 The Livermore Teen Academy, that's what I'll be talking about. Once again, I'm Nathan Brumley. I'm the supervising librarian for youth services with the Livermore Public Library. And I'll just be going over, well, quite in detail, actually, what it took to put this kind of program together. But let's just jump into what it was. So long story short is that the Livermore Teen Academy is a three-week program that is a combination of local government education and life skills classes, along with an internship at one of our city departments. The program goals were to help teens have a better understanding of local government, inspire them to become more engaged in their community, and help prepare them to become successful adults. This program fit in nicely with the Library Strategic Services Plan, where we had made it a goal to increase our outreach efforts to underserved groups in the communities. And teens in Livermore had been identified as one of these groups. What's more is the Livermore City Council set a goal to, and I quote, strengthen a sense of community and connection. And they specifically called out exploring alternative engagement and outreach approaches, including community academies that target high school students. Wow, it's like we paid attention. So recruiting for the program was pretty intensive. We require all of the applicants to submit a two-page application, which includes an interview if they move on from that point and return additional paperwork by a very strict deadline. To further intensify as teens to participate, because for those of us who work with teens, we know it can be difficult sometimes, we also had a $330 stipend for those who complete the program. And this was to encourage completion of the program as well as applying in all that good stuff. You can see it's pretty large on the flyer. And in later versions, I even moved that to the top. So there are a few limits on who can apply. Teens have to be entering their junior or senior year of high school and turning 16 by the first day of the program. They must also live and go to school in the vermore. The two-page application includes three short answer essay questions and requires teens to furnish a letter of recommendation that is written not by somebody they're related to. For many teens invited to interview, it was their very first interview ever. So nerves were pretty rattled when we got to them, but they did great. To help manage the number of interviews that we were doing, we also invited employees from other city departments to come and help us out because they could potentially influence who were they be getting at their department as well. So that worked pretty well as a carrot. Lastly, after working with our risk management and legal departments, we had two forms for those who were initially selected for the program that they needed to sign. Those were a waiver. And another was a program agreement that they would come to every single class and make up any work that they did miss if they missed something for whatever reason or they would not receive their stipend or any amount. So there's the application. You can tell I was desperate for a slide, so there it is. We begin our advertising for this program. It's a summer program. So we start in February. That's when all the marketing goes to the schools. And we make the application available right at that time. These aren't due until March. So they have plenty of time to get those letters of recommendations, be thoughtful about their essay questions, and research which city council or which city department they would like to intern at. I think you can all guess how much time they put into it and when I received the applications. So our interviews, we do these in April after that. Once we go through all the applications, anyone who submits a completed application and they're eligible will get an interview with us. This last year, we interviewed 2016's. And we were able to accept 15 into the program. It's just how many spaces we were able to do. One thing we really learned from these interviews is that outside of police, fire, and libraries, teens had no idea what we were doing at the local government level. So in the second year, I included a very brief description of all of our city departments along with the application. And that helped a little bit, but it still didn't help enough. So that tells me that the work that we're doing with this program is pretty important. So we finally make our selections of who's invited to the program in May. And everyone who interviews gets a letter letting them know either they're in the program, they're on the waiting list, or they're not accepted this year. And after that, we bury them in paperwork. No, it's just the forms. So the program is, like I said, three weeks long. We found that the best time to do this is the three weeks right after when school starts in June. Each day, the teens are with us for three hours, from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. That way we don't have to worry about lunches or anything like that. And they're either reporting to the library for one of their class days or their internship site during that time. The format that was most popular with our internship coaches, with our fellow city employees, was the first week of the program is all just a one full class week. Then they're at their internship sites for Monday through Thursday for the second and third week. And then on Fridays, they're back at the library for their classes. Each participant receives a binder. It has information about how a city operates. They get our city's organization chart on there along with a very basic class schedule about what to expect each day and where they need to report. So now I'm going to run through our last activities, our last academies, class schedule, day by day. And so the first day of the program, teens received an overall city department overview by the director of our finance department. And then he really goes into the specifics of how city finance works, where our funding comes from, what's paid with what money, what a general fund is, that kind of thing. And then because we have them cornered, I can't get out, they're forced to take a library tour that includes a library scavenger hunt. And then they're subjected to a presentation on the different databases we offer, which I call that segment speed database thing. The second class day is our city bus tour. And so basically this is something that the city's done for new hires. Typically, they're just given a tour of the city in a bus. The director of community development is with them, and they can answer questions. They talk about the different buildings that are there already in the city. They talk about the different things going into the city. Of course, the teens, they really only cared about what restaurants were coming. And you should have heard the cheers when they heard that potentially a Chick-fil-A was going to be going on in a certain corner. So it's pretty funny. The bus tour also includes a few walking stops. So they stop at a small business incubator downtown. They stop at the water resources department and get a tour of their facilities there. And they also stop at the maintenance yard, where the place where they make the road signs was a real hit. An interesting quote that came out of this, we do feedback surveys at the end of every class day. And my favorite was, it was interesting, had fun, kind of weird touring a city I live in. But they all kind of came away with some interesting stuff. So the third class day brings in our city manager, and he gives a presentation on leadership skills, which is then followed up by a two-hour public speaking skills workshop. So pretty awesome. Let's see. All right. So the next day is a brief presentation on local elections by our city clerk. And then she'll run a mock city council meeting. The idea there is that if they participate in a mock city council meeting, then coming to a real thing and voicing their opinions becomes that much less intimidating, because then they know the format of everything. They know how much time they have to speak, and that anybody can speak. The teens then head over to the city hall for a tour there. And then they are given a day in the life of a firefighter kind of presentation. It was pretty funny to watch them try on the firefighting gear, because then the cameras came out and it was a selfie station all over right there. That brings us to the end of the first week. We closed out with a personal finance workshop, a presentation on information literacy and voting, and a tour of the police department. You can guess which one was the most popular, the policemen. Police just has the coolest stuff. And we also reserved the last portion of this day for them meeting their internship coaches. So following that, they are given a full day of resume and workshops on interview skills. They have a networking class with the Tri Valley One Stop. It's a career center in Livermore. And the final day of the program we spend talking about getting out into the community. So we have organizations present their volunteer opportunities. And then we kind of go around the table and talk about their goals for after the program. And that's typically a really powerful part of it. And they can share their goals if they want to. But it's great. If a teen does miss a class, I'll assign them a certain thing. But it's not going to be any easier than coming to a class day. For instance, one assignment was to read the city manager's budget report to the city council and then get write a report to me about that. So they really don't want to miss any dates. Yep, lots of city departments participated. We had out of nine departments, we had probably let's say eight of them participate. The only one who couldn't do it this year was FIRE. That was one of the things we learned was that there's no good time for all the departments to come and do this program. So sometimes you just got to move on. Other departments have them work on mostly on social media platforms. We're all trying to figure out how to market to teens. And that's what they did. And then we kind of did the same thing. We talked to them about reaching them. But we also had them do things like create flyers and a marketing plan, specifically targeting teens, that kind of thing. Let's see. So we also do a graduation ceremony. This is for anybody who completes the whole program. We try this two different ways. But the way I thought was best was a separate kind of ceremony, not attached to the last day of the program. This way it was in the evening, the following week they could plan to come. And then we found that a lot more of the parents and family members could attend it this way. The mayor was there too, of course. He gives a talk about volunteering and being involved in your community. He gives them their certificates. And I get to hand out the checks. So budget, our first year, we were able to do this with support from a PLP Innovation Grant. Thank you, PLP. We were figuring out a lot this year. So a lot more staff time was used. We offered some things that we thought we would need. But the second year we were able to shrink those costs quite a bit. I think we'll be able to do that again even next year. We decided not to do the bus passes again. We offered bus passes for those getting to the Civic Center. This didn't seem to be a major issue for a lot of them. And the bus routes really weren't very convenient anyway. So it wasn't really being taken full advantage of. So some of our challenges here. It's not a simple or straightforward program to start. We spent a lot of time talking to our HR department and legal for guidance on potential issues surrounding participating teens, mostly because of the stipend. That's what complicated things. We felt it was worth it, though. But that's where we got the requirement of they had to be 16 to start the program. And we had to increase our stipend from $300 to $330, just based on minimum wage, federal minimum wage, and the number of hours that they were in the program. Another challenge was how much face-to-face this program demands with your other city departments. And not to mention all the buy-in that's required to. But it really helped having the city manager totally on board with what we were doing. Shout out to Mark Roberts, yeah. And another challenge would be not every internship coach could spend the same amount of time with their interns or coming up with things for them to do. So the difference between taking on three interns and four, it was significant. I know because I did four the first year. Oh. So what we learned. We learned that teens do not have much knowledge about local government, but teens really did enjoy the experience and they want to know how to get involved. They want to be active in their internships and not just they don't just want to talk to people. They want to get hands-on experiences and feel like they're contributing. And after the program was over, most of them wanted to continue their relationship with the library as well. Thank you.