The Options Program has two primary goals.

• To broaden participants' cultural awareness, knowledge and understanding both on an individual level as well as from the perspective of the Native community in general.
• To provide participants opportunities to gain skills using modern business and technology tools in a workplace type environment.

The Options Program is a nationally recognized program that has been helping to improve the lives of Seattle area native American and Alaska high school aged youth continuously for over 15 years.

The 2008 program is unique in that nearly all of the participants are returning from previous summers. This has changed the focus of this year's program from learning basic skills and the use of technology tools to extending last summer's learning and projects.

A key component of the 2008 program is learning about communicating ideas in writing and evaluating other's writing. Specifically writing about native related issues.

While we always focus on the two primary goals of the program, the activities and structure of the program can vary from year to year. In previous years we have worked on a variety of projects.

Some of the projects:

• Create a Native Community Leaders Gallery for the hall of the hallway leading into Community Technology Center.
• Create a small web site that shares information about the program, the activities done in the program and information about the participants.
• Create a personal project using technology tools.
• Create a video history project recording the stories of local native elders.