Youth Pulse Collaborative

K-12 STEAM education

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative (testing or implementing a new idea)

With 77K residents in poverty and a low per capita income of $36K, Long Beach faces a digital divide that hinders youth learning experiences and limits understanding of future employment opportunities. This gap separates those with educational enrichment through technology from those without it. Long Beach's diverse population—9.7% of youth lack home Internet, 15% are low-income, and the majority are non-White—faces significant disadvantages due to limited digital access, affecting performance and learning.
To address this inequity, our Youth Art Lab Collaborative program will integrate arts and technology through K-12 STEAM workshops. This initiative offers rich experiences that inspire, provide role models, and mentorship for youth. By connecting young people with professional artists, we aim to create new access points to technology, drive neighborhood betterment, and ensure that youth from diverse backgrounds can thrive and innovate.

The Youth Art Lab Collaborative provides K-12 students with enriched STEAM education opportunities, enabling hands-on experiences that blend art, creativity, and technology. This fosters problem-solving skills and ensures digital access, literacy, and citizenship are prioritized, nurturing innovation and growth for our city’s future.
We will focus on four underserved Long Beach neighborhoods, collaborating with city stakeholders and community leaders to identify key issues. This will shape our project briefing and student recruitment plan. Four talented artists will lead each cohort, and the planning team will design the workshop agenda, including ideation sessions addressing community needs, visits to digital design labs, hands-on activities, prototyping solutions, and building or installing the final work. At each session's end, student cohorts will present their art, showcasing creativity, innovative problem-solving, and learnings to the community and media.
We are collaborating with several youth organizations with deep ties: The Boys and Girls Club of Long Beach, Long Beach Public Library Foundation, and Space Time Design Collaborative.
By investing in our future generation, we will establish a sustainable pipeline of young innovators who will foster growth and innovation in our city. Through these efforts, we are committed to cultivating a digitally literate, creative, and innovative community that drives our city’s future forward.

At the most direct level, these projects will offer immediate, youth-sourced solutions to neighborhood needs through art and technology installations. Whether addressing public safety, promoting youth engagement, combating urban blight, deterring vandalism, or raising environmental awareness, the possibilities are vast.
By targeting neighborhoods with limited technology access, the program will provide underserved youth with distinctive opportunities to explore and engage with emerging digital applications and technological innovations through an artistic lens.
The tangible benefits to Long Beach and LA County will include increased community engagement, a stronger sense of neighborhood pride, constructive creative outlets, heightened cultural and environmental awareness, improved public safety, and an overall better quality of life.

The Youth Art Lab Collaborative is a new initiative, and we plan to capture success metrics:
• Student Participation and Feedback: We will track the number of students engaged, their satisfaction levels, including feedback from the unveiling event for community members.
• Project Outcomes: The quality and innovativeness of student projects will be assessed via neighborhood surveys. These surveys will evaluate localized issues and resident perceptions regarding how the art project impacts the designated issue, neighborhood pride, and satisfaction.
• Community Involvement: We'll gauge community engagement and support through media reach metrics, including social media visits, shares, and engagement, as well as coverage by local media outlets.
• Long-term Impact: Improvement in digital literacy and STEAM engagement will be measured with pre- and post-program diagnostics of student participants, assessing their adeptness and confidence in digital technologies.