RANCHO SANTIAGO COMMUNITY COLLEGE DISTRICT (17) - 2012

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The program aims to provide participants services in the following areas: Work Experience, Vocational Training and Certification in Digital Media Technology, educational support, civic engagement and leadership development, entrepreneurship training, life skills development, college skills development, job search training, mentorship, and follow-up services. Classes will be conducted by qualified teaching staff from Rancho Santiago Community College, and will be supplemented by workshops in academic and life skills development conducted by library and project staff. Work experience will occur as appropriate: in the library, in the digital Media Center, and in the field, as interns complete projects that explore and document the needs of their community. The amount requested to provide these services is $168,545.00 B.Program Description The "Seeds to Trees Digital Media Technology Academy" program developed by the Santa Ana Public Library in partnership with the Rancho Santiago Community College District's (RSCCD) Corporate Training Institute (CTI) program is a free comprehensive apprenticeship program comprised of paid training and work- experience student internships for 20 youth ages 16-21 leading to certifications in the fields of digital media technology. Of these 20 WIA eligible student interns, 8 youth (40%) will be "Out-Of-School Youth" (ages 16- 21) and 12 youth (80%) will be "In-School Youth" (ages 16-21). This program will promote the Santa Ana Youth Council's (SAYC) vision for Santa Ana Youth by creatively addressing each one of the major target areas in the SAYC's vision. Having identified the need for community savvy digital content producers, the Santa Ana Public Library and RSCCD will provide an opportunity for youth participants to learn valuable job skills while contributing to their community's knowledge of youth related issues. While the program has a certain amount of structured content creation, the students themselves will be given a large amount of opportunity to voice their own unique perspective on the issues facing Santa Ana youth. By tapping into this creative partnership between the SAPL and the RSCCD, both institutions will increase their capacity to serve youth patrons. Advances in information technology have inundated the lives of millions with a vast amount of media. User generated content has fast become a source of news, entertainment, and artistic expression for an entire generation of web savvy individuals. As e-commerce continues to grow at faster rates than the rest of the economy, the ability to express one's insights with multimedia presentations has become an increasingly marketable skill. Those individuals with the proper training and knowledge of digital creation tools will be in a prime position to excel in a 21St century economy. Many of our local youth are already naturally web savvy and are open to the idea that they could one day follow a career in digital content creation. In this way, the digital media academy taps into a youth's desire for self expression and teaches valuable work skills in the process. The program aims to provide participants services in the following areas: Work Experience, Vocational Training and Certification in Digital Media Technology, educational support, civic engagement and leadership development, entrepreneurship training, life skills development, college skills development, job search training, mentorship, follow-up services. Work Experience (Santa Ana Public Library): Upon WIA eligibility determination and acceptance into the "Seeds to Trees Digital Media Technology Academy", all 20 youth participants will be hired as work experience employees (WEX) for a period of 9 weeks. Participants will work 8 hours a week, and of that 4 hours will be in-class training and the other 4 hours will be on-the job work experience as production crews responsible for creating content and programming that will be broadcasted on Santa Ana's library-run CTV3 station and website. After the initial 9 week WEX experience, all 20 participants will be hired on as paid library page student interns with the Laura Bush grant program and will be put on the payroll of the Parks and Recreation Department of which the Santa Ana Public Library is a division. Participants will work 9 hours a week, and of that 4 hours will be in-class training and the other 5 hours will be on-the job work experience as production crews. They will focus primarily of producing health and fitness related programming and pre- production research and development on other programming topics such as "Green Living", history and news. The work-experience occurs concurrently with the class-room training in a project-based learning approach, because it gives interns an opportunity to immediately put their in-class skills to work. This portion of the work Exhibit A