Transmission Project

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.

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.

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

Stephen was the primary link between HOME, Inc. and Brighton High School. providing technical support to four teachers and supporting teachers in two media classes by helping to develop curriculum, provide professional development support including support to the teachers as they learned new computer applications. Stephen provided additional help to some of the students and helped our Media Lab Coordinator organize his work and program at Social Justice Academy. Stephen updated our website and helped develop and update our summer Teen TV content management system for our six week long summer intensive.

Stephen is a dedicated, sensitive and creative teacher who in his low key style gains the trust of hardened and skeptical teachers and students at the schools. He has outstanding problem solving skills and accepts most difficulties with grace and a can do attitude. Stephen was able to provide a high degree of leadership during our summer Teen TV intensive, providing both technical and creative support that encouraged staff and students to excel. His work on our website has helped to ensure that the content management system will continue to be an important factor in our organization’s growth and success.

Doreen attends collaborative meetings at Baden Street Center, Monroe County Youth Bureau, and Webster Recreation Center on a regular basis. She participates in their dance programs (Partner with Dazzle Theatre) and sports and health programs. She was instrumental in having 15 students participate in a filmmakers project, a collaboration between youth organizations, agencies, churches, WXXI, University of Rochester, and Road To Success. Youth were given an RCA video camera to shoot a 3 minute film. She instituted a case-management component to keep the participants/youth focused on their assignments/goals. She was able to recruit a significant number of volunteers over the period under review to repair computers, do etiquette training, and work on filmakers project.

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.

Carrie Cook Carrie has focused on developing our internal systems that support expanding services to low-income individuals. She has developed our tutorial for embedding digital stories in community maps and assisted with the development of digital stories for a Tuscaloosa, Alabama-based project supporting residents of low-income housing. She has also been involved with developing outreach materials for the silence speaks project and a blog for educators who are implementing skills learned in our workshops in their classrooms. The blog will allow them to more effectively utilize digital storytelling with their stories. In addition, she supported website development and local event organizing for the International Day for Telling Life Stories. She will also participate in strengthening our internal digital story archiving system.

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.

The VISTA member worked along with SEDC staff to improve communication and collaboration throughout the agency. She developed a sustainable communications strategies, including starting up SEDC Web-site and maintained the site throughout. She interviewed staff and wrote the contents for the web. She established newsletter and distributed widely in the community. She also assisted in setting up computer lab for after school children to use. She spearheaded on all of these projects by collaborating with SEDC staff. The projects that she worked on are still active and we hope to continue it for many more years.