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Drupal Voices 101: Opening Doors for Youth with Drupal
- DrupalVoices101.mp3
Jenn Sramek talks about how CivicActions became Drupal mentors and trainers to youth at non-profit organization called EPA.net. Nancy Brink originally came to CivicActions asking for a Drupal website that was beyond the scope of their given budget, and what evolved from there was to train the youth from EPA's community enterprise program to learn how to build the Drupal site and run their own business.
As a result, the idea of EPA.net CREATIVE was born where the youth would be involved in building the Drupal site of http://creative.epa.net. Jenn and a number of East Palo Alto youth from EPA.net CREATIVE came to DrupalCon to present at a session titled: "Open Source Opens Doors for Youth: a professional/nonprofit/foundation collaboration builds a youth social enterprise"
Also included in this podcast interview are some of the youth from the program including Soli Tuulaupua, Silvia Molina, William Molina, Selagi Nimo Lesu'i, and Jesus Hernandez.

Jenn expressed interest in replicating this model and building more youth mentorship and training programs as a way to spread Drupal into different at-risk communities, but also to open new doors for these youth by working with open source.
For more information, be sure to check out the video of their DrupalCon presention:

Comments
awesome podcast
Woot! Thank you so much Kent for interviewing us, it really means a lot to all of us to be heard all over the world!
Thank you
Thank you for helping to highlight this type of project. Love that they ended with saying that they want to teach other youth in their community. I work with a nonprofit called KidsTek in Denver Colorado and I am teaching Cisco networking academy courses to a similar demographic and these types of programs empower these youth to have opportunities that they would not otherwise have.
Great work from CivicActions! Thanks to Lullabot for highlighting it.