In May of 2014, FutureReady partnered with the Mayor's office to launch the FutureReady Online Visibility Training Program. The program leveraged resources provided to the Mayor’s office through the joint Google & United States Conference of Mayors Get Your Business Online City Challenge. The training program was created in order to train students how to create websites, improve the social media presence and online visibility of businesses in West Sacramento.
From February to June of 2014 Mayor Cabaldon’s office hosted a series of workshops for West Sacramento small business owners utilizing the resources provided to cities through the Google Get Your Business Online City Challenge in partnership with various regional business development agencies. The goal of the initiative was to assist business owners in West Sacramento to create websites for their businesses and make their businesses more visible online. Due to the success of the workshops and the demand of the business owners, the Mayor wanted to develop a means of integrating student involvement in order to not only promote business development, but to provide job training to youth and aid in local job creation. The Mayor launched the FutureReady Online Visibility Training Program as a means of connecting classroom curriculum to real world experience with the goal of preparing students for college and career.
From May 16th through the 30th the program was launched in partnership with West Sacramento Early College Preparatory Charter School (West Sac Prep), a local charter that specializes in project-based learning. FutureReady designed the curriculum and co-taught a nine-hour pilot course on HTML, CSS, Wordpress (a web development platform) development, & content marketing for West Sacramento Prep students. The program was a success, training and certifying six students from the local project-based learning high school to work with members of the business community in order to promote the development of their business.
From July 2nd to July 23rd, three of the certified students were then contracted by the West Sacramento Chamber of Commerce for a paid internship where they completely redesigned the website for the West Sacramento Farmers Market from the ground up, building their resume and applying what they learned in the real world. The work product they created is still used today as a means of promoting and increasing engagement with the West Sacramento Farmers Market. You can see their work by going to http://www.westsacramentofarmersmarket.com