Following the feedback received in both the youth and service provider focus groups, the pilot project was scheduled to run four days per week, Monday- Thursday, from 1 to 5 pm each day. Student and instructor feedback indicate that the program could easily have run for five days a week from 1 to 5 pm, to allow for more time to experiment with photography and to complete the written work. Students were paid $40.00 for each of the first three weeks, and $80.00 at the conclusion of the project, for a total honorarium of $200.00. While student found the payments helpful in paying for their transportation and food costs, the honorarium itself was not their main incentive for program completion. (See Evaluation Survey and Comments, pages 32-36).
We held the pilot project in a retail mall location, at the Barrie Learning Centre. The advantages of this location were numerous; the class room areas and computers were available and, with a bit of tinkering with the computer and printer connections, ready to use. Technical support was usually available, and always gratefully received! Some participants found the environment to be too businesslike and formal, and suggested that a downtown location with an "artsy" flavour might have been more inspiring. That said, the participants in the pilot were immersed in the Learning Centre environment throughout the project; this type of connection made registration for further upgrading work at the Centre both more accessible and successful.
Our experience of outreach and recruitment of participants was somewhat frustrating, but eventually successful. The recruitment advertisements (see Appendix D) were faxed to selected area youth service providers three weeks prior to the project's start date. These same advertisement posters were placed in youth relevant downtown locations, such as arcades, music stores, variety stores and the bus station. Initial recruitment was slow and unstable; two participants signed up within that first week, but both dropped out by the second week citing employment needs. One week before the start date, I attended the Barrie Youth Services Board meeting to promote the project further, visited a teen parent program at the Community Health Centre, and put in a further call to a local youth employment centre. At the start date, the pilot had 6 registrants, 4 of whom showed up. Fortunately, by the middle of that first week, 3 more participants registered. With one further dropping out after the first day, our participant list stood at 6 youths, which matched the numbers in our funding proposal. A word to future programs - recruiting too early is likely to result in participants dropping out before your start date, but you still need to recruit at least three weeks in advance to ensure that the message gets out in time. Our most successful recruitment connection was the area youth employment and counselling centre, due to the good match between their client population and the project's participation criteria. No youth were recruited as a result of the postering through the downtown core, suggesting that youth-at-risk need agency involvement and encouragement to register for upgrading programs.