2021 Student Team
Karina Diaz Alvarex, Phoenix Woodall, Isabell Aguirre
Project Description
The Gateways student team is partnering with filmmaker Adamu Chan to assist on the documentary What These Walls Won’t Hold, which tells the story of the COVID-19 outbreak in San Quentin and the responses from organizers within and outside of the prison. This story needs to be told, and fits with Gateways’ mission of community based advocacy. We are also continuing to teach remotely with Gateways’ digital media classes, which offer valuable tech and career skills to incarcerated students. The final piece of our project is this website, which will further allow Gateways to connect with others.
Project Outcomes
Digital media classes are central to Gateways’ mission of building community-based resistance to continued incarceration through education and engagement. These classes will likely continue for future students, and our experiences teaching this quarter will help improve our engagement with them. The documentary project will be able to be watched after its release to give an account of what really happened in 2020, and will allow the filmmakers involved to build off of that work in the future. We are hoping to raise overall awareness and engagement with the issues of mass incarceration and community justice within the UCSC and Santa Cruz community.