Transmission Project

Megan was an important part of the training aspect of the station, both for on-air DJ’s and the journalism group. She participated fully in the classes and helped in preparation. She built relationships with the youth, helping them do the best possible jobs in their shows and working with them as they produced journalism for our blog. She was specifically in charge on a class on interviewing techniques. She also helped set up field trips and accompanied students on those trips. She helped make sure that assessments and evaluations properly conducted. She ran her own radio program, modeling the way radio should be done. This work was all conducted under the supervision of the station coordinator, Steve Provizer, who also worked with Megan to write and design underwriting materials which we are now using to connect with local East Boston businesses. She was often called upon to help publicize the work of the station and Zumix in general, by preparing publicity material and helping to organize mailings. Megan was a full participant in staff meetings and helped determine organizational policies.

As previously stated, we are extending Megan’s work on underwriting. The database work she did in the course of helping with publicity have served Zumix well. Also, she prepared documents with procedures, passwords, etc., that have helped make the transition to our new VISTA very smooth.

Nate developed at least 5 partnerships with various businesses on his own and many smaller individual donors. These connections continue to provide ongoing computers for HCN.

He also negotiated a 200 computer purchase at a very nominal fee, picked them up, loaded and unloaded them, and found a place to have them stored.

Nate revised brochures, and a variety of new donor letters, flyers were completed.

He submitted a grant application to Leadership Greensboro which resulted in a team of four local business leaders to help him develop a marketing package, a promotional DVD (still in the works), a lead database and 3 large computer donors. One donor at a local hospital brings 25-40 computers a month.

Nate was especially successful with media through press releases, resulting in TV news coverage three times (videos on our website), one school distribution had 3 local channels show up to cover it. Another grant he submitted to a Create-A-Thon, a local marketing firm, has resulted in a large banner for use at events. It came in very handy and was used 4 times during Nate’s service.

He was instrumental in making many updates, changes and fine tuning our website. He developed the Virtual Tour and has agreed to continue to keep the HCN website fresh and up to date. Nate coordinated all computer distributions which included 71 to the families at Hairston Middle School, 77 to Newcomers School (all immigrants from 8 different countries), 60 to another local immigrant community and sometimes with the help of the Executive Director but often on his own he delivered 50 computers to Group homes (for adults with disabilities) throughout the state of NC. These distributions are very time- and staff intensive; having a Vista take the majority of the responsibility helped other staff to do their respective jobs more effectively. Just before he left, Nate submitted a grant for $30,000 for another local school distribution. We recently received the letter stating we were awarded $25,000.

We have a great website, new ongoing partners, so many computers we have to store them off site, new relationships, an inventory database that makes life easier and some big shoes to fill. (We offered Nate a job, but he declined). We are sustaining Nate’s work by hiring the previous Vista, Anna Simanovitch, in a part time Admin. Assistant role. We have also worked out a consulting contract with Nate to continue web updates, write grants, help complete the Annual Report and in many other ways we we may need to use his expertise and knowledge of our organization .

We have a much more robust SSC community and processes, which will help us to continue growing the platform and making it more valuable to the nonprofit community. We hired Matt as a full-time contractor, and he will continue the work he has begun.

Matt helped set a community tone at the SF Nonprofit Technology Center, serving as a friendly team member and ambassador for the organization. Matt also helped establish our new ANSWR platform, working on platform development and content development. This project is an extension of our SSC project, and builds on the SSC work he did.

Vilmala has been extraordinary at implementing a web based presense for the A-VOYCE program. Her skill in this areana has helped facilitate more open communication amongst and between the youth. The youth have a strong bond of trust with her and she has been a good role model and capable teacher for them. She has done a remarkable job at running the radio station, something she had no experience with before she came to ACDC. She is fearless when it comes to tackling challenges and issues and she does it with minimal supervision.

Shortly after she arrived at ACDC, we had the opportunity to partner with the CITGO-Venezuela Energy Efficient Lighting Program in partnership with Citizens Programs Corporation to implement a pilot program that would provide compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) and energy efficiency education. The Program provided low-income households with educational materials on energy efficiency and energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulbs. Vimala took the project on and became proficient at delivering workshops and training to the Chinese community where she did not speak the language and faced overwhelming interest. ACDC was literally flooded with requests and the project took on a life of it’s own. Vimala handled this by recruiting chinese speaking residents to assist in teaching workshops and helping to handle the volume of people who flooded to ACDC to participate in the program. It also required a lot of community outreach, translation of materials and finding ways to communicate when there were cultural and linguistic barriers. The program was a smashing success, in large measure, because of Vimala’s attention to detail and open communication with board, staff, volunteers and community members. The program raised $22,972 for A-VOYCE which was a real boost for the program.

With regard to student recruitment, Davina developed a brochure and created a calendar/plan for student recruitment. The plan identifies events where we might canvas for students, identifies contacts, who attends, and whether the event was a useful recruitment event. In addition, it includes action steps for non-event related recruitment opportunities. Davina also added recruitment contacts to our database and created materials for the student recruitment display board.

The Grad Cenetral program did not get started until mid April so we did not ask Davina to work on this.

Davina scheduled 29 student and mentor workshops (more than our goal) and identified volunteers to lead all workshops. This is a tremendous help to staff as they do not have time to lead the workshops and in prior years we were able to offer fewer workshops because of this.

Davina became our tech wizard. She maintained the computers in the learning labs. She also did a lot of work on our website, including creating PHP forms which allowed us to create forms that aid in our ability to collect data for evaluating purposes. She also created applications that made it easy for volunteers to sign up to volunteer and report tech issues.

Other forms allow us to see what our students have done in the lab each day – something that has been missing from our program – and will be helpful in planning and securing future funding. Davina also taught herself captcha which added security to our web based forms. Davina mostly worked independently on these tasks but sought staff input when necessary. She worked most closely with Dolly Joseph, our Program Director.

Meghan Daniels accomplished the initial goals of creating a policy and system for training our members on the NPNnola.com website, a posting policy for the E-Newsletter, as well as guides for our internal Salesforce.com database.

What we were not able to accomplish was to increase the rate of postings by members who were trained to upload information on their profiles. While there was a general trend upward in the number of postings by members that received a web workshop, the frequency was not as high as we desired. Other challenges we were faced with involved programming issues with our developer, who had created the website on a proprietary system, thus making basic but essential adjustments a hassle.

Our organization has been able to leverage the success of Meghan Daniels’s work to secure funding for a part time assistant. Meghan’s guides, systems and policies have streamlined our communications platforms.

At the time of our proposed project, we were not aware that our office systems would make a transition to a Salesforce (CRM) database. Meghan Daniels helped vet the system and create user-friendly guides for incoming staff and volunteers. This has proven to be invaluable as it provides a quick and easy-to-use tutorial of the Salesforce.com database.

During the first six months of 2008-2009, Janet was instrumental in producing several new training and curriculum resources — some content-rich and some with the purpose of media/technology application/integration. These included an extensive draft curriculum centered on the historic local Chinese burial grounds of Mount Hope Cemetery that included production of three new digital stories.

She provided critical programming leadership in the organizing of a major Asian American youth symposium in November 2008 that included workshops on Media Justice, Web 2.0 resources, digital storytelling, Asian American history, and community activism.

She also constructed an important database of active Asian American youth and Asian American educators from the metro Boston area.

During the final six months, Janet focused on the launching of the Dorchester Youth Initiative (DYI) — a CAPAY-led program to address critical issues facing Vietnamese American youth and their families and community in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. Janet designed much of the content-rich curriculum with an emphasis on youth/community media. Given the limited capacity of other Vietnamese American community-based organizations to focus on youth issues, Janet also worked to establish crucial relationships with a range of community partners, leading to the organizing and documentation of youth/parent forums in the community. She was primarily supported by the CAPAY coordinator, Tri Quach, and a team of three bilingual Vietnamese American college students from UMass Boston whom she recruited as volunteers to help with the launching and implementation of the DYI.

Janet was not able to devote as much time/effort to the fundraising aspects listed in the position description as we had initially hoped would be possible. She did assist with one major fundraising event (an Asian community dessert tasting held at the Vietnamese American Community Center in Dorchester that benefitted CAPAY and other collaborating organizations). She also researched potential funding sources and developed a useful outline for new funding proposals, but did not actually submit any completed proposals during her term of service.

We were able to achieve most of our significant goals, and also to complete additional items not on the original work plan.

Four Grassroots.org tools are now fully documented with help guides and easy-to-understand information for our membership, which will be valuable as we increase our member base. Our blog content helps convert visitors to members, and there is now a framework for our blog. The positive testimonials will help boost membership and funding prospects. We have also opened up our blog for members and supporters to post their testimonials. Please find it here: http://www.grassroots.org/blog Grassroots.org now has a newsletter template ready to be used monthly. Our e-mail list has grown from 600 to 8000+ contacts, and our monthly content has produced a loyal group of readers. (We currently sustained less than 1% unsubscribe rate). Alice developed seven significant programmatic partnerships, which resulted in on going referrals for membership at Grassroots.org. The partners include some of the best nonprofit umbrella organizations in the country. For a full list please go here: http://www.grassroots.org/support/program-partners Developed a you tube channel site, include new overview videos for potential members and potential donors. Please go here to see: http://www.youtube.com/user/GrassrootsDotOrg Developed an earned media outreach plan, which resulted in multiple significant media mentions. This included ABCnews.com, PC world, Tech Soup, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Please see our media page for more info: http://www.grassroots.org/news We have grown our membership from 680 members to over 2,000. We have increased the rate of usage for our tools. In previous years, we averaged about $200,000 in free services being given away. In the past year we have given away over $2 million in services.

n the beginning, Katrina centered on constructing infrastructure in KKCS’s practices and procedures. She has worked with the Head of School to develop institutional policies and procedures, and worked diligently to implement effective and efficient practices in the After School Program. Through recruiting and training volunteers, she has expanded the number of people working with students, thus lessening the student to teacher radio. She has worked to build an efficient Healthy Snack Program which provides the After School students with nutritious and balanced snacks every day. Katrina also has her sights set on the long term impacts that technology can make on KKCS and has been a part of the planning process for our student and school database. Through these and many more tasks, her comprehensive understanding of both the day to day operation as well as the long term goals have helped to bring KKCS to a higher level.

For the first time, Math/English is offered in the After-School program. Katrina designed the curriculum which follows the Boston Public School standards, recruited student teachers from colleges and Boston Latin School to teach these subjects two days a week for two hours each day. Katrina has also provided additional resources such as lesson planning templates, sample lesson plans and best practices. The Math/English program continues to be offered in the After-School program.

Though Katrina drafted several of the school handbooks, none were adopted. In an effort to gain input and feedback, it was hoped that separate constituient committees conisisting of teachers, parents and students would be formed. This was not done. Time and resources were the challenge. KKCS’s website updating was not addressed by the school administration. The Parent Teacher Association had several starts, but did not get organized. This is a brand new concept to KKCS; the appropriate leadership needs to be identified.

Elizabeth has assisted the education department in all of the stated areas, and has built a solid framework for a sustainable youth channel program. She launched the Youth Media Club, a new program which has attracted new youth to Media Bridges. She produced several videos with elementary school students as part of a 20-week outreach class at a local public school, which initiated an ongoing partnership with the school. She applied for a $1,000 grant to fund our summer camp program. She recruited two high school interns through a media internship program for minority high school students. She also established Media Bridges as a partner organization for a media career exploration program for high school students sponsored by an association of journalism professionals. She developed a youth policies and procedures handbook for Media Bridges, opening the door to more youth involvement in the future. She expanded the youth channel from a four hour block of programming per week, with an additional youth block timeslot for college student productions. She structured the youth page on the new web site, manages the content of the page providing information about the youth program to the public, and has also developed social networking outreach through Twitter, and avenues for video distribution through youtube, vimeo, ListenUp, and local youth filmmaking site IndieViz.

Establishing a youth leadership board was part of our original plan for the youth channel, but that was not completed. The initial lack of youth involved with the organization made that difficult and also unrealistic at this time. Elizabeth has been able to recruit youth participants, which will pave the way for a youth leadership board in the future. There has not been a full-scale volunteer management system put into place for the youth program. Although Elizabeth recruited volunteers and worked with staff to improve volunteer procedures, the Media Bridges volunteer management system is in the process of restructuring, so a youth volunteer management system was put on hold until a better structure is implemented by the operations department. In the meantime, Elizabeth has worked to create opportunities for youth volunteers and has streamlined youth volunteers into the overall volunteer process

Although it was not originally included in the project proposal, Elizabeth created, designed and maintained a youth section on the Media Bridges Web site, created social network outreach (Twitter, Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook) and established additional distribution methods for youth-produced videos online, through video-sharing sites. At the beginning of her service year, the Media Bridges Web site had no information regarding youth programs and was not being updated because we were in the middle of a redesign. When the new site went live, Elizabeth became active in overall site maintenance, specifically in creating the youth section