Digital Arts Service Corps - teens

Month Seven: DIY Productions!

Melissa Niiya — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 18:10:37 +0000

Long time no field report. In the past few months, there has been a lot of progress and change. Tiffany is our new and awesome VISTA, and with her added support, DIY Media (a program to train youth in documentary filmmaking, social media, etc) has launched. I've been working with her and staff to develop the curriculum for this project.

We're also moving along with DIY Productions. As we build our base of creative and motivated teens through the DIY Media program, we hope to draw from this pool and build a social enterprise where teens make media for non-profits. I made a promo that will become one in our portfolio of films to show potential clients. You can view it here:http://www.youtube.com/user/digitalhistories#p/u/5/sp0t6U0PUJU

I've also been working on a website for DIYP. There was a little hiccup where we had disagreement on colors/design (of course, after building out the whole site...yarrgh) but I think it's now settled and we're running with the attached mockup.

Moving forward, I surveyed residents at one of our low income housing buildings and it seems that most are very pro-internet and don't want us to cut it off... so these results could support an effort to raise capital for wired internet at our buildings... I'm not sure it's feasible to do this in the remaining months, but we'll see. It will be difficult to get organizational support for what could be a lengthy and expensive project. But given that most of the residents surveyed cannot afford internet service and yet use and need it...well... I think it'd be worth it!

A couple videos the kids made.

Tony ORourke — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:39:26 +0000

Click To Play

Hope you all are enjoying your last few weeks as Vistas!

Teen Digital Storymapping Workshop in Lower Roxbury

danielle martin — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 12:58:12 +0000

I just finished a digital storytelling and mapping workshop that included over 10 youth who stayed creative and excited to share their stories even in 90 degree heat without AC! It's a project I've been working on pretty much since the beginning of this VISTA year, by meeting with folks from the Lower Roxbury Empowerment Coalition, a group of housing developments and non-profit programs who are trying to create inter-neighborhood partnerships and tap into Northeastern University outreach programs. Jayme Bonds, who works tirelessly at Mandela Homes, participated in one of my train-the-trainers this spring and got pretty adamant about me working with youth leaders from her summer programs. We decided to open it up to as many local housing development summer programs as we could get together, and it worked out well. We even got a couple participants from Worcester!

I gathered some MassIMPACT folks and got Colleen Kelly, now former CTC VISTA and employee at Emerson College, to come help facilitate. The group of youth were all girls except for one, well spoken young man George, who all had interesting and personal stories to share. It was a big group for a digital storytelling workshop (over 15 folks working on stories at once) but it worked out fine to split the group into two story circles and we had enough experienced storytellers floating around to help with the one-on-one support. Several of the youth also really excelled at the technical side, so they were finished with their stories by the beginning of the third day. So we had them publish their stories on StoriesForChange.net and help build the Google Map...and then show others how to do it as well. We're hoping to do a few follow-up two-hour workshops over the summer to help support these youth in their quest to teach digital storytelling to other younger residents.

I also owe big thanks to Royal and Paulette at Camfield Estates for hosting, and for Jayme Bonds from Mandela Homes for providing the food. The final stories are posted at StoriesforChange.net http://storiesforchange.net/event/teen_digital_storymapping_bootcamp and all linked off the Google Map at http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=1015076548696853...
There's also more photos on Flickr.