Asian Media Access collaborated with the Step Up program to provide an enriching experience for interns. Step Up provides youth placement in internships that provide a foundational work experience with deep and intentional mentoring. This experience will prepare youth for more challenging positions in the future and make a more equitable workforce. With Asian Media Access, the program emphasizes a combination of technical learning and communication skill building, along with learning professional development. This year was the first year back in person after three years of working exclusively online.
First half of the program,Interns were a part of various in-person training across different tools and topics. One of the training sessions included an overview of Canva, which helps introduce and enhance basic graphic design. Youth are able to use these learned skills to create visual concepts and communicate their ideas that inspire, inform, and influence audiences. Canva is a tool that can be used for social media posts for various platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but also designed for presentations and handouts. After each training session, the interns then have the opportunity to exercise their new knowledge. For the Canva training, the interns shared their personal goal and future aspirations:
Other tools included Storybird and Animakers to create different graphic designs.
In addition to training, Interns also participate in discussions surrounding topics such as Voting, Vaccination hesitancy, and Gambling Problem Prevention. Youth combine the information that they learned from training and apply their knowledge from discussion to create captivating and educational pieces. For example, youth created a comic strip through Canva highlighting these topics:
During the process, interns learn how to update their language to appeal and announce to their audience.
Towards the second half of the program, interns were divided into four different groups and were trained in video production, which included learning processes such as script development and creative camera shot angles. This provided the chance to collaborate with teammates and learn different communication styles. At first, youth struggled with learning how to work with new members of the team, but in the end had a common goal to produce a video and learned how to take the lead necessary to complete the project.
Overall, through this experience, youth had a place to develop their communication skills, time management, teamwork, problem-solving, financial literacy, critical thinking, soft and hard skills, and explore their career interests. The youth learned how to develop professional peer relationships
