Empowering people is a dream goal for a journalist like 26-year-old Columbian Tatiana Velásquez Archibold. One of six participants in the month-long Early Childhood course facilitated by RNTC and the Bernhard van Leer foundation, she beat off more than 300 journalists for a place on the course, becoming a fellow at the Van Leer Foundation for a year.
Velásquez is enthusiastic about the course: “I learned more on combining journalistic and multimedia skills. The course will help me to create a website with useful tools. My idea is to combine journalism, blogging and childhood. The course emphasised the importance of interactivity and getting reactions from the people I’d like to write about. Indeed, their responses can be very useful for me – I can empower people to actually make a change. I do not only want to point out problems, I also want to find solutions, no matter how small they are.”
Velásquez is a freelance journalist in Colombia. She used to work for El Heraldo, in Barranquilla, writing about education and so children’s issues. She was one of the very few in Colombia involved in this kind of writing. Velasquez: “Writing about children is considered as soft journalism. Most journalists choose economic or political issues.”
The need to write about children’s issues is, however, obvious to Velásquez: “Children are vulnerable when it comes to security and health. They might suffer sexual abuse, or they are being recruited as child soldiers, or as drug traffickers in the slums. Many children in Colombia are partly neglected. Homeless children, in particular, but also children who grow up with loving parents, sometimes lack the money for a quality education, health insurance, or even a balanced diet.”
Children are hardly ever portrayed as individuals who can be taken seriously. Much more often, they are seen as victims. Velásquez did better than that and won the Pandi Child Friendly Journalism Award in 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5I12QMTDMI
Tatiana Velásquez participated in the Tailor-Made course Journalism & Early Childhood. An initiative of the Bernard van Leer Foundation, carried out by RNTC.
