Ways that states can nurture tourism and foster economic growth take many forms, but in Arkansas, middle school and high school students are taking a lights-camera-action approach and doing it one community at a time.

The project is called My Community, a statewide initiative to encourage development of promotional videos touting assets of towns, counties and even regions. Sponsored by a coalition of educational institutions and state agencies such as the departments of Economic Development and Education, My Community coordinates and encourages student-produced films of two minutes to 10 minutes. The project was launched during the 2004-05 school year.

"Some people thought we'd be lucky to get six videos. We got 36," says Joe Glass, leader of the Arkansas Department of Economic Development Film Unit. In April, Gov. Mike Huckabee presented nine awards for seven student films at the first My Community Awards Luncheon.

The inspiration for My Community was another Arkansas-originated project called the EAST Initiative (Environmental and Spatial Technologies), a not-for-profit education model that puts state-of-the-art technology classrooms in schools to teach film making, architectural design, digital animation, Web site development, software design, geospatial technologies and other high-tech endeavors. What began in 1996 in one rural school has spread across Arkansas and is in five other states.

"The idea behind it is that students direct their own learning. They come up with a plan and implement that plan," explains Bill Dirst, EAST communications director. "Then the educator in that classroom monitors progress and the individual development of each student."

Dirst says EAST and My Community were a natural fit, since so many Arkansas schools already boast EAST labs. EAST students studying digital video may opt to take on a My Community project. "That's one way students can provide a service to their community and, in the meantime, develop some of those soft skills like meeting with community leaders, and develop the technical skills of storyboarding, filming and editing," Dirst says.

Because EAST labs already existed, expense to launch My Community was minimal, Glass notes. Four state agencies did share the costs to develop one professional editing system available to students statewide. On state servers is the My Community Web site (www.mycommunityproject.com), where the videos are available for viewing and download.

My Community videos and images are already being used to tell Arkansas' story to prospective business and industry, even internationally since available software can translate them into more than 100 languages. "What a tool this is going to be for business recruiters," Glass says.

Chambers of Commerce are taking notice, too. In fact, Glass recently referred one Chamber executive to the local EAST lab, where students agreed to produce a My Community promotional video with a decidedly business focus "for gas money and a lunch every now and then," he says. Local businesses are also turning to My Community students for high-end content for their own Web sites. For rural communities in particular, he notes, this could be the catalyst for more sophisticated economic development efforts.

Another benefit of My Community is that, eventually, a digital images library of each Arkansas community will exist. "This is digital asset grabbing, storing, retrieving, repurposing and reusing. Someday, everybody will be doing this," Glass says. "At some point down the line, Arkansas - God bless us - may be the first state to have a documentary on every community in our state, no matter how large or small."