up, I never had to worry about being murdered.

They’re not hiring right now.

When we hear their stories, we are fundamentally changed.

I take in injured songbirds.

I understood the importance of getting our kids stories out there.

Not only for them to have a voice, but for other people to understand how important it is to invest in this.

There are things to celebrate.

There are things to have hope for.

Community Voice Lab takes that mandate to bring local stories out of the dark and into the light.

Our hope is that out of watching these films, our viewers will feel much more connected to the region.

The lab exists to locate those storytellers, to empower them to tell their stories.

We see students from different walks of life who have faced homelessness.

Human trafficking grew up in broken homes.

When they come, this is a space where they find hope.

It was my responsibility as a filmmaker and international student to find a story that represented voices similar to mine.

When a crew of filmmakers come in with a camera and they say, I love what you do and I admire what you do, it makes them see themselves through this other lens.

It’s really hard to feel connected to the people that live right here.

In Washington, D.C.

you have two communities.

You have the federal city where all of the concentration of power is, And then you have another Washington, D.C.

It’s very easy for us to be overshadowed on a local level.

The themes that I was most determined to include in this film were purpose, community, and a sense of belonging.

We tend to talk about and think about things in a scarcity model, but in Daron’s story, there’s really an abundance.

It presents a raw view of the needs that are still existing without servicing a population, you know, of adults with special needs.

When I was interviewing one of my participants, he had mentioned that he was robbed at gunpoint.

At that moment, I knew that this story was much greater than just an after school program.

I’ve been doing this work for 25 years, sometimes get lost in everything that goes on.

Many often don’t step back to think about just how difficult being a youth mentor is.

The biggest risk when films like these don’t reach a wider audience, is that we all become more vulnerable to being isolated in our own communities.

They tutor us in the art of being human.

We love our partners, and we want our partner stories to be told to a broader public television audience.

Who knows the types of people that, through public television, might encounter the work of our partners and our storytellers and be changed.

These are the kinds of films that I want to make.

This is their story.

This is not mine.

I’m just telling the story.

I am so grateful that Daron trusted me.

So I hope you enjoy watching these stories.

If it can reach one person, if it could change one heart, then it was all worth it.

[music swells]