iWRITEADREAM Pembroke/Hopkins Park, Ill.: It's a Rap: Life in Pembroke

Kwame Robinson raps about life in his hometown. "Best believe that I will represent Hopkins," he says during an impromptu performance. (To hear Kwame, click below.)

PEMBROKE LIVE!

Deandre Hampton, a student at Lorenzo R. Smith School in Pembroke, Ill., was among nearly two dozen students who participated this summer in the iWriteADream journalism camp created by John W. Fountain, a former New York Times national correspondent and currently a journalism professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago. He and his wife Monica Fountain, a former Chicago Tribune reporter, head the journalism program. The students call their body of work (photographs, stories and poetic essays) produced in the workshop and presented here: Pembroke Live!

iWriteADream

Telling Our Stories
One Community at a Time
-PEMBROKE, Ill.

Each day, American journalism presents the menu of news, events, people and places it believes most important to the lives of Americans. Today’s stories become tomorrow’s history. But each day, many stories often go missing, particularly stories about minority communities and the poor.

Most often conspicuously absent from the voices and portraits of communities presented by daily journalism are the voices and perspectives of children and teens.

In a world where technology can bring the global community face to face with the stroke of a keyboard, iWriteaDream promotes digital diversity and seeks to create an online body of work from underrepresented communities, capturing their voices, their hope, their existence and their stories as told by them.

These are the voices of those who live in Pembroke/Hopkins Park, Ill., among the economically poorest communities in the state, but rich in hope, promise, dreams and in that which matters most.

You may reach Fountain at jfountain@Roosevelt.edu