Literacy skill development was identified as an area of need for underprivileged students in a school district. A digital storytelling workshop was conceived as a way to strengthen university ties with the Professional Development School (PDS) and the local library, while providing an engaging, essential, skills-focused summer literacy workshop for under-served youth in the community. To examine the efficacy of the workshop and to determine whether participants gained valuable skills, researchers examined the following questions: (1) Do students who participate in the creation of digital stories develop enhanced communications skills by learning to organize their ideas, ask questions, express opinions, and construct narratives?; and (2) Do students benefit from digital storytelling to learn to create stories for an audience, and present their ideas and knowledge in an individual and meaningful way? From the data presented, it is evident that the participants greatly benefitted from the workshop; however, that was not the only success resulting from the workshop. The collaboration between the university, the PDS and the library was a resounding success and has laid the foundation for many more successful collaborations in the future.