Who We Are
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 2007-2008.
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 disciplines.
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 a monthly drop-in program for youth, the Documentary Arts Movie Night (DAMN). Both 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. In 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. In 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 20 low-income youth (ages 14 to 21) and runs from October through June each year. Program hours are 4-6:15 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.
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 on radio station KXCI as spoken word segments and in the Arizona Daily Star as guest opinion pieces.
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.
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.
