CTC Community Outreach
Organization:
Bass Museum of Art VISTA Name:
Molly Park
Program Start:
6/2002
Program End:
6/2003
Project Description:
Goal #1: Improve marketing of programs and resources in order to draw a larger, multilingual segment of the community for Open Studio hours and other programs.
Goal #2: Build partnerships with local schools, job placement agencies, and new media companies to facilitate the exchange of resources and opportunities
Goal #3: Increase the sustainability of the program and the Lab through entrepreneurial strategies and capacity building
Project Outcome:
Molly has worked consistently to improve marketing through various efforts: identifying untapped resources (i.e., high school interns from an arts magnet school who can create fliers for the lab), making ongoing marketing more consistent (by working with the museum’s PR and Marketing person), and helping ensure that information about the program on our website is up-to-date. During the first quarter, she coordinated an Open House for the community classes program (which is targeted towards artists and professionals and designed to bring in revenue) that drew approximately 60 attendees (a definite increase over the last under-attended Open House) and was supported through sponsorship by Bacardi.
Molly cultivated contacts with artists and graphic designers, a company that produces multimedia and graphics presentations for use in courtrooms and legal cases, Miami-Dade Community College, and Miami Ad School, which we can use when finding internship opportunities for youth program participants this summer and at the end of the school year. She has also compiled valuable online resources about career possibilities in the arts and new media, and will be contributing to a section of our forthcoming online curriculum guide, The Documentary Project: A How-to Manual (funded by the America Connects Consortium Field Innovation Grants program). Recently, Molly also initiated and coordinated a visit to the program from a professional graphic design and storyboard artist, who talked to youth program participants about career opportunities available to them and his experiences working for MTV, The Discovery Channel, Sony, and other companies.
The AmeriCorps VISTA project has helped grow the capacity of the program in many ways, including by beginning to improve our systems of documentation, evaluation, and tracking. Molly has been working on developing an Access database which would improve on the previously existing one by allowing staff to track class registration, Open Studio (drop-in) members, and demographic and contact information in the same place and produce better reports. She has also augmented research of funding sources and developed ideas for ways that the Lab can be more self-sustaining, including by restructuring class registration fees.