Content Creators Academy is a non-profit youth mentorship program that I founded a year ago after celebrating the blog’s third anniversary. 

Content Creators Academy Jersey City is a nonprofit education program offering mentorship to youth in Jersey City interested in media, marketing, and entrepreneurship. We curate workshops covering a variety of digital media, including graphic design, videography, photography, and illustration. Our team of volunteer mentors provide tailored lesson plans, and teach valuable skills that enhance students’ college applications and professional portfolios.

We began taking applications at the end of summer and accepted eight bright students to join CCAJC. Classes began in October led by our director MacAdam Smith. Our eight students learned so many valuable skills this year and are proficient in graphic design, photography, videography, branding and most importantly entrepreneurship.

We had mentors from many industries come in to train our kids and talk about what they do! We had talented photographers and videographers, a drone specialist, creative entrepreneurs and many more.

The classes were held at ChicpeaHQ but after closing our offices, the students moved to The Clearport for a month for a graphic design intensive class led by owner Hayoner. After that, they moved to Fresh Tomato Studio, a local photography studio that does everything under the sun when it comes to video and photography, animation, motion graphics and more.

Over the last few months, local co-working space Indiegrove welcomed the students to continue their studies in their conference rooms.

We also received generous support from two local organizations, Jersey City Youth Foundation and Party with Purpose, which awarded grants to our program. These contributions are providing more equipment for our classrooms, so that more CCAJC students have access to design programs and photography equipment to learn on.

I am extremely grateful to these businesses and organizations for taking us in and allowing the students to continue their work.

Student Applications

We will be taking a break over the summer for community outreach and to build the program for the next semester. If you are a student or know someone who might be interested in joining please go to ccajc.org to submit an application.

Mentors

Are you interested in being a mentor for our program? Are you an entrepreneur? Creative? We always need people from different industries and backgrounds to come to our classes. This is a great way to give back to the community. Let us know if you’d like to be a mentor for some of the most creative students in the city.

Special thanks to our donors this year:
The Silvermans
Ben Torrei of BGT Group

Special thanks to our board members:
Angela McKnight
Brian Platt
Marelyn Rivera
Bryan Kuan

If you’d like to help us grow the organization and obtain the supplies for the students, please visit our GoFundMe page! And save the date for our students’ graduation – June 21st at Atlas!