Engaged Youth » Partnership Plan 11/6/07: Please Comment

Partnership Plan 11/6/07: Please Comment

November 6th, 2007 at 10:50am Toby Campbell Permalink

Hello, all! Please review the plan of action for partnerships over the next few weeks below. If you could respond with a blog comment to a) let us know whether this plan looks good to you, and b) indicate whether you have any personal contact with anyone at the organizations listed, we’ll go ahead and begin contacting these potential partners.

THE ASK: We will be asking contacts whether they can provide us with content that we can put on our website, crediting them as the source, for our website soft/hard launch.

THE INVITATION: In turn, they will be invited to attend our soft launch party. This will provide an opportunity for them to see what we’re doing, see their content on the site, and to help test the website if they are interested. This is also an opportunity to begin thinking about ways we might be able to work together as the site launches and grows.

THE CONVERSATION: We will use our conversations with potential partners as an opportunity to informally inquire about possibilities for further collaboration in the future, whatever form this may take.

THE ORGANIZATIONS:
1. Youth in Focus: They produce youth photography. Amber has an existing relationship with staff there we could build on.
2. Seattle Public Library: The MacArthur grant stipulates that we will work with the library, so it is important we continue to explore this option. There may be a way we can get involved with their May All Ages Arts Night, which Toby and Chris discussed with Jennifer when they met with her. Amber will follow up to coordinate.
3. Pongo Publishing: This is a new organization with potential content to contribute. Chris has made contact with them, and they have expressed interest in partnering at some level.
4. Artworks: Have a website but don’t display student work on it. Perhaps they would be interested in contributing photographs of past student work on the PSO website.
5. Power of Hope: Their mission is “youth empowerment through the arts.” They have a website but use it to promote programming and do not post youth works. They may be interested in partnering with us, so it’s worth a conversation.
6. Arts Corps: Arts Corps offers free arts education classes to kids in grades K-12. They have a very limited amount of work posted on their website, so it would be worth reaching out to them to have a conversation.

HOW? Who will contact these organizations in the near future?
Amber: Youth in Focus, Seattle Public Library
Chris Tugwell: Pongo Publishing
Toby: Artworks, Power of Hope, Arts Corps

WHAT’S NEXT? Once we’ve talked to some initial content-producing partners, it seems like the next outreach should be to organizations that explicitly work with diverse youth.

Entry Filed under: partner strategy

3 Comments Add your own

1. Chris Tugwell | November 6th, 2007 at 9:00 pm

Some other obvious partners are the YMCA Earth Service Corps (YESC) Program and the Mayors Youth Council.

YESC already indicated they would manage a group page. I don’t believe the director fully understood the concept, but she’s willing to give it a go. The group would probably be managed by their youth council.

YESC isn’t just a Y program. They actually provide stipends to schools that use the YESC model. This could lead to more environmental groups forming to share the work being done at each school.

I also believe we can get MYC involved. The program serves a lot of youth over the school year. One of their agenda items is to identify issues, research the issues, and present their findings to the mayor. It would be awesome if each issue team managed a PSO group and shared their work and findings with the larger community.
2. Deen Freelon | November 12th, 2007 at 5:31 pm

This looks great so far, Toby. My main question would be: what is the timeline for putting this plan into action? People have expressed some reservations about getting our partners in on the act too far in advance of the launch, for fear of them not taking us seriously (a la the Vera Project). I guess if we let them know about the grant money behind it and maybe show the prototype site, they might be more inclined to tentatively promise support.
3. Toby Campbell | November 15th, 2007 at 10:20 am

Deen, yours is a good question. For now, I think we might just want to start initiating some casual conversations to introduce ourselves to potential partners and see if they’d be interested in providing a bit of content for the launch. It will have to be an incremental process though, as we do still have several months before the site launches. These are just some ideas about how to get some conversations going for the time being, and to see how potential partners react to the possibility of working with us.
I will go ahead and contact the partners I’ve indicated for myself here, and we can continue our conversation as Amber and Chris talk to the organizations they are in touch with as well.