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About Echoes
What we do:
Echoes of Incarceration is an award-winning documentary initiative produced by youth who are directly impacted by the criminal justice system. The project provides hands-on video production and advocacy training for young adults, and creates documentaries and video journalism pieces told from the life experiences of the filmmakers themselves.
Echoes project has created films for Sesame Street, Upworthy, NowThis News, screened work at the White House in 2014, and was named a Robert Rauschenberg Artist-As-Activist Fellow in 2017.
Our structure
Level 1: summer camp and school-based workshop
Our first level of instruction involves a filmmaking and advocacy training through school workshops, and through our 5-week summer camp. These hands-on trainings create PSAs and short films for our "Resiliency Film" series - which are made by and for young adults impacted by the justice system.
Level 2: Junior Crew / Stakeholder films
The next level of training is our Junior Crew - which is a 18-month intensive video production and journalism training. This crew creates short documentaries and training material for criminal justice stakeholders.
Level 3: Senior crew, Echoes Journalism Initiative
Our Senior Crew works on ambitious, general audience documentaries and journalism stories, partnering with organizations such as Sesame Street, Upworthy, NowThis News, Democracy Now, and the Columbia University Justice Lab.
We believe that if young people are the most severely impacted by the justice system, they should be given both tools and a platform to raise their voices and advocate for for reform. We believe that both justice and public safety can be greatly increased by listening to youth and centering their voices in our justice system.
Throughout the process, Echoes youth are provided job skills, mentoring, and professional experience on freelance productions. As a team we also practice restorative justice and mindfulness, and make personal development and self-care central to our work.
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Documentaries
Children of the Incarcerated series
For six years, the Echoes project focused on the issue of parental incarceration. We created a series loosely based on the Bill of Rights for Children of Incarcerated Parents, each looking at experiences of children ranging from the moment of a parent’s arrest, the experience of caregivers, the experience of visiting parents in prison, maintaining ongoing relationships with incarcerated parents, and a series of portraits of resilient youth who have overcome parental incarceration. We give films away for free send DVDS to prisons, colleges, and conferences across the country.
Documentaries and training films for criminal justice stakeholders
Echoes has made numerous films aimed at lawmakers, judges, police, correctional officers, bringing awareness to the needs and experiences of young people in the justice system.
In 2021 alone our films were used to train:
400 federal technical assistance grantees
330 members of Buffalo Police department
90 NYPD sergents
150 public defenders in MA
150 justice leaders in MA, including DA’s, sherrifs, and judges
50 justice leaders in Vermont
plus hundreds of screenings in university classrooms, prisons, and non-profits
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video journalism
The Echoes Journalism Initiative creates first-person, youth reported stories on all the ways the criminal justice system interacts with young adults. From the school-to-prison pipeline, restorative justice, community policing, juvenile detention, to “raise the age” debates, our stories examine both the scientific research as well as the lived experience of youth as they intersect with systems of crime and punishment.
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work for hire
meet the Echoes collective
