Casa Azul Productions Enterprise

Problem: Worldwide, the digital skills gap is projected to increase across all industries. More than 82% of middle-skill jobs require digital skills. Comparatively, positions that are digitally intensive pay more. Digital skills provide a career path to higher-skilled jobs. Much of the workforce is left behind and unable to afford to move for a job or pay for expensive digital skills courses, this is especially true for workers in developing countries.

Solution: CAPE provides professional development in digital media and paid microwork opportunities to workers in developing countries. CAPE also supports young-adults to create businesses in their communities.

Scale: CAPE will continue to expand meaningful professional development opportunities for workers without access to digital skill training, robust labor markets, and competitive pay rates. With increased capacity CAPE could expand beyond the US and Latin America to provide pathways to higher-skilled and higher-paying work regardless of location.

Global Unemployment: More than 200 million people worldwide are unemployed, many of them young people. Another 2 billion working age adults – mostly women – remain outside the workforce. In the 15 years, 600 million more jobs will need to be created.  Worldwide, an estimated 23% of young adults currently employed earn less than $1.25/day. With 90% of these young adults living in developing countries there is an urgent need to develop innovative solutions to these workforce challenges.

Digital Skills Gap: Many university graduates are underemployed and don’t use skills they acquired in school. Creating more and better jobs requires moving workers from lower to higher skilled activities. An estimated 120 million workers worldwide will need to be retrained due to AI and automation within the next 3 years, many of these concentrated in the developing world. In 2014 workers needed 3 training days to close a skills gap, today it takes an average of 36 days. Many companies don’t have a strategy to address these gaps and hire externally.

COVID-19: The recent pandemic has accelerated the need to close the digital skills gap with many people being laid off, underemployed, or facing a rapidly shrinking labor market.

Solution:

1. Provide free online training on digital skills through interactive and youtube-style videos and tutorials.

2. Provide jobs to workers in developing countries by providing them with digital microwork.

3. Support youth to create businesses and professional networks within their communities.

Addresses: CAPE helps close the digital skills gap by providing free resources and flexible work paid at a higher rate than what is available locally. CAPE invests in its students and connects them with professional development opportunities that match their interests.

Process: The process includes a multi-tiered certification program in which workers can progress through courses on digital media, production, and other skills. These courses are offered in Spanish and English and are currently available through the website and can be accessed with a computer or mobile device. The business platform pairs workers with business on projects related to website design, branding, and digital media content creation. CAPE is updating its project management platform to allow for real-time collaboration while maintaining quality control. Updating project management will allow CAPE workers to expand into creating augmented reality content for business clients.

Population: Our target population is young adults, ages 18 to 35, from developing countries. We will first focus on expanding work in the US and Latin America as we have already started our work there. These young adults are part of the production process. They are the teachers, producers, and they provide feedback about what type of digital skills content to produce.

Needs: We actively engage with our community to better understand their needs. Laura, a 28-year-old from Argentina, attends college, does freelance work, and teaches one of our courses. She understands that many people want to learn new skills but may not have the resources, so she teaches digital media skills based on free platforms rather than paid ones. Maria, based in Venezuela, experiences frequent power outages. She needs the flexibility CAPE provides to do work in copywriting.

Solution: To produce our website design course, we hired a youth production team based out of Mexico, CAPE contracted with them to produce a total of 7 course videos. The team was able to learn more about video production while getting paid. CAPE provides professional development experiences in digital media and hopes to offer full-time jobs as it increases capacity.

The global workforce is rapidly changing, many positions in developing countries will be eliminated. Local labor markets may not offer quality, high-paying jobs which contributes to underemployment. Access to digital skills training can be costly, if available at all locally. By providing free digital skills courses, CAPE can help close the skills gap in a way that is flexible for workers in vulnerable situations. These skills, CAPE’s microwork approach, and its focus on providing meaningful professional and career path development opportunities help these workers with the technical and professional skills necessary to be competitive in a rapidly changing job market.

Our Mission is to provide employment opportunities, not aid, to help fight global poverty. 

Our work is done through impact sourcing in an emerging industry: digital media. In today’s business world, industry leaders tend to outsource both physical and digital work to developing countries as a way to take advantage of low wages. At CAPE, we intend to stray from this model by socially outsourcing microwork by providing living wages and professional development to workers .

Recently, impact sourcing has become a better option for social impact businesses. According to the Everest Group, “Impact sourcing ... enables global enterprises to improve business outcomes by hiring and providing career development opportunities to people who generally have limited employment prospects.” We believe that connecting people to dignified digital work and paying living wages has the potential to solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges, from reducing poverty to empowering women, giving opportunity to youth, and retraining the workforce for 21st Century careers. 

At CAPE, our competitive advantage is that we work with young adults who are technologically savvy but have yet to professionalize their skills. The young adults and adults that CAPE works with and hires know how to use digital media tools to socialize, but we are training them to become professionals and earn a living wage. The areas that we work in and outsource work in are social media, website design, video production and illustration. We are also exploring the area of Augmented Reality given the industry’s current trends. 

Educational Courses

We use technology in both components of our social enterprise; the training and educational program, and the business platform. 

In our education platform, we used existing technology and personalized it to provide  free and bilingual courses for non-tech savvy users. Users can use their desktop and or mobile device to take our course. Our course is fully functional on mobile devices. Currently, 46% of users access our platform through their mobile device.

Business technology

The service that we offer is business to business, meaning we provide services to companies  in the USA who are in need of website design, branding, or any digital media content creation, such as video production, online courses, etc.

To efficiently serve our clients, we are developing a leading technology platform that will allow us to collaborate with our clients and our workers in developing countries who produce digital microwork. All aspects of project management are currently done manually by our program director. The platform that we are developing will guide us in exemplary project management, allowing us to track projects, update the latest version of the digital content, and track who did what and its different versions. This will help maintain high quality control, even if our workers do not speak the same language and live in different time zones. An added component of this platform will be offering digital protection to workers and clients, since the individuals that we target live in very vulnerable settings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfHbENcmdsA 

The goal of the project is to retrain young adults and adults in 21st century careers with a focus on digital media which includes video production, website design, social media, illustration, ect. We believe that if we make our educational courses accessible then more young adults will want to get training in digital media skills that have a higher pay and have job opportunities. To accomplish this we have three main objectives:

#1 Provide free education and training:

Input:  To do this will provide online courses that youth can access online, we also provide online webinars, and provide supplemental material like ebooks and workbooks for learners.  

Output: Users gain new skills in digital media. Students in our course get an assessment after each video so we are monitoring the progress of their learning. For each course, students must receive a minimum of 70% passing score to pass the course level. 

#2 Provide microwork to young adults and adults: 

Input: We provide hands-on training for learners to put in practice the skills that they have gained through our online course. The program manager assigns project activities based on learner’s level and works closely with them to support their learning.  

Output: Users gain new skills and are able to do independent tasks in digital media which helps broaden their abilities. 

#3 Casa Azul provides 21st century training for workers around the world 

Input: Program leaders maintain knowledge on career trends by building partnerships with business, government, and nonprofit communities.In order for Casa Azul to provide the skills that are in demand by business, we must keep updated with trends and demand.  

Output: Casa Azul produces courses that are based on demand in the workforce by collaborating with the business community, the government sector, with universities, and the nonprofit community.

Since we launched our online platform, we’ve had 250 participants from all over the world take our self-paced course on website design, offered in both English and Spanish. To date, our YouTube channel has 100 subscribers. Moreover, our first webinar on Facebook has been watched and replayed over 800 times. We are partnering with universities, nonprofits, and government programs that will host webinars of website design, UX design, and on different digital media topics. The attendance of the live webinars vary from 30 to 100 attendees per session. 

At our current pace, we project that by the end of the year will have directly impacted 1,000 students through our self-paced course, and a total of 2,000 through our YouTube channel, live webinars and supplemental course material. In five years, we expect to serve millions of young adults and adults who are taking our online courses on education in digital media. 

Moreover, we currently contract six young adults and as we take more paid projects we hire them full-time. By the end of the year, through a local partnership with the Economic Center of Development in San Diego, we will have four more paid interns. We are also partnering with the Mexican government to host six interns that are currently attending university. Our goal is that by the end of the year, we will be working and training 20 youth. Our goal is that in five years, we will be serving thousands of youth through direct employment.   

Unconsciously, the pre-phase of the project started when project leader, Bianca Alvarado, who grew up in underserved communities of San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, was forced to develop leadership skills outside of school. Bianca learned that barriers have to be removed in order to enact change for youth in similar communities. Bianca has been working for more than seven years with youth by developing programs in the STEAM and workforce development areas.

Phase one is complete, accomplished with funding provided by the U.S. State Department. Our pilot program served as a platform where youth could learn about digital media careers and undergo an apprenticeship program. We have surpassed our pilot expectations by creating an online course that is being accessed by adults who want to learn about digital media outside the USA, in countries from Latin America and the Middle East. In just five months we were able to establish a team of professionals who currently help us train others in digital media skills, work with us through digital media work, and assist us in shaping our program.

Next Five Years: Phase two of this project consists of creating Casa Azul Productions Enterprise, an entity through which we will formally establish our social enterprise. We now know that we can produce the quality that clients seek in digital media production. The profits made from this work allow us to train youth, pay them, and leverage their skills to teach others, generating a complete impact circle. 

Some of the barriers that we have overcome in the past are:

1.  Driving long distances to help transport youth from marginalized communities to our center in Tijuana 
2. Having our production equipment stolen from our center
3. Using our personal funds to initiate the project

There are various barriers that we will face in the next years to establish our social business. However, we know that with the support of organizations like yours we will be able to accelerate our growth. We need assistance in the following areas:

Technical barriers. Our free online website is powered by Wordpress using SiteHost and an educational theme with multiple plugins. We use multiple third party options to provide hands-on activities, yet we would like to offer more functions within our own space. On the business side, we want to provide our clients and workers a platform to manage our digital media service.

Legal barriers. We are in a space that requires knowledge of data usage, protection of information and privacy rights. While we recently enacted a policy for participants 13 years or younger, we are sure there are far more legalities we are not aware of and must implement in our program.

Financial barriers. We started this project with zero funds. Bianca, our program leader, used her income from her job to start training some youth in Tijuana. Eric, our co-founder, uses his job earnings to buy production equipment. They will continue to do what is necessary to keep the project moving forward. 

Technical barriers. We do not have access to programmers who can effectively develop our program. If we become part of the SOLVE community, we would like to invite students to participate in helping build our softwares and programs. Otherwise, we will outsource this to another country where it is more affordable to build.

Legal barriers. There are many privacy laws that we are not yet aware of. Being a part of the SOLVE community and working closely with individuals who have knowledge in tech work will give us the opportunity to ask these questions and obtain additional resources.

Financial barriers. We would like to be part of the SOLVE community in order to have access to mentors who have experience in scaling businesses and using systems. However, we are also planning on finding local mentors. 

The founders are also constantly learning using free information on the internet to overcome any technical or knowledge barriers. Lastly, we would like to be part of the SOLVE community because our long-term goal is to expand in the Augmented Reality industry which we will know some MIT professors care about.

Bianca Alvarado and Eric Alvarado are the founders of the project; they both live in San Diego and volunteer most of their time to keep the project moving forward. 

There are also seven other youth and young-adults that work with us on a contract basis. Jessica Aparicio is based in California and is the queen of English copywriting. Laura and Pablo are both superheroes from Argentina and help us with website and video production. Maria from Venezuela is a rockstar with Spanish copyright. There are three more youth from Mexico who are currently mastering video production. 

We are all aligned with the same mission: to remove barriers so youth from any economical background can access training and knowledge in 21st century careers. We are all experts in our profession and through our different backgrounds we bring a different lens to our shared passion for digital media. Digital media for social change is at our core.

Laura is from Argentina and has  more than 4 years of experience in both photoshop and illustration. 

While working at a call center full time, Pablo devoted his free-time to learning video production and video editing for almost three years. 

Eric has spent the last five years teaching youth about video production and editing in Mexico. He is a self-taught video editing guru. 

Bianca is an educator with over 8 years of experience in innovative program design and management, curriculum development, and strategic partnership cultivation. She is a community leader with 7 years of experience engaging in projects related to community development, STEM, and workforce development. 

Due to the current situation in Venezuela we cannot provide details of Maria, but she is an expert with Spanish copywriting. 

Jessica holds a bachelor’s in Business Administration and a master’s in Social Innovation. Her digital media emphasis is in copywriting.

We also work with three youth from Mexico- Kelubay, Miguel, and Angel. We are working with them and giving them digital media training so that they can create their own digital media production company.

Last year, we were awarded a mini-grant for Casa Azul Productions’ Apprenticeship Pilot Program funded by Alumni TIES which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and administered by World Learning.  Alumni TIES seminars give exchange alumni an opportunity to apply for small grants to implement transformational projects. 

As an alumni of the Gilman Scholarship, Bianca (our program leader) was eligible to compete for this, and the pilot program was awarded $10,000. The theme for last year’s Alumni TIES grant that we were awarded was on, “ Stronger American Cities: Closing the Skills Gap and Building Entrepreneurial Ecosystems”.  

Through this program we have been able to receive support to manage the funds that we were awarded. We are currently also receiving support with getting a fiscal sponsor to help us apply for grants. 

We are currently expanding our educational program to reach more youth.  Some partnerships that we have started a relationship with and will continue to foster are: 

1. Education Department of Baja California, Mexico: We hosted a workshop for more than 100 students of the University of Technology of Tijuana

2. Sweetwater High School: The school’s STEM program promotes our resources through their portal 

3. The Connectory Portal: A comprehensive collection of STEAM opportunities and programs where families can discover local STEAM opportunities for the children. Our online program is featured in their portal.

CAPE functions with two guiding strategies:

1. provide training and work in digital media to workers in developing countries

2. support those that want to start digital media businesses in their communities.

Our model brings together our non-profit and business efforts as one social enterprise and is divided into three components:

1. Provide no-cost training in digital skills to young adults (18-35) and adults (35+) primarily located in the U.S., Mexico and Latin America. Nevertheless, we have individuals from all over the world (Iraq, India, Canada, and more) accessing our online platform. The training that we provide includes website design, UX design, illustration, video production, and technology careers. Access our apprenticeship program remotely via our website: www.casaazulproductions.com

2. Attract professionals that want to learn more about digital media and teach others. For example, Pablo, a team member from Argentina, works in a call center and edits video as an independent contractor. We provide him with training and an opportunity to enhance his video production skills. He will create an online course in video production for CAPE.

3. Offer micro-work to digital-savvy people in developing countries, providing them with jobs through the contracted work that they receive through CAPE. We produced websites, ebooks, videos, and social media accounts for businesses and individuals. Utilizing our bilingual skills, we reach out to talent that would otherwise not have this opportunity due to a language barrier. This final piece allows CAPE to support the apprenticeship aspect of our social enterprise.

Our goal is to become a fully functioning social enterprise, relying primarily on the contracted work that we pass on to workers in developing countries through microwork. Just last year, CAPE generated our first income by working with five local businesses in San Diego, helping them develop their website, branding, and rebranding of a store, as well as video production. Currently, we are starting to produce online curriculum designs, like e-books and workbooks all with independent contractors who would like to work full-time for CAPE.

What we at Casa Azul Productions seek most out of a partnership with SOLVE is guidance. The journey to becoming scalable and financially sustainable as a social enterprise can be overwhelming and at times isolating. Having someone with prior experience in scaling projects, particularly socially impactful projects, can help guide us in the right direction with our vision for CAPE. Alongside the individualized support, we also believe Solve’s solutions can assist us in developing better communication methods with our team members, who are positioned in different Latin American countries. What software and tools could we use in order to best carry out a multi-partner digital project? We have also found that in order for our social enterprise to be successful, we must be able to reach out to STEM leadership who have worked closely with students. This is a key component and would help us in increasing the number of participants in our apprenticeship program, as well as scaling the independent contracted work we now do.

We have also started to do R&D on Augmented Reality through the use of 3D Models. Therefore, we would like to connect with faculty like Professor Sanjay Sarma and professor D. Fox Harrell who both have a background in online education, AR, VR, and/or 3D Modeling.

We are in need of assistance in the following areas:

1. We reach out to outside professionals when in need of guidance. Being able to have a board of advisors that supports our cause will allow us to feel more secure.

2. With the ability to code, we can customize our platform and provide more features to our students.

3. Currently the co-founder is in charge of all aspects of the project, leaving limited time to seek out funding opportunities or marketing outreach.

4. Creating online content for users requires legal knowledge in regards to the use of data, registration, age limit, etc.

5. Zero funds have been invested in advertising and marketing, requiring us to do more word-of-mouth outreach which can prolong our goals.

6. Other: We have started to do R&D on Augmented Reality through the use of 3D Models and would like to connect with MIT faculty who is also working on this.

Some of our potential partners include research staff from MIT working in Latin America and Tech especifically in Digital Media like AR, VR, giving jobs to people in developing countries , or workforce development . We also look forward to partnering with people in developing countries in order to best contract out our work, as a part of the business component of CAPE.

We have also started to do R&D on Augmented Reality through the use of 3D Models. Therefore, we would like to connect with faculty like Professor Sanjay Sarma and professor D. Fox Harrell who both have a background in online education, AR, VR, and/or 3D Modeling. We want to explore the potential of creating digital images for these new industries using the workforce and talent in developing countries through our business model which is offering workers microwork in these industries.

Finally, we are partnering with nonprofits, government programs, and universities to offer our free training to their young adults both in the USA and other countries. 

The average percentage of women working in the tech industry is 30%, while women make-up 59% of the US labor force. At a global level, only 20% of all jobs in technology were held by women in 2018.

We concentrate our social investment efforts with a focal point of developing 21st century digital skill sets through digital learning. We are specifically tackling the UN Sustainable Development Goals of gender equality, reduced inequality, and decent work and economic growth. We have already made successful progress with our current members who have benefited from our training. We believe women should hold more leadership roles in the tech industry. This is why 100% of our instructors are women of color. 

Website design is one of our key training workshops because we help women and girls tell their story that can reach viewers across all borders. We are helping women create their website for a business idea or project that they have.  By creating their own digital media enterprise they gain a strong and valuable online market presence. An example of this work is the website https://scholarsontherise.com/ that is being designed by two high school students from a low-income community with zero experience in technology and no background in website design. They have been able to develop their website using only our online free course. Together, we can support more girls and women who want to share their talents and passions with the world.

Our target benefit population is specifically focused on young-adults and adults. Our solution is to teach skills and create paid project opportunities for workers within the digital media industry. We focus our efforts on training individuals who normally lack the infrastructure and access to digital media training. Our free and self-paced online training is currently available online which is desktop and mobile friendly available at www.casaazulproductions.com   

On the business side, we strive to operate in optimal efficiency by using a supply chain with impact in the production of digital media content. Operating through Microwork allows us to impact a larger amount of lives in a shorter period. Impact sourcing this microwork helps those most in need of our digital media training for developing their skills in the industry. By using a microwork model we also are able to pay impact sourced workers a living wage. Right now we focus on digital media training but we hope to grow this to include training across all STEAM platforms.  

We could greatly benefit from learning the systems that are used in GM as we want to produce a company that is as efficient and scalable through our digital media impact work. Moreover, through our pilot project we have seen through data how desperate adults are to get retrained. We know this because we have adults who are taking the course which was designed for youth that is why we have started to design training for young-adults and adults. 

We are working towards inclusive economic growth through digital media training for adults. Through our pilot program, a free youth-centered online website design training course, we discovered that there is a greater demand from working-age adults for these skills. From reaching out to these adults we came to understand that there is a significant gap in access to 21st century digital skills. 

Our training platform is designed to be simple and user-friendly so that an audience of any age can fully comprehend it and gain the abilities to create their own website.  We focus our efforts on training individuals who normally lack the infrastructure and access to digital media training. Our free and self-paced online training is currently available online which is desktop and mobile friendly available at www.casaazulproductions.com   

The courses that we offer include website design, UX design, illustration, and we have more coming soon on Augmented Reality and 3D-Modeling. 

We can see now more than ever how remote work and digital media has gained much traction in the workforce. These are essential skills that will bring good job opportunities and also help build online market presence for entrepreneurs seeking to build an online business.     

We are also partnering with universities, government entities, and nonprofits  around the world to help them retrain the workforce for 21st century careers. 

Our solution is profitable as we have already have some business clients. By impactfully outsourcing digital media work on content creation like website design, video production, and illustration we are saving about 70% of the cost to produce these items in developing countries while producing jobs and training young adults. 

If we are awarded this prize, we will use the funds to pay full-time staff so that we can take on bigger paid-projects in digital media.