Amplify Utah supports and facilitates dynamic journalistic storytelling to celebrate diverse points of view. By partnering with traditional media, we cultivate an environment that encourages stories be shared widely and made easily accessible for our communities to read, hear, watch and engage.
Sandy’s new female speaking club strives to amplify women’s voices
07-06-2025 By Savannah Stacey
These women have entered their public speaking era.
80 Years Later: Student Documentary Revisits Utah's Topaz Camp
05-11-2025 By Jordan Thornblad
"It [is] so important to Utah history that we don’t brush this under the rug."
'Don't Let It Happen Again': Topaz Survivors Warn of Detention Powers
05-11-2025 By Marissa Bond
“When you forget your history, you repeat it,” says a 94-year-old Japanese American in the University of Utah student-made documentary.
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The Beehive, a garage-like venue and dimly lit vegan bistro decorated with punk art, is fostering a sense of community among young people looking for live music in downtown Salt Lake. Known for attracting alternative bands, new musicians and young adults to the stage, the venue offers a welcoming stage for those seeking connection
“Young adults feel like they don’t have a place to be and for lots of them, that place can be concerts,” said Andrew Earley, owner of The Beehive, formerly The Deluxe on State Street.
Since Kilby Court, one of Salt Lake’s earliest and still-running alternative music venues, opened in 1999, several others have begun to follow in the years since, including The Beehive, The Underground, Tiny Porch concerts in the 9th & 9th neighborhood and Fountain Records. Often, these venues, geared to those under the age of 21, are constructed out of repurposed spare spaces and stocked with second-hand audio equipment and furniture.
Opening a space for young adults who aren’t of legal drinking age has been a motivation for several of these alternative venue owners, including Adam Michael Terry, who opened the Fountain Record music collective and store in November 2023.
Creating a space for the under-21 demographic, Terry said, was one of his main goals for the weekly live jazz nights in the store’s basement. Salt Lake City lacked the jazz scene, he said, especially for those who couldn’t go to bars, and he wanted to create an affordable and accessible scene for young adults.
“Music scenes often rely on venues,” Terry said.
Earley, who is also executive director of the nonprofit Alternative Arts and Music Program Utah, said he had a similar vision for The Beehive when it opened in 2016. The venue and non-profit organization also work together to provide an affordable and accessible platform for artists, according to its website.
The size of DIY venues, often accommodating an audience of anywhere from 50 to 100, offers intimacy between the artists and the audience. More traditional venues, like the Delta Center, have around 20,000 seats, according to its website. Earley said he wants this intimacy to pull young adults together and inspire them to start playing music or to join a band.
He said he hopes “[the audience] can be empowered instead of awed.”
Earley said he also wants to move away from how traditional venues separate the musicians and the audience, with a large seating arrangement and a tall stage. Attendees can feel disconnected from the artists and artists can have a hard time interacting with the audience, he said. The environment of small DIY venues creates a better experience for both the artists and the audience, he added.
Young adults find a lot of value in the community surrounding local alternative music, said Aidan Hatch, who attended one of Fountain Records’ jazz nights for the first time in November. Knowing that the scene supports local business and creates a community space brings locals together, said Hatch.
“It’s very important because it’s a way to share experiences and because it’s unique,” he said.
Beckham White, a young concertgoer, said smaller venues that cater to younger audiences also foster an emotional connection to music and the artists.
“There’s always a want for places like this,” he said during a Nov. 7 jazz night at the store.
Earley added that non-profit and DIY venues are also much more accessible to young and new musicians because they charge fewer fees and are more likely to host unknown artists. This gives bands opportunities to grow and experience a different level of live performance.
He said giving young musicians their first professional gig is valuable because it creates energy and community among newer artists, both individually and as a group.
“Our ability to give that opportunity to new bands in a healthy scene is the biggest contribution The Beehive has had to Salt Lake City’s music scene,” said Earley.
Terry said he also enjoys mentoring young musicians who volunteer at the jazz nights, helping them hone their improvisational skills and learn to share the musical space.
“The evolution [of the scene] is for the musicians, who are still developing,” said Terry. “It introduces you to like-minded people and hopefully new endeavors.”
Sebastian De La Cruz, a bassist who’s been playing at Fountain Records for a few months, said the opportunity to regularly play live with other artists is important for new musicians. He said he’s learned more not just about music but also about himself as an artist.
“Playing live with other musicians is the best practice you can get and a great way to get [to] know music through the people you meet,” he said.
For some, the alternative live music scene is also a place to foster counterculture and to advocate for what they believe in, Earley said. The goal for some venue owners is for that space to be healthy and safe while still impactful, he added.
“Everywhere you have a dominant culture, there’s a significant pushback. People don’t have a place, and alternative music can resonate with these people,” said Earley. “It’s healthy counterculture.”
This article was published from the University of Utah’s COMM 1610 class.
The Logan City School District has updated its policy on symbols in classrooms, after months of debate over the presence of rainbow pride flags in classrooms.
The policy went into effect March 3, after a 3-2 school board vote last December to revise the district’s Standards for Media Use policy to support Utah state code, which says any classroom materials “do not display materials that endorse, promote, or disparage a particular political, personal, religious, denominational, sectarian, agnostic, or atheist belief or viewpoint.”
Under the new district policy, a school’s principal does not have to remove personal items — including pride flags — from a teacher’s desk as long as they “do not disturb the learning process.”
Before the district enforces any changes, Superintendent Frank Schofield and the district’s five other board members plan to offer training to administrators on how to implement the policy in unique situations. The administrators will then train their own staff, according to Shana Longhurst, the district’s director of communications and public relations.
“We know there are going to be a lot of novel situations that are going to come up, just because of the complexity of the issue,” Schofield said.
Frank Stewart, the board’s vice president, said the policy and training will help teachers better know the answers and processes for student and parent concerns.
“We just want every teacher to have and feel like they have the backing of our administration in every circumstance, so that they have answers when a parent comes to address on specifically about their student or their child — that there’s a good process in place to make sure that we consider all the options on ways that we can best help them,” Stewart said.
Board member Larry Williams agreed, saying “we want to minimize putting the teacher on the spot. … And that’s why there’s going to be a building administrator principal involved in determining what’s appropriate.”
Schofield said the board has delayed putting their training together, so they could take any changes by the Legislature into account, specifically relating to neutrality in classrooms.
The policy states: “Materials that do not convey the District’s educational message, or are determined by the building principal to be in violation of the guidance in this policy, may be removed by the school principal. An educator or other employee who uses instructional time or space to convey a political, religious, or personal message after being directed not to may be subject to disciplinary action.”
However, Longhurst explained, the policy “does not require anyone to remove anything from their classroom, unless it violates the policy. Nothing needs to be removed at this point and will not need to be based on the implementation of this policy.”
During a Sept. 13 school board meeting, Andrea Sinfield, a Hillcrest Elementary School parent, kick-started the conversation about classroom symbols when she expressed concern about a pride flag sticker with the words “Safe Space” on the front door of a few kindergarten classroom doors in her daughter’s elementary school.
Sinfield said it feels like nothing has changed over pride flags in classrooms.
“It’s a little disheartening to me, because of all the work that [we] have done to try to create a neutral classroom, because that’s what it is,” Sinfield said.
Jay Bates Domenech, a senior at Logan High School and president of the school’s Gay Straight Alliance (GSA), agreed that there has been little change since the policy went into effect.
“The only change I’ve really seen is actually an influx of teachers putting up pride flags,” Domenech said.
However, Domenech did say he was concerned that, after the administrator training, their principal may be more strict with implementing the policy than other schools in the district.
The implementation, Domenech said, “is just going to make it a more hostile environment. We already don’t have a super-amazing, supportive school — and that goes for a lot of things, like not only queerness but also, like, people of color and undocumented people, etc. But, like, I just think it’s going to increase the kind of otherness of queer students.”
Sinfield suggested that the Logan City School District could implement a policy similar to the Cache County School District.
She referenced a picture of a flier outside a Green Canyon high school classroom. The flier pictured several students — including a student in a wheelchair, students of color, and another wearing a rainbow shirt — with the words, “Safe, Welcome, Invited. Our school is a safe place where everyone belongs. Come, learn with us.”
Schofield said that there hasn’t been a discussion with the board yet on creating a similar district-wide symbol for inclusion.
“As we have the conversation of ways to communicate inclusion for all students, one of our board’s commitments is to do that in a way that doesn’t inadvertently send a message of exclusion for groups that identify with a particular symbol,” Schofield said. “We haven’t finalized anything, because our board is extremely aware these images have strong emotional impacts on students and their families.”
Stewart said the board and district’s decisions centered on trying to help everyone feel included.
“It really is our hope that we can continue to do everything we can to help students feel accepted in every capacity,” Stewart said.
Jenny Carpenter wrote this story as a journalism student at Utah State University. It is published as part of a new collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.
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We also request organizations include the following text either at the beginning or end of the story text :This story is jointly published by nonprofits Amplify Utah and [Your Media Organization's Name] to elevate diverse perspectives in local media through emerging journalism. Jenny Carpenterwrote this story as a journalism student at Utah State University. For more stories from Amplify Utah, visit amplifyutah.org/use-our-work.
In the home of Darren Parry on a Sunday afternoon, five Salt Lake Community College students circle the former Northwestern Shoshone Nation chairman for a conversation about the crisis facing the Great Salt Lake.
Parry’s gaze, meanwhile, remains fixed on the camera in front of him. Visible over his shoulder, in the frame of the camera, are three framed photographs of his ancestral family. They were Shoshone people, remnants of the 1863 Bear River Massacre, who were later baptized by Latter-day Saints in the same river.
For Parry, his ancestral history serves as an example of how westward colonizers pushed Indigenous people from their homes. When Utah eventually sprung into statehood, Parry pointed out that Indigenous people “were not given a seat at the table,” here in the state or anywhere else.
The latter point is what informs Parry’s views on current efforts intended to help the dwindling Great Salt Lake, and it’s why the crew of students visited his home for an interview. “We’ve scienced this [Great Salt Lake] problem to death,” said Parry, who goes on to add, “We have to start looking at the problem from a … different view. Why not maybe an Indigenous view?”
This conversation with Parry was one of several interviews that the student group conducted for a new documentary covering the lake. They decided that the film should focus on “Indigenous stewardship,” a term that refers to the notion of Native people being at the helm of environmental decision-making.
Titled “Diverted: Indigenous Stewardship and Saving the Great Salt Lake,” the 30-minute documentary is set to premiere Friday, Dec. 8, at Salt Lake Community College’s South City campus. Its premiere comes after months of work, which was carried out by the student group for a course at the college.
Those involved in the project – seven students in total – said they wanted to tackle an urgent subject matter.
27-year-old student McCaulee Blackburn, co-producer of the film, recalls first learning about the climate crisis at age 11 and subsequently wondering what lay in store for the planet.
Like perhaps many young people today, Blackburn said growing up and moving through life was accompanied by “constant climate anxiety” over their future – a future they felt had been stolen from new generations. So, when a SLCC film student pitched the idea of a documentary tackling Great Salt Lake to Blackburn in January, hopping on board seemed like a no-brainer.
At the time, Blackburn had just finished an internship with the Great Salt Lake Collaborative, a group of media and education organizations that joined forces in 2022 with the goal of informing the public about the lake and its declining water levels.
During their internship, Blackburn spoke with water experts and wrote articles communicating ways to help the lake. However, they noticed that solution talks almost always tended to omit Indigenous perspectives.
“I knew that if I was going to work on a project about the lake, I wanted to make sure Indigenous people were being centered,” Blackburn said.
Of particular interest to Blackburn was the notion of Indigenous stewardship. They aimed to explore the science of the lake as well as how a different set of hands – those with a link to the land – would manage Utah’s water resources in contrast to the state legislature.
Blackburn initially recruited two fellow SLCC students to work on the project. One of them was friend and SLCC film student Valene Peratrovich, who is also an alternating host of KRCL radio’s Sunday morning program, “Living the Circle of Life,” a show dedicated to the Indigenous people of Utah.
Born in Alaska with ancestry from three separate tribes, Peratrovich said she has experienced firsthand the connection that Indigenous people have with nature and the earth. Blackburn’s sentiments were much the same: “Impassioned,” Peratrovich said.
“As an Indigenous woman, it was crazy and relieving to know other people care; that I don’t have to be the only one … trying to push things forward,” Peratrovich said. “Someone sees me, and I see them.”
The three-student group began producing their documentary outside of a class or work setting, relying solely on personal equipment. Then, in the fall, Peratrovich enrolled in a documentary production course at SLCC and pitched their idea to the class as a potential pursuit for the semester. Much to Peratrovich’s surprise, the class selected her pitch.
Student Kolby Butts, who serves as co-director of the project, had also pitched coverage of the lake separately from Peratrovich. Butts said reading about the lake’s lowest recorded point last November prompted him to bring this pitch forward over other ideas he’d been considering.
“Our lives are on the line,” Butts said of his reasoning. “We’re now trying to preserve our spot in the future so we can continue for more generations. But in the current state of the world, we can’t do that.”
Butts hopes the documentary, with its features of expert voices and various images of the lake, can help more people connect with the issue and influences audiences to consider the perspective of Indigenous stewardship.
“The biggest goal of this was to bring this story into a new medium,” Butts said. “We’ve seen dozens upon dozens of articles … Reading stuff like that works, but I don’t think it gets the point across.”
As the student group readies to premiere the 30-minute documentary – which features interviews with Parry, water and climate professors, Carl Moore of PANDOS, and Elizabeth Kronk Warner, dean of the University of Utah school of law – their plan is not to move on but rather to expand what they’ve already created, with hopes of eventually creating a feature-length documentary.
“We’re going to the wisdom keepers, scholars and community members, and bringing them all together to find the commonality,” Peratrovich said.
Watch the trailer for Diverted: Indigenous Stewardship & Saving the Great Salt Lake.
Cristian Martinez wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. It is published as part of a new collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.
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We also request organizations include the following text either at the beginning or end of the story text :This story is jointly published by nonprofits Amplify Utah and [Your Media Organization's Name] to elevate diverse perspectives in local media through emerging journalism. Cristian Martinez wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. For more stories from Amplify Utah, visit amplifyutah.org/use-our-work.
An activist group at Brigham Young University is asking students across Utah to join a national college walkout next week, in an effort to fight homophobia on college campuses.
The Black Menaces — known for asking BYU students challenging questions about racism and equality, then posting the answers on TikTok— has teamed with the Religious Exemption Accountability Project to organize the “Strike Out Homophobia” walkout on Tuesday.
The aim of the walkout, organizers say, is to protest discrimination against the LGBTQ community and other minorities at colleges and universities operated by religious organizations.
“We are walking out to protest the end of legal discrimination by religious universities against queer individuals,” said Sebastian Stewart-Johnson, content coordinator and editor for the Black Menaces, in a TikTok video posted Sept. 6.
Brigham Young University is owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, through its Church Educational System — which also oversees Ensign College in Salt Lake City, BYU’s branches in Rexburg, Idaho, and Laie, Hawaii, the online BYU Pathway Worldwide, and a network of seminaries and institutes of religion.
Students on campuses across Utah and the nation are invited to participate, as organizers hope to get more than 100 colleges and universities involved. The walkout begins at noon Mountain Time on Tuesday. That day, Oct. 11, also is National Coming Out Day, the annual celebration of declaring publicly one’s LGBTQ identity.
Event organizers, on their website, say the goal is to bring Title IX protections — which prohibit sex-based discrimination in any school that receives federal funding — to private religious schools, which are largely exempt from the law.
Elisa Stone, a professor of English and queer studies at Salt Lake Community College and an advisor for the college’s queer student association, said she believes the walkout could be effective in prompting change.
“Peaceful protest is always impactful,” she said. “Anything we can do to get the attention of those who are choosing to oppress and let them know that the oppressed are rising up, that’s when things begin to shift.”
Student Resource Center (GSSRC), which works to support SLCC’s LGBTQ students throughout their education. The GSSRC holds activities and support groups and provides resources to women, LGBTQ students and allies.
Nizhoni Tsosie, an English student at SLCC who counts several BYU graduates in her family, said she would be interested in participating in the walkout.
The videos the Black Menaces make for TikTok, which have been going viral for months, paired with planning events like the walkout and participating in protests in Provo “takes guts,” Tsosie said.
“The Black Menaces have become notorious among my family,” she said. “I think they’re doing what all BIPOC students at BYU wish they could’ve done. It’s kind of amazing to see just a handful of students and a microphone make a whole school feel on edge.”
Haily Askerlund wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. It is published as part of a new collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.
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We also request organizations include the following text either at the beginning or end of the story text:
This story is jointly published by nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune to elevate diverse perspectives in local media through student journalism. Haily Askerlund wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. For more stories from Amplify Utah, visit amplifyutah.org/use-our-work.
