Last fall a local senior Catholic Youth Ministry group found a 21st-century way to make their voices heard: they made a video and posted it on the Internet.
The youth group at Immaculate Conception Church in North Little Rock submitted a short video they made themselves to a youth video contest on MyCatholic Voice.com, a Web site created to “capture, index and share” the Catholic faith tradition.
The group’s youth director, David Yacko, had just come to Immaculate Conception in September, after he served as youth minister at St. John Church in Russellville for 10 years. He saw an announcement on the contest in a newsletter from Liz Tingquist, diocesan director of Catholic youth ministry.
Emily Stewart, CYM member and senior at Mount St. Mary Academy in Little Rock, also heard about the contest at school and thought the group might want to participate.
“Since he (Yacko) was a new youth director, he brought his laptop to meetings. I knew he had done videos for the diocese before,” said Stewart, 18. “It seemed like an easy way to do something all together.”
The group holds a Bible study each week, but the study was curtailed the week they made the video, Yacko said.
The contest consisted of 12 weekly themes, starting in September and running through the end of November.
“You could enter every week, but they chose to enter then (week 10),” Yacko said. The theme for week 10 was “In the Word.”
“You had to find your favorite Bible verse and base the video on that,” said Jacob Parker, a senior at Catholic High School in Little Rock.
The group started by discussing Bible stories, Parker said. They chose the story of Noah and the flood.
Once they had their verse, the group of 35 to 40 students worked on the project “in a very tiny place,” Yacko said.
“It was really neat. They came up with the entire idea on the spot. They used only resources that were available,” he said. “I shot the video, but everything else, conceptually and visually, was done by the students.”
The students created human and animal puppets out of paper grocery bags and pencils and then decorated them with markers from a member’s backpack.
“We made it out of what we could find in the room,” Stewart said. “We started with absolutely nothing and made an entire video.”
“Everyone was working together as a community — it was so much fun,” Yacko said. “They did it in one night.”
The group made a second video for week 12. In this video they reenacted the Charlie Brown Christmas story.
“(Making a video) was a great way for any youth group to get involved,” Parker said. “It was a very cheap and efficient way to get your youth group out there.”
The video on Noah won the weekly prize of $500 for Theme 10. It received both votes and ratings from people who came to the Web site. It won because it got the most votes with the highest ratings of the 10 entries posted for that week. As of Feb. 6, the video had 572 hits.
“We asked families and friends to vote, and we got lots of votes,” Stewart said.
At that time, the youth group was collecting money to help with the parish’s annual Christmas project, in which the parish adopts families through Helping Hand and helps with their holiday lists.
“In the past, (the youth group) would only get about $100,” Stewart said. “We wanted to get the needs and more of their (the families’) wants.”
The prize money allowed the group to “put more toward giving them (the family) what they wanted,” she said.
“We were able to buy a lot more for a lot more kids this year,” Parker said.
The video also won a grand prize for the highest average rating of the approximately 150 entries on all 12 themes. Two grand prizes of $1,000 each were announced at the National Federation of Catholic Youth Ministry’s 2008 conference Dec. 7 in Cleveland.
The group will decide how to use the $1,000 prize later this year.
The videos “In the Word: God’s Covenant: Noah” and “Charlie Brown’s Meaning of Christmas” can be viewed at www.MyCatholicVoice.com.
