Transmission Project

We hope to secure a VISTA member to work out of our Sacramento office to increase the capacity of our organization to communicate, collaborate, and share best practices between our two regional offices.

As a growing organization, we expect to open additional regional offices as our flagship program, California Voices, expands throughout the state. The Sacramento regional office is our first attempt to grow outside of the Fresno region. While the Sacramento office has been highly successful in expanding programming and project partnerships in the Sacramento region, we have realized our need for capacity building as an organization, so that we may create standard internal systems which allow our organization to communicate and collaborate between the two current regional offices and continue to offer quality programming as the number of regional offices grows in the future. The pace of program growth in the Sacramento region has made it clear that capacity building and internal systems development is timely, needed, and would enhance our ability to provide quality programming that increases community engagement.

We seek a VISTA member who can work directly under the Sacramento Regional Director to research and develop the following internal systems:
- Create hiring and training materials for new staff
- Create standardized premiere planning materials
- Create standardized systems for management training and staff supervision at the regional office level
- Create standardized instructor training workshops
- Create standardized electronic communication systems between offices
- Create standardized staff trainings and guidelines for working with youth
- Create material supplementing the California Voices training manual, focusing on higher-level filmmaking techniques
- Create standardized film distribution resource lists, including social media avenues, film festivals, and community radio/TV avenues

This project is timely and would increase community engagement for several reasons. As digital media has become more accessible in recent years, we now have the opportunity to engage young people from economically disadvantaged neighborhoods to share unique perspectives from different cultures and backgrounds. With the Web2.0 tools available, we also have the chance to engage young people across the state in dialogue surrounding some of the critical issues that we face as a state, nation, and society.

This project relates to other activities of our organization because we hope to use success in Sacramento to expand the opportunity for young people to engage in participatory media around the state. Future expansion out of our two current offices will be driven by success in Sacramento, and we hope to engage youth participants throughout California over the next five years.