The Tribal College Consortium for Developing Montana and North Dakota Workforce (DeMaND) is using social media to tell their stories, raising awareness about labor and college attendance rates for American Indian men in comparison to American Indian women and sharing the success stories of the DeMaND program. DeMaND uses YouTube and Facebook and has also engaged the services of The 1941’s, a comic group that uses satire to address difficult topics within the Native American community.

The 1941’s originally created videos for the consortium to encourage men to become “modern day warriors” by receiving training through DeMaND; other videos feature the programs and each of the consortium’s colleges. The 1941’s have a YouTube channel with over 50 videos and 28,000 subscribers where they perform small skits discussing various political and social issues from a Native American perspective.

To learn more about DeMaND, and the 20 programs of study that have been created or enhanced using TAACCCT funds read Strategies for Transformative Change: Short Term and Accelerated Training through Blocked Scheduling.

Teryn Payne is an undergraduate senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studying news-editorial journalism. She has been working at the Office of Community College Research and Leadership since the summer of 2014 when she started as an undergraduate intern. She works with the Transformative Change Initiative at OCCRL.