PRESS RELEASE
The Paros Foundation
917 Parker Street, A14
Berkeley, CA  94710
tel: 310-400-9061
email:  peter@paros-foundation.org
web: http//

Manana Youth Center to Hold Summer Program for Diasporan Youth

YEREVAN – The award-winning Manana Youth Center will host its first
annual summer program this year, providing Diasporan teens and
pre-teens the opportunity to learn photography and documentary film
making in the heart of Armenia’s capital.

The program will be led by noted filmmakers and photojournalists, who
will teach classes alongside leading field trips and other workshops.
The field trips will take students into both Yerevan and the
surrounding countryside, teaching them to engage with Armenian culture
in new and unique ways, largely through immersion. At the same time,
they will help youth to hone their verbal and visual communications
skills in order to become the next generation’s opinion-makers and
culture-shapers.

Manana’s aim is to making top-flight education in critical thinking,
communications, and creative communications, available to a wide range
of Armenian youth. This fills an important vacuum, as many youth had
been left with no after-school opportunities following the collapse of
the Soviet Union. The few enrichment centers that were left were
prohibitively costly for all but the wealthiest of Armenians. Since
then, Manana’s goal has been to provide opportunities that will help
ensure the advancement of all strata of society throughout the coming
generation.

Through Manana, more than 100 students learn from prominent
professional journalists, photographers, graphic designers, animators
and filmmakers each year; the summer program is an effort to unite
these youth with young members of the global Diaspora who have similar
potential, and to help the latter discover, embrace and understand
Armenia and its people.

Manana’s students have won scores of awards at festivals and
competitions throughout the Caucasus, Europe and the Americas. The
Tufenkian Foundation has served as a primary sponsor of Manana during
the past 10 years, and since 2007 has been joined by the
California-based Paros Foundation.

Registration forms are available on Manana’s website,

###

For more information on Manana’s Summer Program, please visit Manana’s
website at ;or contact Rick Barry of the Tufenkian
Foundation at rbarry@tufenkian.com.