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The following was adapted from NAYA program to reflect what a state wide program would look like. The purpose of this the proposed state wide program is to attach feathers (tools and resources) to a community-based circle (or support system) tribal and urban Indian youth.
The focus of the proposed program is to empower our youth as they reach towards high-school diploma and in doing so increase out entire community's capacity and effectiveness to address common barriers
During the initial assessment of the needs of our community, it became apparent that the programs that could be offered would be limited by the level he entire community had in the use and application of technology. A question was raised: Could we teach our youth how to apply technology and then match them up with projects that would help our community. A three year technical program was established to simply empower our youth to help solve our needs.
The first year develops skills that lay the foundation for producing web-ready communications: graphic design principles, storyboards, web development, shared project management skills such as interviewing and project scheduling, peer review, and redesign. Project activities focus on developing effective communications that can be deployed on the web. Students develop a variety of graphical images, an electronic portfolio, and a client website. A great deal of flexibility is allowed in the curriculum to allow the assignments to focus on the needs of the NAYA programs (Youth, Family and Community)
The second year builds on student design and development skills by focusing on rich media development as well as website design and development. Students work in on teams where community elders are considered clients. The student teams will merge on a single unit to apply their design and development skills to assist a single client. Their client is the Youth and Elders Council, and the project is to assisted in the development of the Elders Interviewing Project. This project will conduct video interviews on community members for historical purpose and to build the infrastructure needed to solve the critical issue addressing the community. They will produce for the community rich media communications such as digital narratives and rich media elements of client websites. They will focus on effective rich media design, multimedia storyboarding, design specifications, and iterative development with clients.
In the final year, the student development team will use the infrastructure created in years one and two to build an online community based on material staff had developed related to the issue of drug addition and improving mental health in our community. |
