BYkids Founder and Executive Director Holly Carter loves documentary film. She sees it as an invaluable resource for kids to learn about the world—especially when the documentary films are made by other kids.
“I think that's the way to crack people wide open. I think it's the language that kids speak. They don’t need words, they need moving images. I want to have kids be able to see the world more realistically and be able to participate in it in a way that they have some amount of authority. I want kids to own their voice. I want kids to use their voice. I want them to really get comfortable in their skin so they can use their power.”
In her earlier career as a journalist working at the New York Times, Carter noticed what she describes as “colonial journalism.” She observed her colleagues flying to countries where they often didn’t speak the language or understand the culture to quickly gather information that was then reported in ways that she believed were often superficial or incorrect. After leaving the New York Times, she traveled to South Korea as a Henry Luce Scholar, with little knowledge of the country, the culture, or the language. Returning two years later, she found herself engaged in a form of guerrilla diplomacy, educating other Americans about a country that was potentially misunderstood.
"I really got obsessed with this idea that people on the ground should be telling their own stories. We should not be having a person, a filter, a journalist, a cameraman, go somewhere to take a story.”
From there, it was a logical shift to the realm of documentary filmmaking, where she became a producer on a film about the life of Margaret Sanger for PBS. “I realized that when I go to see a documentary film, that just lit up my world. That was where I found magic,” Carter says. Eager to share that magic with a broader community, her next project was a partnership with DoubleTake magazine to launch the Full Frame documentary film festival in Durham, North Carolina.
Around that time, Carter began to notice what she considered to be significant gaps in her own children’s school curriculum, observations that reminded her of the colonial journalism she had witnessed early in her career.
“What got me mad was that these kids are being taught about pluralism and equity. And yet, they really only want to go to Harvard and get rich. What we're actually teaching our kids is not to listen and be empathetic, but just to get ahead for themselves.”
Motivated by the hypocrisy of educational institutions and the fear-mongering around differences following 9/11, Carter began working on how she could shift the education of American youth using films by young people.
And, with that, BYkids was born.
