Marking A Technology Milestone For Club Kids

A year ago this month, we joined Comcast NBCUniversal on an extended journey to provide the latest technology tools and skills to the more than 4 million youth served each year by Boys & Girls Clubs across the country. Already, that journey is taking us to some amazing places.

In Chicago, Emmanuel discovered there is much more to technology than Facebook and selfies.

In Tucson, Josiah began writing his own short stories and created a digital portfolio to store his work.

And in Philadelphia, a group of teens used photography to tell stories about their challenged neighborhood – and learned along the way about framing a shot, the importance of tripods for stability and software to manipulate photos to produce a sharper visual story.

Each of these milestones – and they are indeed milestones – stems from My.Future, a year-old technology education program that is transforming the way our young people interact with technology in the Clubs. Watch the video above to see the difference My.Future is making for two Club youth in Chicago.

Five years ago, we partnered with Comcast on a different initiative that helped introduce basic technology to youth who were not growing up with computers at home or school. So much has changed since then, and today’s young people are digital natives. They have accessed technology through their phones or other devices since they were toddlers.

So last year we teamed up with Comcast NBCUniversal again, creating My.Future to encourage youth to learn through project-based experiences, and then to dive deeply into specific interest areas that could lead to some less obvious career paths – such as robotics, coding, online journalism and game design. Partnering with Comcast NBCUniversal, we made My.Future the centerpiece of our new five-year agreement.

We are thrilled on the one-year anniversary of My.Future to share that the Comcast Foundation has invested more than $3 million in the program, awarding grants to 90 Clubs across the country to provide them with the technology and staff training needed to expand My.Future’s implementation.

Today, technology opens the doors to so many opportunities, and that’s why working with Comcast NBCUniversal we look forward to continuing on this journey together.

This article first appeared on Comcast Voices, a place for conversations with Comcast. Read more blogs about our impact in the community here.