VISION | MISSION

Our mission is to build lasting community links between artists, teachers, youth organizers, parent professionals, and community volunteers to empower youth through arts-based programs that develop self-esteem, social awareness and digital media literacy.

Our most immediate goal is to create the VoiceIT e-community, an open-source collaborative landscape to create, manage and exchange multimedia content, schedule events/workshops and support constructionist learning amongst youth and adults in communities. Working in direct partnership with several colleges, schools, community-based organizations and cultural institutions, VNM offers workshops & classroom residencies in digital multimedia storytelling (including language, visual, media and performance arts).

HISTORY

VNM first began in Summer 2005 as the Community Arts and Technology Initiative (CATI) in conversation with several community and school partners (Harold Washington College, University of Chicago Center for Urban School Improvement) to help address the lack in access to media-arts opportunities available to youth living in some of Chicago's Southside lower-income neighborhoods (e.g. Kenwood, Pilsen, Englewood).

By Fall 2005, VNM had begun collaborations in 2 schools (North Kenwood Oakland and Nancy B Jefferson) working with students, researchers and teachers on curriculum-based and afterschool digital media projects. In addition to working in neighborhood schools (classroom residencies and afterschool programs).

In the summer of 2006, VNM offered its first Voices CAMP (a summer apprenticeship for teens ages 14-18 sponsored by After School Matters and hosted by Harold Washington College -- one of the City Colleges of Chicago). Voices CAMP (Community Arts and Media Partnerships) is a teen-led mentoring and organizing project using creative writing, visual arts, performance and web multimedia (audio, video, radio) to engage urban youth as voices for change in their neighborhoods.