| Art and entrepreneurship converged at Eastern Bank’s Franklin Street office yesterday for the “Bearing Witness” event.
The event featured the work done by a handful of Boston-area youths this summer with the help of the Media Leadership Institute (MLI), which had the students produce short films and even tackle Boston’s infamous snow problem, which currently looms just a few pages away on the calendar.
The MLI is a partnership between Resilient Coders and Press Pass TV, who use the bourgeoning tech and media production markets to educate and empower at-risk urban kids. Eastern Labs, the technology arm of Eastern Bank, hosted the event in order to “celebrate and amplify the meeting of social change and technology,” according to their press release.
This “meeting” is at the heart of Eastern’s mission to support and engage the communities that surround its nearly 100 branches, said Laura Kurzok, executive director of Eastern Bank Charitable Foundation. As a mutual bank, Eastern is owned by its customers and governed by a board of trustees, who, in 1999, voted to put an unprecedented 10 percent of its earnings toward charity and community giving. In 2015, Kurzok said, this will equal about $6.5 million across about 2000 organizations.
Resilient Coders and the MLI became part of the picture a few years ago when Eastern’s Chief Digital Officer Dan O’Malley, head of Eastern Labs, met Resilient Coders Founder and Executive Director David Delmar in the local startup scene.
“Eastern’s history is about pooling our resources, and teaching each other how best to use them,” O’Malley said, so the MLI was a clear choice for Eastern charitable funds.
The event began with an introduction by guest speaker Meghan Verena Joyce, East Coast General Manager of the ride-sharing app Uber, who described how her company was born of “a really simple idea, followed by a lot of hard work.
“Don’t forget what you learned here – it all starts with a great idea,” she said to the teenagers scattered about the room, anxiously awaiting the premiers of their films and app prototypes. “If you were able to accomplish this much in just a few weeks, just think how much the rest of your lives could have in store for you.”
Though the films, ranging from coverage of political rallies and community development programs to dance and rap music videos, only ran several minutes each, Press Pass TV Co-director Joanna Marinova reminded the audience of the amount of work the students put in – with each of them involved in the extensive organizing, interviewing, filming, editing and producing of their content.
The students’ Uber-style snow removal apps allow users, both homeowners and city officials, to post jobs (aka the locations of colossal snow banks where driveways and streets should be) for local kids to come handle.
The idea, MLI leaders described, came of a broad prompt issued to the student body, along the lines of “Two issues facing Boston are snow and youth unemployment. Go.” With some refining and pitching to possible investors, the results could change daily life in The Hub come the turn of 2016.
“It has been an extremely difficult and demanding summer for them,” Marinova said, “but they definitely have rose to the challenge, as you can see.”
