Community On Demand Card Game Curriculum Pilot (3-Year Rollout)

OUR GOAL:
Use our Community On Demand Card Game Curriculum to improve college and career readiness by 10% or for 15,000 youth in low-income communities suffering from pandemic-related learning loss throughout the state of Georgia by 2027. Community On Demand is a veteran-led, flexible, blended-learning, employment solution that integrates the fun of a card game into individually customized curricula, hands-on leadership training, and meaningful work-based learning experiences.

WHAT IS LEARNING LOSS?
Learning Loss refers to any specific or general loss of knowledge and skills or to reversals in academic progress, most commonly due to extended gaps or discontinuities in a student’s education.

OUR SOLUTION:
We use Community On Demand to address three pathways that uses a direct service approach to strengthen academic support and create change:
• Academic Support - Improve academic outcomes by ensuring youth have access to the supports and experiences e.g., afterschool and summer experiences that foster academic outcomes, employability skills such as 21st century skills, leadership development, and planning for future careers as well as hands-on, project-based, quality mentoring and experiential enrichment opportunities targeted to increase youth’s engagement in learning and social-emotional development.
• Career Pathway - Cultivate developmentally appropriate opportunities for youth to build the soft and hard skills including youth apprenticeships that will make them competitive in the current and future workforce as well as providing personal growth and development and social/economic opportunities.
• College Planning - Support youth and their families in navigating the complexities of accessing and completing a post-secondary program including selection, enrollment, funding, and other supports that eliminate barriers as well as maximize young people’s ability to take advantage of their post-secondary options by increasing quality mentoring, leadership, service-learning opportunities and support for reducing school dropouts.

OUR RATIONALE:
It is critical that Community On Demand becomes an effective tool to increase access to college and career ready opportunities for youth and young adults while addressing systemic issues such as poverty using a racial equity lens to eliminate barriers that young people face in their current educational and workforce environments. Our focus is to equip youth with high quality college and career opportunities that eliminate achievement gaps and lead to sustainable careers and greater economic prosperity. Regardless of race or zip code, all young people deserve the opportunity to graduate high school and have access to resources that truly connect them to higher education and high-growth careers.

ABOUT COMMUNITY ON DEMAND
Community On Demand was created by U.S. Army Veteran, Dana Jewel Harris and is administered by The NEXT Steps Youth Entrepreneur Program (a 501c3 nonprofit organization) through the development of Junior Executive Management (JEM) Teams and their implementation of meaningful, work-based learning experiences.

There are five components to The Community On Demand Card Game Curriculum:
• CoD Card Deck - an innovative 72pc pocket-size card game curriculum that uses five color-coded achievement domains to help learners quickly define, measure, build and name their high-demand employability skills.
• CoD Game Board - a reusable 18" x 24" dry-erase project-based mapping tool that allows learners to visually see applied use of each skill card from the Community On Demand card deck. This game board makes skill-building and team-building fun!
• CoD Skills Self-Assessment Worksheet – a single use, letter-sized project-based mapping checklist that helps learners quickly assess how they apply use of each skill card from the Community On Demand card deck.
• Money Guide for Young Entrepreneurs Activity Workbook - The official textbook for the Community On Demand card game curriculum -- provides eight easy lessons to help learners assess their employability skills, build their Junior Executive Management (JEM) Team, create impact solutions and career-building opportunities, and even launch new social ventures
• Money Guide for Young Entrepreneurs Online Course (Curriculum Series) - Online courses that guide learners through the Money Guide for Young Entrepreneurs Activity Workbook and Community On Demand card game competitions with in-depth digital visuals, audio tracks, and activity worksheets.

PILOTS & PROJECT AREAS | FY2022-2025
• Paulding County (Pilot Program). In three years, NEXT Steps expects to achieve the following milestones within the Paulding County School District & NW GA RESA: 20,000 students, 2,000 educators, 500 Nonprofits, and 680 For Profits. (As of February 2021, we have provided Community On Demand materials to 500 students; Train-The-Trainer workshops with 10 educators)
• Legacy Music School (Clayton County) -- a music school to serve as the anchor for the Community On Demand Digital Media Network (target 600 participants)
• Favor House (College Park) - a nonprofit that offers sports program for at-risk College Park youth that is going to use Community On Demand to conduct an awareness campaign for their organization (reach 4,000 residents with the help of a newly elected official Joe Carn).
• 30-Acre Private Farm (Fayetteville, GA) - A new site to replicate my Agricultural Technologies With Open Outdoor Design (ATWOOD) Model which uses Community on Demand with farming to teach kids business strategy, event management, economic development, and entrepreneurship.
• Rain/Fire Church (Douglasville, GA) - a church family that owns 200 acres and a "business incubator/studio hub" that wants to use Community On Demand to develop a leadership training program specifically to help retired veterans and those leaving active duty become community leaders and youth mentors
• F1ne-Tune (Georgia & Alabama) - a professional development company that has agreed to promote and offer Community On Demand's professional development courses (3) as one of their services.
• National Women In Agriculture (Georgia Chapter) - a women's agriculture group that is using Community On Demand as an employability skills development solution to their funders/partners at Fort Valley State University and through their AgriTeens high school agriculture program (100 students).
• Holiness Is The Way (Online Ministry) - an online ministry with 3.3K followers that shares bible-based inspirational words of encouragement. They want to use Community On Demand to build their YouTube channel, increase their congregation, and develop multi-state calls to action through community service.

About Us
The NEXT Steps Youth Entrepreneur Program is an award-winning, 501c3 private operating nonprofit foundation located in Atlanta, GA. It was founded in 2008 by Dana Jewel Harris, CEO of The NEXT Steps Small Business Incubator (NS-SBI).

Ms. Harris has been teaching students and local leaders how to use her signature Community Involvement Growth Strategy (CIGS) Models as a platform to bridge the communications gap between the local education and business communities. Her mental toughness, personal development, and leadership training platform also establishes lines of communication between the students, schools, volunteers, mentors and professionals within the 17 high-demand STEAM industries that fuel Georgia’s economy.

She created Community On Demand as a game-based learning tool for STEAM entrepreneurship so that she could develop a talent pipeline management system that strengthened the employability skills of today’s youth and young adult workforce. Her capacity building and skills development programs have served Title I school districts and communities that develop comprehensive local needs assessment plans, school improvement plans, school-parent involvement policies, and Career & Technical Education curricula in order to address, reduce and eliminate the socio-economic conditions that negatively impact the special populations they serve (as defined by the Carl D. Perkins CTE Federal Fund).

Her goal is to revolutionize how STEAM education is taught. Instead of traditional lectures, she centered her learning tools around financial literacy, blockchain technology, STEAM education, entertainment and entrepreneurship. Today, she uses the Community On Demand Digital Society & Activation Process as her main vehicle for engaging communities through her CIGS Model to ensure learners of all ages are provided with meaningful, work-based learning experiences and career-building opportunities that positively impact their local economies.