En Pilsen Community Building

Carlo from En Pilsen led a workshop with our Mentees on how to become closer to your community. He explained to our mentees how important community is and shared ways to become closer to your neighbors. Using local hashtags on Instagram and other social media platforms can connect you to other people within your neighborhood. In Pilsen, Carlo began a clean up and restoration at a community garden to allow neighbors to connect and become closer to their community, which similar to what we have in Maywood. You can find out more about the work that Carlo is doing within in Pilsen on Instagram.

Photo Credit: Mariah

Milkshakes to Marketing

Have you tried the Milkshake app? Well, our mentees did on Saturday! Lu’Cretia, our Creative Project Manager, led a workshop with our mentees and each individual created a free mini website on their phones. After taking some time to design their websites, our Mentees shared their websites with one another. Milkshake is such a great and inexpensive tool for our Mentees to create a website that will benefit them as they create and build their brands.

Photo credit: Mariah

Understanding Your Brand

To start a brand, you need to understand the brand that you want to build. On Day 2 of marketing Lu’Cretia, our Creative Project Manager, initiated a dialogue with our mentees about how to better understand their potential brands. Different videos were played to demonstrate how different celebrities use their values to establish their brands. She discussed how Lil Nas X uses his platform to create music, but also partners with other brands, like Nike, to create products that target his audience.

Our Mentees created their own social media selfceare manifesto that included: what they want to gain from social media, how long they want to spend on each platform, and what they want to share on their platform. This workshop was a success and super informative!

Photo. Credit: Mariah

Intro To Marketing

Photo Credit: Mariah

Marketing is a big part of how brands and businesses take off. For the first day of week 6, Lu’Cretia, our Creative Project Manager and mentor to lead this workshop. Lu’Cretia went over all the basics of marketing. She engaged in a conversation with our mentees about what marketing is & what goes into it. She also taught them how to create ads for various businesses, all while staying on track with branding styles, colors, and fonts. It was fascinating to see our mentees work together as a team to create their ads for TFD.

Photo Credit: Mariah

A Field Trip to Gente Fina

Photo Credit: Mariah

This last weekend, our mentees went on a field trip to Gente Fina, where they got the opportunity to ask the co-founders, Manny & Abraham, different questions about the creative field. They learned so many new things about creating a brand and what it takes to start. Niches, vendors, manufacturers, money, ideas, and networking were all mentioned throughout this dialogue. We cannot wait to partner with them again soon!

After we got back to the firehouse, Sandra, our Mentorship Coordinator, assisted our mentees in digitizing their work into Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator is a very long process to learn but in the end it is all worth it. It is an amazing skillset to have and we love having Sandra to be able to pass on her knowledge to our mentees about this amazing software.

Photo Credit: Mariah