Legacy Project of Stark County

‍About the client:

Legacy Project of Stark County exists to build small group mentoring relationships between 4^th and 8^th grade students and members of their community. They promote social-emotional learning through their curriculum that encourages smart decisions, responsible academic performance, and positive behavior modifications. The Legacy Project of Stark currently has 240 adult volunteer mentors who serve more than 1,500 middle school youth in and around Stark County Schools.

‍

Challenge:

The Legacy Project of Stark County needed to raise money to fund renovations of a new building they acquired to house their weekend mentoring program for teens. They hired Homeplace Creative to create a series of videos to highlight the relationships built between mentors and mentees and communicate the value of their programming to potential donors and stakeholders in the community.

‍

‍

Our work:

Creating video content featuring at-risk youth requires being intentional about not sensationalizing or dramatizing information shared for the sake of a good story. To ensure both mentees and mentors involved with the Legacy Project shared the stories they felt comfortable sharing, we instituted the following tactics:

• We took mentees/mentors to a quiet, comfortable and open space for the interview
• We made time to have conversations with interviewees before we turned the camera on to put them at ease and make sure they trusted us enough to share their stories as they wished.
• We allowed interviewees to answer questions at their own pace by listening well and using momentarily silence to allow them to gather thoughts or retract statements if they chose.
• We used small cameras to minimize intimidation and to capture the actual setting of mentorship as close to the lived experience as we could.

‍

Result:

The Legacy Project of Stark County uses the videos we created routinely on social media, digitally, and during in-person events to showcase the value of their programming and the direct impact their program has on young adults.