So Much to Celebrate at Adobe Youth Voices Live!

If you were anywhere close to downtown San Jose on Saturday night, you’ll have to excuse us if we had the music turned up a little too loud. But there was good reason to celebrate as we wrapped up a fantastic week with the Adobe Youth Voices Live! party at the California Theater.

The mission of Adobe Youth Voices is to provide youth in underserved communities the opportunity to create media that express their emotions and concerns about issues that are affecting them and our world. To date, The Adobe Youth Voices program has impacted 150,000 youth and 4,000 educators in more than 40 countries. The celebration on Saturday was the grand finale of our second international Adobe Youth Voices Summit, a four-day conference which brought together more than 90 AYV students and educators from 16 countries around the world. Their stories are amazing and so are they.

The week’s highlights included a moving keynote from journalist Laura Ling, who you might recall was held captive in North Korea for nearly five months while on an assignment covering refugee movement between the China/North Korea border. On Saturday, the Adobe Foundation joined forces with the Black Eyed Peas Peapod Foundation to open the newest Peapod Adobe Youth Voices Academy at Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA) in San Jose. MACLA joins the growing network of academies in New York, Los Angeles, Oakland and Redwood City, California.

But Saturday night was all about celebration with performances by AYV students and a special appearance from Fergie, apl.de.ap, and Taboo of the Grammy Award-winning Black Eyed Peas. Photos from the AYV Summit can be seen here.

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