Life-Skills & Leadership Development
Life. Camera. Action! (LCA) is a leadership and life-skills development program that uses digital video and the art of storytelling to teach LA youth (ages 12 to 17) to become successful productive citizens. Established in 2011, Life-Camera-Action operates in the Boyle Heights community of East Los Angles. Partnering with local middle and high schools, LCA is an innovative program that provides students, ages 12-17, opportunities to use technology and digital media to explore issues relative to them and their community. As they create media projects, students learn and enhance their life skills through critical-thinking and literacy skills; experience new methods of learning and doing research; improve their competence in a wide range of academic subjects; develop leadership skills; and improve their personal development and scholastic achievement.
Life Camera Action (LCA)
Docs for Change
“Have you ever been affected by the death of someone you didn’t know?” That was the powerful opening line to a pitch that led to the 2022 Fall LCA cohort’s Documentary project. Life Camera Action! is Hollenbeck PAL’s 12-week Leadership and Media Skills program that consists of two projects: the documentary, where students work together to highlight stories in our community, and the individual film that teaches students to tell their own stories creatively. For the documentary, our students from ages 12 to 17 were taught about elevator pitches and then asked to come up with their pitch for a documentary topic and voted as a class. In the fall of 2022, the story chosen was the real-life experience of 12-year-old student Carmen Nunez, who was mere feet away from the scene of a tragedy that rocked the community.