Munchies, Movies, & Music takes over Mears Park

by Andrew Lonnes, SPNN Youth intern

On August 13th at Mears Park, SPNN’s Youth Action committee (YAC) hosted a fantastic event, Munchies, Music, and Movies: An SPNN Youth Film Festival. The festival had a lot of fun activities: live music, food, yard games, and a video reel. There were about 150 people that passed through or stayed for the whole festival.

This summer the YAC was made up of the six youth media leaders that were hired at SPNN through support from Youth Job Corps. YAC is comprised of youth that have been a part of SPNN youth programs. They meet twice a month during the school year and their focus is to empower youth voices at SPNN and in the community.

Munchies, Movies, and Music took about 6 weeks for YAC to plan, meeting every Monday afternoon from the beginning of July to the day of the event. They split into 3 groups: Marketing, Entertainment, and Video Reel. Marketing was in charge of posting the event on different social media websites, and posting fliers in different locations. The Entertainment group was in charge of figuring out the bands and performers, and also the different activities that people can do while they are there. The film reel group was in charge of putting together the final videos for the screening.

We had a lot of great partners to make this event happen: The Bulldog provided hot dogs and chips; Unity One Credit Union was very gracious and let us borrow their popcorn-maker, which was a huge success; and Saint Paul Parks and Recreation provided the projector and screen. SPNN Youth provided games and a spin wheel, in which people could win SPNN Youth wristbands, temporary tattoos, buttons and if they landed on the mystery space they could win a T-Shirt. Youth performances by The Poetry Pathway Regulators, a spoken word group, and Teen Power, a hip hop crew, provided great entertainment during the first hour, followed by a video reel after the sun set. The reel featured videos from SPNN Youth programs, including Set It Up, the Youth Intern Program, and Connections classes from the past two years.

Everyone was very excited to share the work of SPNN Youth with a new audience in a festive setting. The evening was a great opportunity for youth to come together with their peers and mentors from across the cities to celebrate their achievements. Thank you to everyone who attended!