Creative.EPA.net Training

In their groundbreaking model, EPA train the youth staffs with an eye toward social enterprise, that is, to empower these vibrant young men and women to develop and run their own for-profit technology services company in their local community—providing income and skill-building opportunities for them while helping their fellow community members with their for-profit or community activism enterprises. In true open source spirit, EPA's program also looks to create an easy-to-repurpose, customizable training program which can be implemented anywhere in the world where youth have a need for such training. This community-minded group is thinking on a larger scale then just their own neighborhood. Helping their own youth help themselves is only a beginning for them. EPA.net wants to share.

 Sharing is a core value at CivicActions. When EPA.net and CivicActions crossed paths, the alignment of values and the complementary nature of our skills were undeniable. EPA.net had the connection to the community and the will to reach out. CivicActions had the technological know-how and the ability to teach the youth staff by design as well as by example. Together we formed a partnership between EPA.net, CivicActions and the ZeroDivide Foundation (who gave EPA a generous grant to make their training vision a reality). We came together to design, implement and document the first of many training series. In this first set of training sessions, the youth staff’s very first project was to build a website for their new social enterprise.

Training is ongoing and the youth staff have caught the Drupal and open source bug. In April 2010 the staff attended DrupalCon 2010 in San Francisco and presented their progress and vision for the program in a session entitled Open Source Opens Doors for Youth. CivicActions and EPA.net hope to continue honing their training series and preparing to “contribute” this exciting training model back to the community.