Long Beach YMCA Youth Institute

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About the Program

The YMCA Youth Institute provides an afterschool youth development program at the YMCA of Greater Long Beach / Community Development Branch, California, which integrates technology into literacy, media arts, career development, and civic engagement projects for academic success. High school youth start this program during the summer to work through team-building and diversity-awareness exercises, and participate in a further intensive technology program during the year. About 50 to 70 participants enroll in this program every year and become "high-school alumni" once they graduate from the summer program. Then they participate in the after school program all through their high school years.

The Goals of This Program:

• To embody principles of youth development/engagement that lead youth towards academic success
• To guide youth in developing academic, career-oriented, and technology skills through a program model framework for service-learning and project-based learning

Program Activities:

The entire curriculum of this program is organized as project-based learning that coaches the high-school participants to work as a group. Below are examples of the program activities:

Example 1) Digital movie and music-making: This is a literacy project where the participants focus on brainstorming ideas as a group and turning the ideas into a story with a Word document. While writing the movie story, they create a storyboard and compose a script, which are the bases for creating a three-dimensional movie using DV Cameras and movie editing software such as Final Cut 4 and iMovie. The participants also create their own digital music to insert into the movie using music keyboards and Reason music software.
Example 2) Teen magazines: The participants develop their own Teen Magazine working with Adobe software including Photoshop, PageMaker, Indesign, and Illustrator. Through issues and stories that the youth want to explore, they acquire journalism skills in addition to digital graphics skills.
Example 3) Team logo-producing: The participants also produce team logos for their "production company" using 3D animation software called Cinema 4D. Through this project, the youth cultivate a positive attitude to collaborative team projects while acquiring production and digital arts skills.
Example 4) Relationship training: To enrich the project-based learning in a group, "diversity training," "team-building," and "leadership-building" trainings are provided so that the participants learn to build supportive and constructive relationships with their peers and adult mentors.

Funding Sources:

• James Irvine Foundation
• Community Technology Foundation of California
• California Consumer Protection Foundation
• The Knight Foundation
• 21st Century High-school Afterschool Initiative