About
VOICES is a community-based nonprofit organization in Tucson, Arizona.Founded in 1999, our mission is to mentor low-income youth to tell their personal, family, neighborhood, tribal, and community stories so they can strengthen their cognitive, artistic, emotional, leadership, and higher education skills. Youth who are creative, resilient, educated and active citizens are youth who benefit themselves, their families and our community now and in the future.
HOW MANY WE SERVE AND WHERE
Our service area is Pima County. We typically serve between 75 and 100 unduplicated youth per fiscal year. Our fiscal year runs from July 1 through June 30. We are currently in Fiscal Year 2006-2007.
OUR OVERALL ACTIVITIES AND PROGRAMS
Specifically, we mentor youth to tell their stories using the disciplines of photography, photo documentation, creative nonfiction, journalism, oral history, digital storytelling, spoken word, and dance. Our projects usually blend at least two of these disicplines.
VOICES has a quality reputation for its mentoring practices, processes, publications, and multimedia events.
Our flagship program is the 110º After School Magazine Project (discussed in depth, below). We also run two weekly drop-in programs for youth each year: the Documentary Arts Movie Night (DAMN), and the Documentary Arts Working Group for Youth (DAWGY). All three of these programs are run out of our downtown headquarters at 48 E. Pennington Street in Tucson, Arizona.
Additionally, we typically run programs with our headquarters co-tenant, City High School. Last year (2005-2006), for example, we implemented the World War 2 Stories Project in which 80 City High School students documented the oral histories and personal photos of 19 World War II vets.
We also run one or more satellite projects with neighborhoods, tribes, and communities outside of downtown Tucson. Last year (2005-2006), we ran an after school digital-storytelling project, Looking Forward/Looking Back, with teenagers of the Tohono O’odham Nation. We also ran a program called Generaciones Unidas where South Park youth told their neighborhood stories through photo collages.
THE 110º AFTER SCHOOL MAGAZINE PROJECT
Our longest-running and most in-depth program is our 110º After School Magazine Project.
This program serves 30 low-income youth (ages 14 to 21) and runs from October through June each year. Program hours are 2-6 p.m. Monday through Thursday.
Throughout the project, youth participants identify, research, write, and photograph personal and community stories that matter deeply to them.
During the in-depth 110º experience, youth participants learn how to tell their stories using the art of the personal essay, journalism, and photography. Their trainers are the VOICES 110º Writing and Photography Directors; two VOICES Youth Leaders (young adults who have proven themselves as past 110º participants); two AmeriCorps personnel; and adult volunteers who are writers and photographers (most are Arizona Daily Star staffers and University of Arizona graduate students).
These trainers act as a critical mentoring support system for the youth as they work through the story creation process—from inception through research, first drafts, fact-checking, many revisions, and publishing.
The 110º stories take the forms of personal essays, photo essays, feature stories, and edited interviews. They are excerpted throughout the year in the Arizona Daily Star as features, photo essays, and opinion pieces. Each June, the Star then publishes the full-length stories as a newspaper tabloid magazine entitled EM>110º—Tucson’s Youth Tell Tucson’s Stories.
The Arizona Daily Star is our key community business partner for the 110º program. They provide volunteers, and significant in-kind donations of design, editing, printing, and distribution. They also provide an annual cash donation and connect the 110º program to national journalism awards and grants.
Youth who successfully complete the 110º program receive three degree-applicable credits from Pima Community College (PCC), our key higher education partner. Additional 110º program activities carried out with PCC include three “college knowledge” and financial aid workshops for 110º participants and their families during the program year.
The outcomes we hope to achieve through the 110º After School Magazine Program are to significantly improve youth research, writing, photography, higher education, professional, emotional, and leadership skills.
We verify these outcomes through the portfolio model of assessment. At midyear and end-of-year points in the program, participants and mentors will conduct in-depth analyses of the participants’ compiled project work (their portfolios) to determine if they improved in specific outcome areas.
We have developed this assessment model, in part, through consultation with Edward M. White. White is an emeritus professor of English at California State University, San Bernadino, and a senior lecturer at the University of Arizona. He is a national authority on teaching and assessing writing.
GROWING THE 110º PROGRAM TO MEET YOUTH DEMAND
Over each of the past three years, 120+ youth have applied to get into VOICES’ flagship program—The 110º After School Magazine Project.
In response to this demand, VOICES increased by 50% the number of youth we’re serving through the 110º program. This means we are serving 30 low-income youth this year (2006-2007) instead of 20, as in past program years.
We need to keep growing the 110º program because of the high demand. The challenge is to grow while safeguarding the quality of our in-depth mentoring practices.
AWARDS
This fall, the 110º program won two major awards:
1) the Youth Development Coalition’s first annual award as Pima County’s Most Outstanding Youth Program, and
2) the Community Service Award from the Arizona Newspapers Association for the 110º magazine that results from the program and appears each June in The Arizona Daily Star.
