Leadership Team

November 27th, 2007 at 10:11pm Chris Tugwell Permalink

(link to David’s original proposal–df)

This posting is in support of David’s proposal to develop regional leadership teams. In my opinion, this is a wonderful way to reach a larger audiance than having one program filtered through the Y. The Y is near and dear to my heart, but we need to engage a lot of youth in this project. The regional leadership proposal has the ability to reach between 50 and 100 youth each year. If we can reach an additional 50 youth through service learning then we are talking 100 to 150 participants a year - that is good, powerful stuff.

Here are few other reasons I like the regional team approach:

As I stated above this approach has the potential to reach a lot of young people. This is great for marketing. Young people encouraging young people to use the site will develop a strong user base, especially if they have a positive experience (summer feedback indicates they will). I also believe our leadership team will participate in guerilla marketing. Hitting the streets with flyers, mouse pads, business cards… is a great way to build interest, and an approach One Economy uses when launching the Beehive in a new community. Southend kids marketing to southend kids is great. They are going to know where and when to reach the kids.

I love the grassroots feel to the regional approach as well. Getting young people to work on issues impacting their community is extremely powerful. Utilizing the Project Citizen model (Identify the problem, gather information, examine solutions, and develop an action plan) on a community/regional, as initial approach, will keep us from overwhelming the kids. They know what is wrong in their communities we just need to equip them with the methodology (like Project Citizen) and tools (digital storytelling, blogging) to share the issues. In my opinion, Improving civic awareness from a commuinty level up feels like the “right” way.

This approach also requires us securing space for weekly meetings. I suspect that the local library would be a great spot to hold our regional meetings. Providing space does not requre a lot of time or resources (staffing), but begins to develop a solid relationship. One that we can develop into something more down the road. In my opinion, a great early approach to involving the library system.

This approach also incorporates capacity building. In my opinion, there are far too many territorial organizations that hoard curriculum and take an elitist approach. Organizations with less resources sturggle when more successful organizations don’t or won’t share best practices or learning lessons. We can help alleviate this problem by partneingr with organizations in need of some assistance (if it makes sense and what we have to offer is valuabel) through a train-the-trainer approach. We provide curriculum and the first round of training and then they can continue the program the next time around.

How do we pull this off (a few ideas):

We will need to localize the application. We can create 4-5 regional applications (one for each team) and ask that providers distribute the correct application.

Partner with community based organizations in the areas we decide to run our leadership teams. One example would be Horn of Africa.

Identify those orgnaizations that we would like to work with or could benefit from a partnership with us.

Target alternative learning environments, like YEP, Opportunity Skyway…

Use the public library or partnering organizations to hold meetings.

Stagger the meetings and we can utilize the Y’s equipment. Utilize some of the funds to purchase more equipment that floats between the partners.

Develop a curriculum menu that we adhere to from beginning to end. For example, we’re all teaching video at the same time.

Turn all curriculum into powerpoint presentations - less expense and more mobile.

Questions:

We talked about staring the leadership team during the summer. Does this still work if we take a regional approach? How do we manage the 5 group during the summer when BC isn’t around? Do we do a two to four week training at the Y during the summer to teach some of the technical skills, like video production.

Participant retention will hinge on the relationship youth develop with their regional facilitator. How will the regional teams respond when every 11 weeks a new BC intern takes over the group? Is there a way to get one year commitments from BC interns?

How do we get BC interns ready for this type of commitment? What type of training do we offer? Do we need to offer? Is it fair to ask a BC intern to assist with video produciton if he/she has never participated in digital story telling?

If using BC interns is problematic then the Y can make this happen, but it would mean groups meet once per month. Or, we would need additional staff resources.

Entry Filed under: digital learning skills