Transmission Project

Anne has been invaluable to PCF and has helped us grow as an organization. She, with support from myself as well as Nick Reville, has taken Miro Community from an early-stage project to a fully-fledged platform that is serving many communities.

Anne is beginning to work on making Miro Community a self-sustaining pillar in PCF’s arsenal. She has began to develop a userbase that will support the project with monthly fees and/or contracts.

Anne has started work on a miro community site that aggregates feminist video content from all over the web. It has began taking a life of its own and has been written up on feminist blogs and in Bitch Magazine.

Scott created help guides, Webinars and supplemental materials to make the Grassroots.org Toolbox experience seamless for al Grassroots.org members. Scott took over the management of our NING social networking site in addition to streamlining our SEO consulting program and making the application process for the Social Venture Consulting program more efficient. Scott authored an extensive amount of content on our blog, such as the “Tool of the Week” series and our “Faces of Change” video series. In addition, Scott created estore.grassroots.org (a promotional products website resulting in 4% donations for Grassroots.org) and was an essential force in creating Interns.org on Wordpress. Scott’s positive, can-do attitude enabled him to complete every project he was asked to complete.

Scott ended up developing our NING Community Networking site. Scott fully took over this project from the design to the moderation of the site. Scott also took on the role of reaching out face-to-face with our local members, something he had a personal interest in and showed initiative in doing. In addition to promoting Grassroots.org through attending “GrassrootsCamp” NY Tech Meetup events, Scott got involved in the projects of our member orgs. For example, Scott volunteered his time to sketch/design a handbook for Grassroots.org member “Getting Tools to City Schools” and their sustainable binder project. Scott is a true joy to have in the office and his greatest accomplishment in my opinion is his positive contribution to morale.

This year, Kristofer took the lead in developing and formalizing the curriculum for our youth-led policy program, the Digital Expansion Fellowship (DEF). After taking feedback and evaluations from our first DEF summer project, Kristofer redesigned the summer curriculum into a full 8-week summer course for a new round of fellows. The new curriculum is a comprehensive training in media policy research; combing basics in digital journalism and an introduction to policy analysis. This summer the fellows used their newly acquired digital reporting skills to examined mobile broadband and cellphone policy from a community perspective. They produced a news feature looking at how a proposed bill requiring ID for prepaid cellphones would impact low income and immigrant communities. They also produced four cell phone literacy workshops that will be included in a collaborative tool kit project focused on expanding cell phone literacy.

People’s Production House proposed a large community media network project during the second application round of the Broadband Technology Opportunity Program. Our proposal brought together 21 New York City community organizations to imagine a constellation of community media centers across New York that would work as media production centers for a community news outlet. Kristofer was the main outreach organizer for this application. He helped recruit many of the organizations to the project proposal and coordinated a lot of the application process with the groups. While we weren’t awarded our BTOP grant, the organizing provided us with an opportunity to advance our goal of strengthening our community media network. We are taking the momentum from our BTOP organizing to develop a New York City Digital Justice Coalition. Throughout the year, Kristofer also engaged with other community media organizations to share or work, exchange ideas, and collaborate on larger national projects.

One of the goals that Kristofer set for him self was to help us develop workshops and training materials in Spanish. Kristofer lead our first Spanish language community journalism training in his first year as a VISTA and he wanted to take it further by developing media literacy tools that could accompany the trainings. This year Kristofer helped organize the first Spanish language track at the 2010 Allied Media Conference. In developing the Spanish language track, Kristofer engaged some organizations that serve the Spanish speaking in New York, helping to develop Spanish language community reporters.

In addition to the work completed in our project proposal, Kristofer also helped refine our 12-week media community journalism training curriculum. The curriculum needed an upgraded and he assisted with the process. Kristofer also helped strengthen ties to partner organizations through his involvement in organizing the Allied Media Conference and his participation in the Media Action Grassroots Network. Through these conferences and networks, Kristofer has helped facilitate projects on a national scope, including our upcoming Cellphone Literacy Toolkit, which is a collaboration between allies in New Mexico, California, and New York.

Scott worked with mentor Brittney Fosbrook to create an ongoing, nearly self-sustainable strategic plans for a volunteer-run program in our Community Technology Center. Scott created an online volunteer guide which contains all the “how to’s” and useful links for our volunteers.The guide also contains volunteers agreements and lab rules. Scott also worked with our Systems Administrator to create customized, bilingual computer profiles for our clients, making it easier for our guests to login and use the lab with minimal computer experience. Scott also cleaned up the space physically, getting rid of unused materials and installing useful information sheets for additional resources. In addition to volunteer outreach, Scott also conducted major outreach to clients and to our case management staff, so that they understand the resources available and their potential value to clients.

The volunteer program in the CTC has been successful in that it has increased lab attendance, increased volunteer engagement, and has decreased the amount of staff time necessary to run the lab. However, the CTC is not able to self-sustain on volunteers alone. Scott has been hired as a full-time employee, with half-time duties related to CTC coordination.

Scott was a key player in HPP’s first steps in social media, creating a Facebook and Twitter presence, as well as advising the development of our revamped website. This developed as the need was identified at HPP and matched Scott’s skills and interests.

With the help of our first-year DASC member, we have expanded collaborations with other community media centers in the state and region, sharing technology, marketing, educational content and curriculum to media centers and non-profit organizations.
-Increased communication with between two media centers to enable collaboration on several key projects including growing capacity of both organizations to fundraise, use technology tools, and manage staff and members.
-Increased communication enabling the implementation of new technology resources, including access to other center’s technical staff, new equipment for CMAP’s institutional network and engineering expertise from other centers.
-Increased CMAP’s ability to fundraise/build community awareness
-Helped to initiate new strategies to develop and share community content between centers.

Based on the success of the first year of this project, we are now in the second year, expanding to a statewide collaboration. For the first year, both organizations expanded our capacity through seeing the need to hire staff for fundraising, collaborated on grants that resulted in funding and staffing, and created an expanded collaboration program into our region. After the second year, we hope that agencies will work together regularly to continue this collaboration.

Our VISTA accomplished all of what was included in our project, but also helped to write grants for the organizations and learned development skills. He was hired by one of the media centers after the project to be a development assistant. He also became involved in developing the second year plan for our expanded collaboration.

Our CTC VISTA is the DISKovery Centers Accessibility Coordinator. She coordinated all of the meetings with staff and project partners. She also became our in-house AT specialist, and helped recommend our software and hardware purchases. She has developed advanced curriculum at Pacific Bridge. She has also coordinated and facilitated the access committee meetings. Our VISTA has also coordinated our Computer Adoption Program and has developed curriculum for the program. She has also trained staff on the Ubuntu Operating system so that staff can then teach the participants enrolled in our Computer Adoption Program.

Although we have partnered with other organizations that have given us a small number of users with disabilities, we are still short of our goals. Our VISTA has assisted on our outreach plan, and has developed outreach materials but both our centers in Little Tokyo and Echo Park are struggling increase our numbers.

Stephanie’s primary focus was to develop a marketing database and other technology tools to expand our membership. In the year that Stephanie spent with us we increased our membership by approximately 1/3.

Stephanie’s efforts lead to a significant increase in membership as well as developed a robust marketing and outreach database that will continue to be a valuable tool for our project.

Stephanie took on a number of ad hoc research and other projects based on her interest in immigration law and policy. She also helped to support our social networking initiatives and overall content management.

In addition to completing most of the assignments originally envisioned for John’s year with New Entry, John completed assignments which went well beyond the stated goals in the original proposal. In addition to the three workshop videos to be included in the online curriculum, John developed a Seedling Training video for on-line curriculum use.

The sustainability of John’s contributions will remain significant, well into the future. In addition to developing solid working curriculum for on-line use, John developed important foundations upon which New Entry curriculum can expand. John established a formula for production of workshop videos, on-line curriculum videos, and Farmer-to-Farmer Moments. This formula will be repeated with each new video which is produced into the future. John also converted our lending library of VHS tapes into DVDs to both extend the shelf life of the videos and make them available to clients with DVD players. John also participated in outreach activities and made important partnerships throughout the area.

The corps member created the website getconnectedoakland.org. She researched computer related resources (i.e. education and training, tech support, free internet hotspots, where to purchase or acquire a free refurbished computer) in Oakland and the surrounding area. This information is now available on the website. The member has also spent time creating fliers and other marketing tools to get the word out about the website to the citizens of Oakland. The member has also sat in on computer classes taught by other organizations and shared information with them about open source software and other free online resources that can enhance their current curriculum and training.

Now that the website is up and running, we can now refer our clientele to the website for any technology needs. We also use the website to locate resources and recommend them to the community we serve. The website will be maintained by staff members at OTX West. Former VISTA member, Jasmine, has been hired and will be one of the main people maintaining the site.

Jasmine also created online Google forms for our volunteer registration and computer class registration and sign in. We used paper registration forms and needed an easy way to convert our paper forms to online forms for easy access.

One of my main tasks is putting together our Annual Report. One of the more interesting elements of the report has been coordinating Chinese translations that accurately capture our programs; luckily there are staff members here who are able to help out with this.

The power of Facebook, Twitter, and many other forms of social media continue to fascinate me. We have some really innovative urban planning, human development, and youth-based programs which I think have great potential to be marketed using social media. It will be a good experiment to see just what is possible using these up and coming tools.

I have been able to apply my IST monies towards an accounting class. While at first glace an accounting class may not seem relevant to my marketing and communications work, it has been beneficial as I am gaining a greater understanding of how my organization operates. Additionally, it has helped me draft the important financial sections of our annual report, and compile content for charity rating websites which closely examine non-profit finances.