Center for Multicultural Cooperation

Location:
Fresno, CA

The Center for Multicultural Cooperation (CMC) creates youth service and leadership opportunities that connect generations, cultures, and communities. CMC promotes educational programs for social and civic responsibility, service-learning, media, art, history and multicultural cooperation. We mobilize young people to become civically engaged, use technology to serve their community, and honor the ideals and legacy of those whose stories they preserve.

Project Description: 

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.

Project Tangibles: 
Much could be shared with the field from this project. This would include information and documents in relation to connecting a participatory media organization across regions, digital storytelling curriculum and educational resources, in addition to media created by the young people involved. Specifically, this will include: 1) A lesson plan to train educators in digital storytelling 2) A sample project plan to increase capacity for CMC 3) Documented process for an organizations staff to do regular updates and load them into an email newsletter and website 4) Documented process for an organization to use social media to better document and publicize their work

Supported Projects



Website and Social Media Development

Colleen Beach
9/20099/2011

Colleen has been extremely important to our organization and has spent the past year on a variety of projects that help us to better communicate and collaborate internally and externally. She made upgrades to our CaliforniaVoices.org website and she also upgraded CMCWEB.org to a newer version of Joomla. She designed and implemented a new contact database, created a social media strategy (includes facebook, twitter, and more), and researched a number of open source software solutions for our organization.

She will continue 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.

The VISTA will research and develop the following internal systems:
- build the capacity of the CMC Sacramento office to communicate/collaborate with the CMC Fresno office and implement CMC programs in Sacramento community.
- 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

Colleen Beach was responsible for a variety of Web2.0 efforts including work on CMC web efforts including cmcweb.org, californiavoices.org, and CMC Facebook and Twitter pages. Colleen also organized efforts to create an online contact database and e-newsletter for CMC. Our VISTA member came to the project with extensive knowledge of Web2.0, and did considerable research and self-training in areas where she needed additional expertise.






Marketing and Curriculum Development

Rich Beckermeyer
7/20097/2010

Richard Beckermeyer led efforts to develop media curriculum and marketing materials for CMC’s California Voices program. This included the updating of an 80-page curriculum focused on digital storytelling and civic engagement in the after-school environment. Richard collaborated with about a half dozen staff in two regions to make the required changes and update the graphical appeal of the new curriculum. Richard was also helpful in troubleshooting technology and equipment problems in our Sacramento office and training staff in new programs.




Transmission Project