“Here at Spy Hop it’s kind of like a friendship-based family. You have the connections, you’re all related because you like the same thing, so you build strong friendships throughout that and then when you go out into the community you are not alone. You have people that are around you that you already know so you feel a little bit safer. It’s just a branch to grasp for.”

Quote from focus group participant in Spy Hop Productions Evaluation Report 2007-2008

At its 10th anniversary, Spy Hop Productions is now among the nation’s largest youth media organizations. However, Rick Wray, executive director and co-founder, says its engine for social entrepreneurship is always being fine tuned, which means that not only will youth media groups have larger, more freely accessible platforms for creativity but it also will ensure freedom for groups to continue pursuing strong empowering, socially conscious projects that have made the organization so successful.

Since 1999, Spy Hop has thrived on “a culture of innovation, independence and risk-taking,” Wray explains, adding that everybody from the top down “freely embraces change, never nervous about experimenting.”

To help celebrate its anniversary, Spy Hop will hold its only annual fundraiser Thursday, April 30, from 6 to 9 p.m. in the Jeanné Wagner Theatre of the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts in downtown Salt Lake City.

The event’s participants and sponsors attest to Spy Hop’s well-developed capacity for business and education collaborations. Edward Herrmann, an actor with Tony and Emmy Awards to his credit, will be Spy Hop’s keynote speaker and Carter & The Coach (103.5-FM, The Arrow), morning DJs, will be masters of ceremony. Some of the city’s best-known restaurants are providing food and beverages.

Spy Hop will then auction off, with Kevin Gallagher as auctioneer, each of its four core programs to the audience, plus one Sundance Film Festival package.

Today, those four core programs — Multimedia Apprenticeship Program, Youth Documentary Arts Program, PitchNic Young Writer and Director Program and Loud and Clear Youth Radio Program – draw more than 600 students annually from 116 schools in and around the Salt Lake City metropolitan area. Ten years ago, it was just one program with Wray and co-founder Erik Dodd working with 12 kids who produced a documentary called “Hourglass” on an annual budget of $20,000. From a 200-square-foot space, Spy Hop has expanded into facilities in the Gateway District serving hundreds of students each year on an annual budget of more than $1 million that includes a richly experienced faculty.

Critical to Spy Hop’s mission has been its capacity to serve a diverse group of students where more than one out of four come from low income to lower middle income families and nearly four out of ten come from various ethnic and racial demographic segments. As Wray notes, Spy Hop is the only outlet many students have for such diverse interaction and where they work together not only on video and film, audio production, photography, animation, graphic arts, and interactive media design but also they learn together about how to deconstruct the media, becoming astute, skilled media literate consumers and producers who navigate the barrage of numerous media channels by becoming empowered, not being manipulated by it.

The apprenticeship program is just one clear indicator of that unique hands-on access. Last year, students created projects for Head Start, Tracy Aviary, the Salt Lake Art Center and others. Many of these projects comprise, among other things, autobiographical stories, experimental films, digital art pieces, remixed film trailers, digital art pieces, and the production of original music and interactive online visual and literary works.

Larger projects are equally the norm. The 2008 Write Shoot Ride documentary, The Unsung, explored the meaning of being a hero – including stories of a man who gives out free bread and a super-hero crime fighting club.

And, as reported last fall in this blog, one could readily see the quality of the Pitch-Nic films which serve notice that groups such as Spy Hop are enormously effective in amplifying and sustaining young voices that ultimately will become the respected creative film artists of the next generation. These films are not just a pivotal point for these young filmmakers but also for community support and awareness of groups such as Spy Hop Productions.

Last fall’s Pitch-Nic entries framed provocative eager mindsets common to their filmmakers. For example, two documentaries were presented – one a mature, sensitive first-hand look at the impact of a wilderness camp for two teens dealing with substance abuse and family communication problems and the other a respectably researched personal account of the consequences of life without a Social Security number. A third was a pleasant story about a young man who’s convinced that the messages in his fortune cookies are being manifested in reality. The final offering was a dramatic, intense story about a suspect in a hospital who desperately tries to discover what he’s been accused of doing.

Spy Hop content also finds many different audiences as students have had their work featured at festivals including Sundance, Utah Arts Festival, and others as well as cable networks including HBO.

The projects extend to virtually every medium. Every Saturday night, participants in Loud & Clear go live on KRCL 90.9 FM to play music, interview guests, host live local bands, present documentaries and highlight calendar items pertinent to the youth community. The students work as fully-vested radio professionals, learning audio production skills, the craft of story packages, FCC rules and regulations, writing skills, interviewing, “DJing”, voice training, and media literacy.

And Wray notes the youth involvement in Spy Hop doesn’t end there. The staff relies on the input of a youth advisory council to keep the mission as fresh as possible. “They tell us what their peers are into, what needs are not being met,” Wray says, adding that helps sustain what is the only fully established youth media arts center in the Intermountain West, easily competing — if not exceeding in terms of output, size and budget — with similar centers in much larger metropolitan media markets.

Spy Hop’s alumni occasionally return as instructors and recently Wray has set preliminary groundwork for an extensive alumni tracking survey, well aware that many students are finding careers or pursuing education in the media profession. A recent survey of last year’s participants showed that more than two-thirds of participants indicated they plan to attend a college or university and a quarter of respondents expect to work in a related media or technology field.

Extending the social entrepreneurship mission means that Wray and the Spy Hop staff, especially in this challenging economy, are capitalizing upon the rapidly growing acknowledgement that nonprofits must diversify their revenue streams. Like the “spy hop” metaphor — when a dolphin rises out of water scouting out the horizon and watching for other dolphins in the pod – which has been so effectively used to describe their work with students over the past decade, Wray is looking at innovative partnerships that ensure the center can focus its energies on educating students and producing new media content.

One way is the Interactive Digital Education Academy (iDEA) that provides periodic workshops to teachers in the K-12 grades who are seeking to integrate new media technologies into their core curricula. These five-day workshops take participants through the process of producing public service announcements, short films, and animation projects as well as provide ongoing support from Spy Hop staff professionals.

It’s just one more way that Spy Hop’s staff and students have carved passionately a promising niche for educational reform and have sustained Salt Lake City’s best venue for an empowered, informed, creative voice of youth.

Major sponsors for the April 30 event include the Zoo, Arts & Parks of Salt Lake County, Bonneville International – KSL TV 5, Utah Film Commission, Jon & Karyn Hodge, Jones Waldo Holbrook & McDonough PC, and XMission. Tickets are $60 each and $40 for Spy Hop alumni. For more information about the benefit, see here.