Hey, this is Steve Bean, Enterprise Director at the Digital NEST. Welcome to our video! The Digital NEST is an independent 501c3 non-profit. We operate a tech-rich youth career training and co-working center in Latino, agrarian Watsonville CA and will be opening our 2nd center in Salinas, CA next year. While our center has only been operating for a year, our approach is based on 10+ years of NSF-funded work through the ITEST initiative. Along with my colleagues Jill Denner and Jacob Martinez, I was the PI or Co-PI on two ITEST projects: Girl Game Company and Watsonville TEC. Digital NEST employs all the strategies we field-tested in those projects, but is also a whole other animal – it my next post I’ll tell you what makes it different…

Hello Steve. Thanks for sharing this video. I’d like to know more about how youth develop collaboration and communication skills through NEST. Do they participate in team-based project work? The students in the video snippets mention learning new tools and techniques, and gaining access to technology at the space. I’d like to hear more about their projects. How are they applying the skills they learn? Is there a semi-structured goal or challenge?

Thanks Irene! We run the whole gamut. At the baseline our model is drop-in co-working. Then, one level up we have what we call our “Gen Ed” (general education) program. Gen Ed covers the whole range of tech interest areas with the intention of promoting exploration and exposure and helping Members ID whether they are interested in entering our career-track programs. Currently, these are in web design and video production with pilot efforts in entrepreneurship, ag tech (mobile app development) and game design. Gen Ed runs on workshops, talks, field trips, seminars and online courses through donated lynda.com accounts. Members enter career tracks through multi-session workshops that we call Institutes. These are categorized at levels 1-3 across different product-focused skill sets such as websites and narrative or documentary films. In Institutes, our youth Members receive direct instruction AND complete a project for a client – either “internal” or a paying client. The Institute leveling also serves as a certification system for qualifying our Members to do paid work through bizNEST. bizNEST is our low-cost tech consultancy, a service we’re providing to our local business community that gives those businesses the affordable tech help they need and at the same time it cements our Members’ skills, gives them a competitive edge on job applications, provides for alternate- and micro-credentialing and puts money in their pockets. Do date, our Members have built more than a dozen websites for clients and produced a handful of videos, including our STEM for All video! Members who excel at Institute work are selected by staff for our fellowship, which we call our Associates program. Our Associates receive privileged status and one-on-one career advising from staff. In exchange, they give back by recruiting non-Associate Members to their project teams to help them complete hands-on projects. The Associates get much-needed experience in project management and team leading and the non-Associates get the chance to apply what they learned in an Institute to a real project. In another post, I’m going to talk about our Contributing Member groups, which have yielded some remarkable, unanticipated outcomes/findings…

Steve,

The Digital NEST looks like an amazing place to learn skills with interesting people. I’d love to hear more about how the CS college students help support youth learning. Do you provide support for the mentors as well?

Hi Jill and Steve,
I’m glad to learn more about the impressive work that you are doing. I’ve heard about it in the local news, and it’s great you show it in the video!
Barbara Rogoff

Hello Steve and colleagues,

It sounds like you offer some great professional learning experiences for students. How great that your students produced this video!

Could you talk a little more about how you’re targeting underrepresented groups, and Latino/a students specifically? Would you say this happens largely through your location and recruitment strategies, or are there specific types of programming or pedagogies you’re developing for your target population?

Hi Katie! Watsonville and Salinas are interesting: these communities are 80% Latina/o so our youth are not “minorities.” Yet Latina/o educational and career attainment is below the state average. In Silicon Valley, less than an hour away, Latinas/os are a mere 2%-4% of the technical/managerial workforce! So recruitment isn’t a problem for us. But to answer your question, I think the first thing I would assert is that a genuine positive youth development approach, which we try to embody, is universally culturally (and developmentally) sensitive. The second thing I would stress is that it’s important to have staff and role models that belong to the same culture as the youth being served (though I think that a genuine PYD approach can compensate for a lack of representation). The third thing I would say is that we look for assets within youths’ home culture. For example, we frame our youths’ bilingualism as a marketable skill. We also talk to them about the tradition of entrepreneurship within sus familias y sus communidades. Many of them have tias/tios who do whatever it takes to make financial ends meet – sell tamales, fix cars, bake wedding cakes, do weekend home repairs, quincenera dress-making, etc. This is a STRONG tradition of entrepreneurship that goes unrecognized here in the shadow of Silicon Valley b/c it doesn’t involve venture capital, a tech product cycle or an initial public offering. We use the Hack the Hood lesson on code-switching and present this as a professional workplace skill, not a “sell-out” – the proverbial “uniform doesn’t make the man [sic].” Next, our program fills a need that we saw over 10+ years of NSF-funded out-of-school programs: a brick-and-mortar youth co-working center that provides ongoing access to technology. Our CBO 501c3 and its supporters are Hell-bent on keeping this center open in perpetuity. No offense to anyone – I was a PI on ITEST projects for years – but “drive-by” programs that don’t address the issues of social- professional- and economic capital over the LONG-TERM for “underrepresented” groups aren’t going to solve the problem, no matter how good a “program” or “pedagogy” is. So maybe I would say that our most critical “culturally sensitive” strategy is long-term engagement with our youth. As far as programming goes, I think we have similar successes – and challenges – as everyone else. We have our “self-starter” success stories, like Luis and Luis who came to us AFTER they started building their own social networking website (www.ratesify.com) or Martin (mar-TINE) the community college student body President who started college without a reliable computer. We also typically have a 25%-66% attrition rate in our multi-session “Institute” workshops. We have 30-50 Members drop in to our center every day but probably 20-30 of these aren’t doing any CS or career development – they’re gaming, texting, watching YouTube, etc. Right now what we’re seeing is that our most engaged youth are also the ones who are busiest outside of our program – and therefore likely to attrit – and are also the ones we lose to non-local colleges. While we’d never tell a youth not to go to college, we’re trying to develop a local tech workforce anchored to our agrarian communities by ties of history, family and culture. So we’re looking at how to recruit and engage more out-of-school youth who are dead-ending in minimum wage jobs in the fields, discount stores and fast-food restaurants. We’re building out our bizNEST tech consultancy to be able to employ youth part-time using their new skills. We probably can’t replace their summer jobs, but by next summer we aim to have six Members only working part-time at their other jobs and making up the rest of their income through bizNEST consulting. We’re trying to show these youth that in the 21st c., global, digital workplace, they can be international tech consultants using a broadband connection in their living room. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that so many of the issues of “minority” groups are not issues of “race” or ethnicity, but of poverty or low economic and educational opportunity. These youth don’t need to be “convinced” of the value of our program – they need help and resources to remove barriers and navigate their fears and culture shock around trying to live in two different worlds.

Great video! Go, Digital NEST! Coolest of the cool!

This is a great example of professional learning within an authentic learning environment! I would love to hear more about the badge and monitoring system, and how it will motivate and measure what students learn.

Is this only for after school students? It would be great if you invited local teachers to learn as well. That way the teachers could take what they learned back to the classroom. Teachers might not want to learn along with the students, but maybe you could do some special programs just for teachers.

Steve, Jill, and Jacob, what a great video! It’s nice to learn more about the NEST from the youth involved and to hear more about the research component. Exciting work!

This program looks great. The real world projects for client reminds me of something the NY Public Library does with their programming courses. They usually look for projects in the same underserved communities. Think about building websites for your local bodega. It is really cool.

How do you select the students who use the NEST. Do they self select? From those students how do you select the 100 for your research? I wish the research project was more than two years so you could follow your students and see what kind of long term impact you have on their lives.

Wow! What a great example of informal education as a way to broaden access to computing education. Really compelling video – thanks!

Great work, Jill, Jacob and Steve! This looks like a fabulous model for others to copy and modify to meet local needs.

Jill – it was nice to meet you at NCWIT this week. The work of NEST is amazing, great diversity statistics. Here is the project that brought our team to NCWIT: http://videohall.com/p/752

Steve – thanks for connecting our CS projects via the comments.

This is a fantastic video. It captures your project and is engaging media.

Great project! How are structuring the study to understand how relationships affect participation and learning?

As this wonderful event wraps up, I’m realizing that I never discussed our Contributing Member program. The outcomes from this part of our program have been both amazing and unanticipated. A little context: we opened our first NEST center in a small, out-of-the-way space owned by a Board Member’s company. This was our pilot location but our goal was always to be in downtown Watsonville. When we secured our new, larger space and started setting it up I knew immediately: we wouldn’t be able to manage the larger space well with just our small staff. So we made plans to launch volunteer youth Contributing Member groups to help us out. Members could log volunteer hours for their community service graduation requirement and being a Contributing Member would be a pre-requisite for being selected as an Associate. We started three groups: Tech Squad (loans out and maintains tech equipment), Connect Crew (welcomes Members and helps staff the front desk and helps maintain a positive community) and Social Networkers (spreads the word about the NEST in their schools and other community setings). The help we needed from these groups was critical but very basic. Three months after re-opening in our new space, these groups have FAR exceeded our expectations. Tech Squadders are moving into more advanced tech tasks like website maintenance and network administration. Connect Crew have taken charge of the required Member Orientation and have begun populating a new group – E(vents)-Unit – and organizing educational and social events on their own authority. Through their work as Contributing Members, our youth are demonstrating how important the NEST is to them and that they are willing to give of their own time and energy to make sure this tech-rich training and co-working space is available to their peers. At this point we couldn’t do it without them – the NEST has become a TRUE youth-adult partnership.