The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation awarded me two grants - the 2024 Community Partnerships Award and the 2024 Independent Creative Production Grant.
You can read more here: https://sachsarts.org/grant-awards/urban-film-youth-mentorship-project/
The Urban Film Youth Mentorship project is the first collaborative partnership powered by The Philadelphia Film Factory (Philm Factory) staff and the Weitzman School of Design’s faculty Dr. Matt Kenyatta, to expand their community-based “Take One” Youth Film Mentorship Program, by introducing local youth and their mentors to hidden community history in their backyards, as an opportunity to both learn the business of filmmaking while documenting the ongoing community planning process in historic West Philadelphia stimulated by the New Freedom District Cultural Plan. Philm Factory is a West Philadelphia based nonprofit founded in 2019 that has incubated the Take One Youth Film Mentorship Program since 2022. During a six-week spring curriculum and a four-week summer curriculum, the staff and volunteer filmmakers rapidly teach young people from grades 7- 12 the fundamentals of filmmaking as an art, science, technological craft, and industry. In 2024 they are launching a two-season approach that is recruiting high school and middle school students from all over Philadelphia, but primarily in West Philadelphia, while retaining the inaugural class of youth filmmakers as mentors to their Peers. This grant will support their recruitment efforts and deepen their connection to future pathways in the cinematic and media arts industry as anchored by the University of Pennsylvania.
Here as well: https://sachsarts.org/grant-awards/the-museum-of-hidden-genius-an-atlas-of-afrotech/
THE MUSEUM OF HIDDEN GENIUS (MOHG) is a digital cabinet of curiosity crowdsourcing histories of African American invention, or “Afrotech”, to preserve, exhibit, and activate an atlas of hidden heritage worthy of wonder, adventure, and world-making in legacy cities. Barely 2.5% of the 98,000 sites in the National Register of Historic Places are devoted to African American heritage. In 2023, only four Black heritage sites are designated for “Invention.” The MOHG pursues the quest, “Where is the African American geography of genius: the hidden Atlas of Afrotech?” In answering this, can storytelling and spatial technologies help joyfully repair legacies of erasure in public spaces? The platform prototypes a micro-museum with several galleries that offer answers to this quest.