The YMCA of Greater Long Beach Youth Institute will be sending two staff and two high school-age teens to American Samoa through a grant award from a partnership between the American Samoa Department of Education and Pacific eCommerce Development Center. The purpose of this trip is to provide instruction to the American Samoa Creative Digital Arts Program at Peacesat Tafuna.

The program will focus on teaching middle and high school teens in American Samoa digital storytelling and movie making with a focus on their cultural history through stories from their elders, dance and language. The Youth Institute and the American Samoa Creative Digital Arts Program are sister programs with a goal to use technology to develop academic and technology skills in youth and to give them a voice through the medium that also develops leadership skills. Digital storytelling is actually a literacy exercise in that it takes the thought process of a story idea and transfers it into a sequential story on paper. Then it further refines the story through character development in the scripting process. The story moves on to become a three dimensional storyboard where it comes to life through the storyboard sequence. The story is then ready to be filmed with actors, locations, sets, and the editing process.

The outcome of this event will be a Cultural Film Festival in American Samoa featuring the student’s films and the processes that they went through in developing these films through group work, collaboration, technology involved, literacy development, and ideas centering around their own cultural stories and experience.

The project will kick off on March 4th, 2005 when the Youth Institute staff and Peer Instructors arrive in American Samoa.
This project has come to life due to the dream of a teacher in American Samoa who wanted to teach his students through the use of technology. His name is Sonny Leomiti. For more information on this international YMCA / American Samoa DOE Project, contact:

Bob Cabeza, Executive Director
YMCA of Greater Long Beach Community Development Branch / Youth Institute
525 E. 7th St.
Long Beach, CA 90813
(562) 624-5474
(562) 537-7369
bob.cabeza@lbymca.org
www.lbcoralyi.org

OR

Sonny Leomiti, Educator
American Samoa Department of Education
Sonny Leomiti SLeomiti@doe.as