About Us
Mission of the California Digital Media arts Studio Partnership
Our mission is to empower youth to connect and engage at school, achieve academic success, bridge into digital media careers, and become active, ardent community stakeholders. To achieve this mission we believe that the two most important challenges confronting us and our communities in this digital age are achieving connectedness and building leadership. Connectedness is imperative so that neighborhoods can exchange common ideas and goals, establish collaborations, and build consensus thereby empowering themselves to solve pressing problems. DASP has built and exerted leadership at the state and community level. We have grown beyond the ability of volunteers to complete our mission. We need to build capacity in order to deliver more profound services and sustain our work.
Institutions serving youth today are either broken or dissolving. Some youth today learn more out of school using the Internet and a host of social network connections than they do in school. Teachers have been trivialized. As such, schools have ceased to function as effective community assets. DASP reverses this trend, empowering 100s of youth and teachers, by building model curriculum, providing teacher professional development in employability skills and technical proficiencies, developing youth skills, producing showcases, supporting new civic engagement, and connecting youth to service learning. Youth who are engaged and working in digital media arts are leaping ahead at school, not dropping out, and offering their services to organizations in their communities.
Youth are empowered by training in digital media to be partners in supporting nonprofit missions and public connection, building social and civic capital. Students are taught how to use digital media as a career pathway and offered bridge jobs with regions high tech industries and internships with media professionals. We have extended and achieved our mission and goals because we are neighborhood based, caring, bold and optimistic.