It’s been an incredible first 18 months for the Urban Health Media Project. Our students were taught how to shoot videos and take photos by an Emmy-award winning USA TODAY multimedia journalist, and how to interview and write by former reporters and editors from The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun and USA TODAY. They’ve interviewed people in powerful positions – including U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams – and people in our community who had never before told their stories. We’ve had eight stories and four videos published in USA TODAY and usatoday.com – the nation’s largest newspaper, including a Page 1 cover story on “fatherlessness” for Father’s Day We’ve had students speak on Capitol Hill – and get a standing ovation – when they discussed their projects on the “code of silence” around domestic and sexual violence in the African American and Hispanic communities. We’ve had students testify about their reporting on mental health stigma to a City Council Health Committee in Washington, D.C., chaired by former Mayor Vincent Gray. And a student’s personal story about how art and music helped him cope with trauma was republished by the scholastic news service Newsela, which is distributed to 1.5 million students and educators. We sent three of our students off to college to study journalism – to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Syracuse University and New York University. And two of our new college students and our creative director, now a sophomore at Morgan State University, remain interns and help teach the next generation of UHMP student journalists how to spread the message of health and hope through multimedia storytelling.