Giving young people a voice through Curiosity…
Curiousworks runs on the philosophy “innovation for everyone” where they seek to give young people the skills they need to tell their stories to the world.
Submitted
16/09/2009
By
actnow
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Updated
2/12/2009
Photographer : NJLA
ActNow: So what programs does Curiousworks run?
Shakthidharan: Curiousworks partners with local youth services in marginalised communities to run media and arts based projects with young people. Young people identify a project they are interested in and based on the resources and technology that already exists in their community we run a series of projects with them over a period of 2 - 3 years.
The aim is to empower young people and to provide them with the skills that they can keep using for the benefit of the community. ‘Cultural leaders’ within the community are identified and supported to champion the projects. They receive training in social media and project management. The projects developed are then shown to the community in significant local public spaces.
This process ensures that the skills and knowledge cultivated stay in the community in a really beneficial way and ensures they continue disseminating that knowledge after we leave the community. In this way our role in the community becomes redundant which is the overall goal of the program.
ActNow: How do you engage young people and keep them interested?
Shakthidharan: Although it can be difficult to get young people to make a commitment initially we find that the best way to engage them is through using technology.
By using technology we meet them in a space that they are interested in and familiar with. They have their Ipods’ and they watch film – what we do then is to take them to unfamiliar places with it.
ActNow: What tools do you guys use? And can other organisations use these too?
Shakthidharan: We tend to move away from anything that makes technology more alien. As we work with different communities and technologies the technology that we use needs to be flexible, cheap and portable. Our focus is on Open Source Technology, technology that is freely available and cross platform.
Some of the online programs that we use (and other organisations can use quite easily as well) include: Wordpress which assists with website building, Flickr and Picasa for photo management, audacity for sound and pencil and animata for animation. Also google apps provide a good resource for organisations and we also use Youtube and blip for video publishing.
Early next year we are going to have a toolkit on our website that will have hundreds of ideas and strategies for using digital media in the community - so look out for that.
At the moment youth services can use our website allaroundyou.net to upload their photos and their videos in relation to the community work that they do. Its free and it has a group page where you can privately setup the people involved in your project, it has discussion forums for you to use, you have your wall to put comments on, you can share your videos and administrate your project .
ActNow: How can organizations who want to engage young people using technology get more out of it?
Shakthidharan: There are a couple of ways youth services can start using technology. One way to do this is, if youth services are interested, we run a training course here at our office that they can attend. This runs for four sessions and goes for four hours which is a distillation of everything we have gathered over the past couple of years.
Something else that organisations can do is to start small and develop a digital media strategy whilst they learn. The best way to do this is to setup a blog and update and share with people about how you are learning about technology and what you are doing with it. In this way you will develop your own strategy over time as you update the young people you work with and learn about how to use different types of technology.
The other part of this is to use the internet as a resource. If you have a question search for it and look on the internet for how to do each step.
One further bit of advice is to not overly focus on the actual tool but think about what the tools you are going to use are going to enable. 
