Hack the Beach 2017 Contest Sign-up
Sep 05, 2017
submission
#87
Submit your idea
Your idea/ technology/ company
| Name of your idea or project | Painted Brain's Wordpress Workshop |
| Which challenge area does your idea respond to? | Health, Learning |
| Describe your idea and how it can help Santa Monica | We’ve have been providing art groups services and changing the conversation about mental illness through our speaker’s bureau across the Los Angeles region in high schools, colleges, mental health agencies, homeless drop-in centers, and lockdown facilities since 2005. We are known to build communities by bridging individuals living in a silo through community liaisons, service coordinators, and the direct experience of our art group services. The demographic we support are adults 18 - 65 living with mental health challenges and/or are homeless. Art has been our main medium of expression though, recently in 2014 there was a great shift of interest in establishing a career in tech. This led to the coding workshops and Painted Brain’s WordPress Workshop (PBWW). There’s a desperate need to develop a community base in Santa Monica as many of our members living there must commute to Korea Town and the Downtown District to join our experiential learning workshops. Our tech partner Proficia was recently given the green-light from the Santa Monica Library staff to hold workshops in the space as many homeless adults aggregate there looking for resources. And since 2015, our partner organization NAMI, has been announcing our coding workshops with CodiePie in multiple chapters in their monthly newsletters, speaker’s bureaus, and general resource orientations. We assessed our workshops through our PBTQ assessment tool and found participants had an increase in their confidence, trust, and connection, and a decrease in anxiety. Understanding the effects our workshops had left us to build a strong curriculum focused on the WordPress platform. WordPress is a powerful Content Management System (CMS) that we found to be the gateway into learning how to code. Through the early process of teaching code in 2014, CodiePie a tech partner developed a WordPress theme tailored to Painted Brain’s operational framework and the coding participant's needs. This gave us a custom feel and control over the UI and UX. We believe our workshops support individuals suffering from mental illness and homelessness through its practical skills training and purpose-driven model. We’ve had over 1000 inquiries regarding the spread of our workshops into the West Los Angeles. |
| What stage is your idea or project in? | Active company/ post-revenue |
| What needs to happen to launch your product? Please list all resources (hardware, software, licensing, legal/regulatory, funding, partnership or support from the City, data, etc.) required to launch your program. | We might need a space depending on the demands. We have Santa Monica Library as one of the space providers at the moment. We would need one laptop per student with an average of 8 to 12 students per group, funding source to support workshop leaders to get paid and to offer stipends for students to encourage their attendance. We would also need liability insurance. |
| How realistic is it for your idea to be implemented by early 2018? Please describe what resources (if any) you will need in order to ensure a working product by early next year. | We've been running coding and WordPress workshops for more than 3 years. Our tech partner CodiePie created the multi-purpose WordPress theme Mantis, tailored to Painted Brain's framework and participant needs. They assembled and trained 8 coding group leaders all allies or living with mental health challenges. |
You and your team
| Team Name | Painted Brain |
| List team members and their roles | --- |
| Contact email | --- |
| Phone number | --- |
| Primary Contact Name | --- |
Initial application scoring
Scoring
| Viability (40%) | --- |
| Value (40%) | --- |
| Growth (20%) | --- |
| Notes | --- |
| Advance to semi-finalist status? | Yes |