Staffing

Mentors help students develop new media literacies. They are the coaches, instructors, and cheerleaders. A candidate should have:

• Leadership skills - To build strong bonds, kids must be able to relate to mentors. They must have the twin traits of motivating kids to venture out of their comfort zone and to empower youth to be self-directed learners. They must also be able to provide helpful critiques in online forums and in workshops.
• Personal portfolios - Best fits are experienced in digital filmmaking, sound engineering, video gaming, or art.
• Pedagogical knowledge - Mentors must not only be good in their field, but they must be able to teach it. Mentors with a firm grasp of learning pedagogy will likely meet with more success in helping youth develop digital media skills.
• New media skills - Mentors must technically fluent enough to lead new media workshops and demonstrate tools and media. The more types of digital skills, the better. It helps to be able to know both filmmaking and Final Cut Pro, for example.

Our experts talk in more depth about the qualities of good mentors in the following videos.

Tene Gray, director of Chicago's Digital Youth Network, offers tips for finding and recruiting good mentors. And here's a recent blog post by Tene on mentors. DYN is in many ways the inspiration for YOUmedia, and remains closely connected to the Chicago YOUmedia.

The Digital Youth Network and Chicago Public Library have designed professional development for mentors. DYN's Tene Gray discusses how to design professional development (PD) for a variety of different roles. The Chicago Public Library's Jennifer Steele discusses professional development more broadly.

This will depend on the type of organization YOUmedia is housed in.

If YOUmedia is in a museum, for example, it’s important to hire staff members who reflect your audience, and this often means staff members who are from the same community as the people who visit your museum. It’s also important to recruit museum educators, artists, designers and technicians who have worked with teens before, who understand teen culture, and want to use the technology that teens use. At the ARTLAB PLUS space, a majority of the staff was hired from the Washington DC area. The program also has an internship program and many of the interns for that program were hired from all across the United States.

Here’s Jennifer Steele on the importance of Cybernavigators in the Chicago branch libraries:

Chicago YOUmedia's lead mentor Brother Mike Hawkins discusses the importance of understanding what your mission is and how to tap staff's skills that might be outside their job title.

Tim Lord at DreamYard discusses the importance of finding people with the organization's core values, and the importance of giving people the freedom to innovate.

Here's sample job descritions of three key roles at YOUmedia. These are not cast in stone, but are examples to get you started thinking about your own job descriptions:

• Mentor [Word]
• CyberNavigator[Word]
• Director  [PDF]

DreamYards' director Tim Lord points to the importance of casting a wide net when recuriting mentors and staff.

(The Hive Learning Network that Lord mentions is a community of civic and cultural institutions dedicated to transforming the learning landscape, and creating opportunities for youth to explore their interests in virtual and physical spaces. Through the Hive, youth will have multiple, continuous and connected opportunities to explore their intellectual and skill-based interests.)