Update on Project Activities
Our week mainly consisted of beginning our final report and conducting data analysis. Justin led some of the more formal statistical analysis, and Katie worked on the literature review while we all had a chance to look through the data. We finished up a first draft of the report and sent it over to the community partners early today morning, and we are awaiting their comments over the weekend. With so much data collected, we were having trouble choosing what to highlight, but we tried covering the important baseline goals, as one of the starting reasons for our project was to show Menlo Park that it is not an exception to the trends of unaffordability and deficient housing supply in the Bay Area. What We Observed and Learned One of the greatest learning experiences is the difficulty of civic engagement. Initially, we aimed to conduct 100 surveys but we were only able to capture 81. In total, we conducted around ten 2-3 hour canvass shifts with shifts ranging from 2-3 people from the group canvassing. While our primary audience for the survey were service workers in the downtown area of Menlo Park, we were often unable to survey folks we wanted to represent in our findings. Many of these workers did not have time and space to fill out the surveys. We had several initial thoughts: there might be people who don’t speak English, know how to use iPad technology, or feel disincentivized by our survey. To address these issues we created both English and Spanish surveys, created paper versions of the survey, and announced to folks we were canvassing so that if they left their email, they would automatically be entered for a raffle for a $25 gift card of their choice. However, we think there are still a lot of different ways we could have creatively promote civic engagement and designed with their needs in mind. This has made us think a lot about how to design civic engagement; in class, we learned about the case study in San Francisco’s Chinatown and how unique techniques and approaches were taken in order to design with the audience in mind, like by using the toy cars to illustrate how traffic flow would change with the sidewalk adjustments. If we were to do this again, we would want to reevaluate how we approach canvassing and use creative techniques in order to engage the audience that we were unable to capture in this round of canvassing. Some of these techniques include having a digital component for reaching people and collecting data. We potentially could have collected more responses if we had city support for collecting data and gauge the need for affordable housing and public transportation options. We would also allot more time to data analysis. With break and the extra week of canvassing, our data analysis time and ability to translate that into a report got shortened. Trying to get project components moving a little faster at the beginning to allow for more time on the deliverables would have been be ideal, but we are still feeling good about our work for the constraints. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward We each discuss a personal example of an “aha” moment in our project. Yesenia: While canvassing in Safeway, I learned how difficult it is to reach some of the people we wish to hear from the most. As the class readings and lectures revealed, minorities are among those who are heavily impacted by inaccessible housing and transportation policies. They constitute a large part of the workforce in Menlo Park, and while roughly 45% of the people we surveyed were hispanic or black, I would have appreciated greater opportunities to speak with more workers who were of this background. Menlo Park is also mainly white and Asian in terms of demographics, so the workers coming from underrepresented racial backgrounds are not only comprising much of the workforce, but are also part of the huge flux of employees commuting long distances to get to work. At Safeway, the manager on shift was very reluctant to let us talk to the workers, as he paid them by the minute. In the future, it would be great to have more time to talk to the workers and gather more testimonials, even from non-english speaking ones, because their voices are historically silenced or ignored. Shikha: When we started off our project, I thought quantitative data was the goal. However, in having conversations through our canvassing experience, I realized how much more valuable the personal stories and testimonies were. People discussed watching their community change beyond recognition, from having to commute two hours on public transportation to wasting a quarter tank of gas in traffic - these individualized reactions went far beyond our initial survey. Our very first survey respondent highlighted just how unforgiving Silicon Valley can be. A manager at McDonald’s, the respondent worked in technology until he lost his role without much warning with the onset of new technology companies. He now lives in a house with 11 people while travelling on 3 buses to get to work. His story felt unfair in many ways, and it instantly made me empathize with our respondents and realize how formative transportation/housing issues are for life satisfaction as well as the role of big technology companies in causing these inequities. I am still so grateful that our respondents trusted us with their stories. Justin: Perhaps my greatest takeaway was talking to an employee at Trader Joe’s. He was describing how hard it is to live in such an expensive area, despite the fact that he had lived there his entire life. He said that this was no place to raise a family, which is a strong indicator of unsustainability if an area is not suitable for the next generation. The stocker at the store was an especially friendly and outspoken person, and I really sympathized with him in his situation. He said he was fortunate enough to live with his parents who had a house in East Palo Alto for a long time, but not all are so fortunate. Homeownership has been a major element of the American Dream since the 1950s, and it is clear that people place a huge amount of value and pride in their homes. Thus, when people cannot own homes, it is not just a problem of shelter, but also identity, as people miss out on a core element of our societal identity. Though property owners may not have a negative duty to provide housing, it is important to allow a city to be open to all types of people. Long-term residents may not have a right per se to live in an area, but they do have a strong claim, and society should respect an individual’s roots and promote continuity of communities, as a place of living is more than just the shelter it provides. Michelle: My biggest learning moment was while canvassing at Safeway. I approached a woman stocking the beauty aisle and describe our project. At first, she was reluctant to talk because she was wary of her manager’s watch. But she continued stocking the shelves and sneaking in conversation about her struggles with housing: how she had to sell her car to afford to live in her mobile home in East Palo Alto, how her kids are the first thing she thinks of when she makes these decisions. It showed me how important these issues are to these workers, and how willing people are to talk about things that matter to them. I’m so glad we’re able to give these people a voice through our report. Sarah: My biggest learning moment happened during canvassing early on in the quarter. I had entered a hair salon on Santa Cruz avenue and was greeted by the cleaning staff, one of whom was working on cleaning up a pile of dust and hair that had accumulated by the door. Instead of the usual look of wariness that I expected to find after a couple interviews, she seemed excited to talk to me, and had many opinions and stories. One story has stuck with me. She described a day in her life-- namely her commute to and from work. She spoke of the struggles she faces in affording to ride public transportation as well as the time it takes for her commute because of the distances she has to cover to get to work every day. In order to get to work on time, she has to wake up at 5:30am to start a long slew of public transportation connections, leaving behind her husband ,children, and dog. To me, it was one of the more shocking things to hear; though I had seen the numbers and statistics, I had never connected a face and a family to them. In that interaction, I learned empathy at a much greater level, and I learned that behind each point of data, there is a life and a story and that these are all important ones to hear. I never expected to have such a profound experience and takeaway like that, but increasingly I see the value that community-based learning and work holds, and how it can completely change someone’s perspective in just a conversation. Going into the future, I will remind myself to seek empathy in my endeavors, and work to always try to find positive human connection behind the work that I do. Katie: One big takeaway that I have from this project is that transportation and housing issues are inherently linked and when we think about redesigning spaces in the Bay Area, we have to think about the ways and modes these two are connected. When I was canvassing in Safeway, I talked to the night manager. He told me that he originally lived in Redwood City, but could no longer afford to live there anymore so now he is located in further into the East Bay where housing is cheaper, but his commute is much longer. This was the case for many workers that we talked to and exemplifies how low-income members of the Bay Area are disproportionately impacted by environmental justice issues on top of being pushed out due to gentrification. Another moment was when I was talking to a worker at a restaurant and he told me that he wanted to take public transportation, but there were many barriers in place that prevented him. For example, he lived in a different county than he worked in and the bus lines do not connect from county to county, so he would have to get off and pay the fair again in order to reach his destination. Our fragmented public transport system makes it difficult for people who rely on it to get to the places they work and live. Through this project, I was able to engage with communities members on topics that we had learned about in class. My biggest takeaway is how to incorporate empathy into civic engagement and how to think about survey design with the most vulnerable and marginalized mind. Update on Project Activities
The following reflection will comment on our activities of both this week and the week of Thanksgiving Break since we did not have a reflection due last week. Over break, we each took ownership over developing one portion of the grant narrative by fleshing out some of the language we had pulled from AEMP’s past grants, and by adding our own text to tailor the narrative specifically to the NEH Collaborative Research Grant. We really want to highlight how interdisciplinary and collaborative AEMP is as a horizontal collective, and how this has been useful in creating a comprehensive Atlas that takes multiple perspectives into account. We’re attempting to convey the power of community-centered understandings of space, as well as the inherency of using the stories of affected individuals in understanding both problems at hand and their solutions. We compiled our text into one coherent draft, and sent it along to AEMP for feedback. We are still waiting to hear back from Mary and Erin about any changes they would like to see, and we are also still waiting to receive budget and collaborator information from AEMP as well. We intend to revise this draft and complete the grant application on Saturday, December 1st. This week, we focused on creating educational materials for AEMP to include alongside its Atlas. We also hope these materials can be adapted for a workshop in the 2019 Listen to the Silence conference. Spencer and Christian created a list of relevant vocabulary from throughout the Atlas and defined these terms explicitly to help students who might not be familiar with housing and policy language. Lexi created a timeline of policies and other events that have influenced the Bay Area’s current housing and equity issues to provide students with the necessary background information to be able to engage fully with these topics. Elise wrote sample discussion questions based on each chapter’s overarching goals and themes to encourage students to think critically about housing injustices and how they play a role in their own lives. Tony worked on a lesson plan for a community power mapping activity that high school and/or college students could do to help them identify what matters to them in their communities. We then met with Magie on Thursday, November 29th to present these drafts and ask for feedback. We intend to revise these materials and perhaps develop a few more activities before submitting them to AEMP on December 12th. What We Observed and Learned Throughout this week, we largely worked on the production of educational resources, and in doing so, were forced to consider the larger context for the information that we learned throughout the quarter. In thinking of which information we wanted to disseminate and to whom, we were forced to also think about the implications of our work in terms of the project’s target audiences and intended results. We decided which information was most valuable as a teaching tool for younger audiences, and in a sense had a large amount of autonomy in dictating that aspect of the project. This demonstrated the subjective power that researchers, scholars, advocates, and activists have in completing their work, as well as how important it is to recognize that power. Additionally, this process taught us the difficulty of producing content with specific audiences in mind. Given the diversity of audiences that AEMP speaks to, we had some difficulty identifying ways that we would best be able to inform and uplift those communities. Particularly at the middle and high school level, we had some trouble identifying ways to distill down some of the terse academic language to an appropriate level. In conjunction with this week’s readings, we had a lot of opportunity to think about our work in housing activism in the context of technology. Given that our project is one based in the digital humanities, we’ve been forced to think about the consequences of working through platforms that might be inaccessible to the people that they reference. In class this week, we broached a similar theme when talking about “smart cities” and the deployment of technology to resolve burgeoning crises in urban contexts. In thinking about how this relates back to our work, we’ve been thinking a lot about the dimensionality to sustainability practices, as well as how projects like this one might best have the potential to revolutionize the way that we visualize and conceptualize information. It has also caused us to think about the ways that our project can become more accessible, and it provided a lot of necessary context for how we plan to approach our work in the future, especially in tech hubs like the Silicon Valley. Finally, this week’s bike tour provide a glimpse at the vastly developing world of Stanford sustainability politics. Several times during the tour the guide mentioned how much money some of their facilities cost, and the luck that they had to be able to pay for them. This made us think back to earlier conversations, though, that we had about seeing sustainability politics as more than just about the environment. Rather, they’re about social and cultural sustainability as well, which led us to question how these investments -- while in projects that are beneficial for the Stanford campus -- might have more broad reaching effects like gentrification on the surrounding region. It made us think critically about what is often posited as a ‘trade-off’ between environmental protection and the interests of the impoverished individuals living in affected areas. In light of the Indigenous Geographies chapter of the Anti Eviction Mapping Project Atlas, we were also struck by the framing during the tour of the Indigenous history of the land on which Stanford’s campus is currently built. In this case as well, phenomena described as fortune in the tour brought to mind systemic histories and made us consider the importance of undertold narratives such as those AEMP is placing forward. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Is there anything you might have done differently if you were to embark on your project from the beginning? One of the greatest obstacles from the beginning of the quarter was understanding how complicated communication between community partners and our group would be. It would have been useful if we better divided the deliverables amongst our group, making each person responsible for consistently communicating with our partners for each deliverable. Despite the difficulty in deciding who communicates what, we managed to figure out what had to be done and how to complete it by important deadlines, and with the input of our community partners. Clarifying exactly what was expected of us in terms of deliverables and experiences would have also been useful. We were under the impression that some things had to be prioritized, like creating a useful oral history either for the Atlas or our own experience. It took a while to clarify exactly what we needed to accomplish, and what was supposed to be a useful experience if time and resources permitted it. Eventually we did clarify what the deliverables are, and since then we have been more focused than ever. Lastly, perhaps scheduling a consistent meeting time every single week where we could all gather and discuss our goals would have been useful. Finding a time to meet each week presents its own difficulties, from changing schedules to family matters, so if a group meeting time were not possible we could potentially have had two meetings, each with half of the group, to discuss progress, then sending brief updates or meeting notes to the other half. In addition, this would have helped us clarify priorities and timelines for meetings with collaborators from the AEMP collective, which could also have been delegated more thoughtfully on our end both in terms of preparation and sharing responsibility for participation. In any case, each of us setting time aside to meet consistently would have created more opportunities for us to clarify expectations and work on deliverables more collaboratively. What was your greatest learning from your community partner and/or from your fellow teammates? One of the most salient aspects of our project that taught us all the importance of communication was the opportunity to collaborate with the AEMP research collective. We learned a great deal not only about the subject material itself and the interconnected issues of housing justice, health, infrastructure, sustainability, and planning, but also about what it means practically to organize as a horizontal collective and to put forward material that challenges dominant narratives and power structures of the Bay Area. Rarely in academia do collectives like AEMP exist, and even more infrequently are they collectives that aim to mesh research with activism. As a group with multiple backgrounds ranging from biology to urban studies to anthropology, we learned how a collective can work in an efficient manner to bring about important social change with the help of data. Most importantly, we learned how to collaborate using our specialties, and this division of academic labor made our work even more interesting and convincing. Within the Stanford bubble, it is often hard to see exactly how coursework will help in a professional setting, and it is easy to become tunnel-visioned in one’s own department, unaware of how research with students in different departments will ultimately help each one achieve their own research goals. This work has been an encouragement and a privilege to say the least, and we have all gained valuable, real life experience from our group work. Was there a particular "a-ha" moment during your project that shifted your thinking about sustainability or community-based work? Or if you cannot pinpoint a specific incident, what major learnings will you take away from this experience? In class, Deland instilled the idea that the definition of sustainability can vary greatly, depending on who is defining it. This idea that something like sustainability, which might initially seem objective or exclusively based in science, is inherently value-based, connected quite well to the idea of countermapping, which is how AEMP describes its map-making technique. The idea behind countermapping is that what is shown on a map is dependent on who is creating the map and what they care about, and moreover that some voices are more often represented in maps than others. AEMP attempts to give marginalized groups a voice in the field of cartography by helping those who have been affected by displacement, gentrification, and eviction in the Bay Area to create maps describing what is important to them and their communities. This style of mapping tells stories that are usually hidden from the mainstream to help empower individuals and create a more holistic view of the spaces that people occupy. We believe that our work with AEMP has shown the importance of viewing the conditions of our environment from multiple perspectives, and examining further the ways that seemingly benign or fact-based policies and decisions can impact communities in overlooked or unanticipated ways. Is there anything you might have done differently if you were to embark on your project from the beginning?
I think this project has been a big learning experience for all of us involved. We were really unsure of how to start the project, as none of us had tried to reach out to people for interviews before, or anything similar. In the first place, our timeline was very ambitious - we should have started reaching out to people we wanted to contact much earlier, and we also should have tried to reach out to a higher volume of people earlier. We were very optimistic about people responding to us, which we were very disappointed about - in the first week our target was to reach out to 3 people each, but by the end of the second week in our timeline we had only made contact with 3 people who were interested total, one of whom stopped responding further along the line. We should have started off immediately with reaching out to a higher number of people first, to account for the number of people we would contact that would not be interested in our project. We also should have utilised our networks more effectively - it was only in the later weeks that we started asking people we knew who they might know that would be interested, which expanded rapidly, but at that point we were already on the tail end of the project. People we have second and third degree connections to would also be much more likely to actually want to contribute. An example of how this worked out was that we had one contact, Imma De la Cruz, who was put in contact with us via Sabrina’s roommate, who was immediately enthusiastic about the project. She in turn put us in connection with a few other interested people she knew and worked with, and even coordinated facebook events to collect stories at. This was incredibly helpful to us, and it would have been great if we had found a few Imma-type people that could have helped us make more connections earlier on. Another thing we wish we could have done differently, although we aren’t sure how we could have gone about doing this yet, would be to contact more people of colour and people from low income neighbourhoods. The people who tended to be responsive to our project were mostly people who worked for non profits, and those were for the most part, non-profits that supported Palo Alto and more affluent neighbourhoods. It was a goal of ours to have a broad representation of people in our narratives, but understandably, other non-profits did not have the time or for what could have been many other reasons decided not to work with us. We might have worked a bit more intentionally on how to go about approaching these organisations, trying to find more personal connections to them, but on the other hand, we were finding it difficult to figure out how to approach people for their narratives in a way that was not extractive and exploiting peoples’ trauma for their stories. What was your greatest learning from your community partner and/or from your fellow teammates? In retrospect, there was probably no single greatest learning from the Tech Museum or from each other as teammates, but we learned a lot of little, but still important, things along the way. Through our work with the Tech, we learned the impact that collecting stories can have on all parties included. During interviews, sometimes the interviewees would become emotional as they discussed how climate change has impacted their lives, discussing how a natural disaster had destroyed their hometown, or how climate change has inspired them to follow a plant-based diet, which in turn has reconnected them with their ancestors. As we listened to these interviews, we were often moved by the interviewees’ passion, pain, and motivations. Thus, if anything, we have probably learned the most from the people we interviewed. We learned how museums can be a way to convey these stories to the public in order to encourage them to act on seriously pressing issues. We will probably see the full impact of this in February 2020 when the museum opens, but in the meantime, the Tech/course has provided us with readings and research to support the act of storytelling to inform and persuade people to inspire change. As a group, we learned from each other and together about how to interview, edit stories, reach out to organizations, and coordinate with multiple partners, which are useful skills for future projects both in school and our eventual careers. The lecture on ethics in community work encouraged us to think critically about our work in collecting stories, and listening to each other’s opinions and thoughts on that topic as well as on how to split up work, approach reaching out, interview, and more taught us how to combine our different input to complete assignments and deliverables while reflecting regularly. Overall, we’ve learned how everyone’s story is important. Whether it was interviewing a community leader on climate change or working on reflections together, we witnessed firsthand how different backgrounds play a strong role in how we approach different situations we encounter in the world and more specifically during this quarter. It showed us how important it is to listen to individuals from all walks of life, those who can bring up various points to consider to ultimately make the project and the world in general a better experience. Was there a particular "a-ha" moment during your project that shifted your thinking about sustainability or community-based work? Or if you cannot pinpoint a specific incident, what major learnings will you take away from this experience? We didn’t really have a specific moment of realization around community-based work. Moreso, we gradually arrived a deeper understanding, with some key steps along the way. First, we learned how challenging it can be to match your needs, capacity, and vision with that of a partner organization. From the get-go we think there were some inconsistencies between our groups vision and mission and that of the Tech Museum. This differences were not immediately apparent, but as time went on, and we further discussed expectations and our progress, we realized the project we had in mind didn’t entirely line up with the Tech’s vision. Over the past several weeks, we have worked to bring these two together, in order to deliver a useful product to the Tech that we can be proud of. Partner interactions are an essential part of community-based work, and through this experience we’ve learned how important clear, open, and honest communication can be. It is best to resolve things as they arise, and bring up discomforts and concerns. It is also important for partners to treat each other as equals and work against any pre-existing power dynamics. We had this issue. We initially treated our partnership with the Tech as a client-contractor relationship. We mostly kept our progress and operations within our own group, but soon learned that the Tech felt very out of the loop and lost in terms of the project. Viewing ourselves as collaborators, instead, helped create a more productive and healthy working environment, and will likely lead to a more nuanced and useful final product. Through our work contacting community members, we learned how important networks and personal connections are to community-based work. We went into this project expecting people to be relatively responsive and open to collaboration. We soon learned, however, cold calling/ emailing has a very low success rate. It wasn’t until we met several key individuals, like Violet and Imma, that things really started to take off. Through their networks we were able to meet many more people for interviews. Having a mutual connection made organizations and individuals much more trusting and willing to collaborate with us and let us into their space. We also had much more luck when tapping into and working through our own personal networks, such as Cameron and Sabrina’s connection to the Jasper Ridge community. Getting people to share their stories - or do anything for you, really - requires trust and reciprocity. This experience has shown us how important it is to have and form connections with those you work with. As Violet and Imma explained to us, these networks take time to build, but they are vital to community-based work. Finally, through our discussions in class and guest lecturers, we learned the importance of ethical service. Our task was to record the stories of individuals across the entire bay area. Initially, we thought this would be easy, but conversations around ethics complicated our project. We learned about a case study in Colorado, where a film crew went against the wishes of residents they interviewed and stripped away their autonomy. This made us realize how essential autonomy and consent are. We couldn’t just go in and extract stories from these people and tailor them exactly to our own ends without any thought for them and their feeling. Update on Project Activities
Over the break, our team mainly worked on data analysis as well as getting together our materials for our final presentation. This past Tuesday morning, our team along with our community partners went to the Community Services Agency (CSA) in Palo Alto to give a presentation to the Executive Director, Tom Myers, and his staff. The CSA has and continues to serve as a safety net for those in need in the Mountain View, Los Altos, and Los Altos Hills area. The CSA provides vital social services such as Emergency Financial Assistance, Senior Lunch, Homeless Services, etc. The presentation served as a means to get feedback from an organization whose mission is to help those who presumably have less, whether that be in regard to access to education, health care, or the internet. Additionally, it was in some ways a dry run for our presentation at the d.school this upcoming Wednesday! Through the duration of the week, Kendall nearly completed a full draft of the infographic, which is one of our deliverables. Moreover, we’ve spent more time as a group determining what we want to get out of our data analysis, seeing that there are many ways we can look at our survey. Last but certainly not least, we had our final meeting with our community partners, Alex and Christina, on Friday at 3:00 PM. At this meeting, Alex and Christina provided us feedback from our presentation on Tuesday at the CSA. Thankfully, most of the feedback was related to how we could improve the visuals of our slides. Otherwise, they were both very encouraging. What We Observed and Learned Starting off with our presentation at CSA, one thing in particular that we observed was their differing concerns regarding the 2020 census. To set in place a disclaimer, this wasn’t a large point of contention, but a nuance that came up during our presentation and discussion. One of our project’s largest “so-what” factors is its significance in relation to the 2020 Census. According to the Census Bureau, starting in 2020, there will be an online component of the Census which will necessitate internet access for all of those hoping to report their household data through this means. Those without digital access face the threat of not being included in Census data. While the Tom Myers, Executive Director of the CSA, full-heartedly agreed with this claim, he also vaguely mentioned general qualms with the types of questions being asked on the Census. This just goes to show that while ensuring that people can participate in the Census by being mindful of digital inclusion is necessary, there are also ways that minority groups can be marginalized through the formatting of the survey itself. Both issues must be addressed in order to ensure social equity through the Census. Something else that we observed and was substantiated through our meeting with the CSA, was the need for more diversity within the languages that the survey was offered in. As of right now, our survey is only offered in English and Spanish. This is mainly due to resource limitations as Romeo was the only fluent speaker of a language besides English. Upon our visit to the senior center, we realized that there were many other non-English monolingual speakers, particularly Asian languages like Chinese, that were active in the community. While this wasn’t necessarily a surprise given the demographic diversity within Mountain View, we were not prepared to survey individuals in any other languages except English and Spanish. This is a clear missed opportunity. This observation was further supported by a comment made by Tom Myers, suggesting that we expand the language accessibility of the survey moving forward in languages such as Chinese and Russian. Connecting this to the larger idea of community-based work, this experience raises questions of selecting or bringing on team members who are able to communicate with individuals in their preferred language. On a small scale, for example, in a community dominated by one language, this is a fairly simple and easy task. However, when addressing an entire city population, making sure everyone can be included is a much more difficult task depending on the limitations of your team as well as your resources. A potential solution that can be applied both in this type of situation or in any form of community-based work is hiring community members whom you trust to do the translation work for you. Collaborating in this way also comes with the added bonus of social capital of that particular community member. People want their communities to be heard and more often than not are willing to help, whether that be voluntary or as a result of a wage. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward As this quarter and this project come to a close, only a few things remain to complete: data analysis, final presentation, and final deliverables. As of right now, Neal and I are focusing on completing both qualitative and quantitative analysis for both the presentation and the final deliverables. Given the amount of data that we have collected for each, the quantitative work is most significant and serves as the main source of our findings. Per our discussion with Christina and Alex, we’ll be analyzing the data on two main levels: 1) a general overview of the City of Mountain View and 2) based on reported demographic differences, in particular, income level. This will allow us to show how the responses of those with relatively less differ from the higher income Mountain View residents. As for our final presentation, we will be re-iterating on the slide deck that we created for the CSA presentation while adding new finds as this becomes available. Last but not least, we’ve been working on our final deliverables for the past two weeks and are on track to hit our last due date! Is there anything you might have done differently if you were to embark on your project from the beginning? We unanimously agreed that we could have produced more interesting findings specifically related to the people that were not connected to the internet by doing more targeted surveying. Before saying anything more, it should be known that this type of broad research was necessary given the fact that it hadn’t been done before. Nevertheless, our team can’t help but feel like we didn’t get enough data from the people we were hoping to learn about. Originally, what prevented us from doing this type of outreach in the first place were concerns related to making this target population feel uncomfortable or singled-out. This should be a researcher’s first concern when conducting ethical community-based research. Despite that, moving forward the next project group should further ideate on ways to learn about community members who lack digital access without compromising good ethics. What was your greatest learning from your community partner and/or from your fellow teammates? Overall, what we learned from our community partner was of and related to the inner workings of local government. Three out of our four members had never really worked on projects that were in cooperation with a local entity such as the City of Mountain View. In politics, we hear so much about the state and federal governments that the importance of local entities is often overlooked. In reality, a local government such as the City of Mountain View is responsible for making critical decisions that affect the daily lives of, in this case, nearly 80,000 individuals. We sincerely appreciated the efforts made by Alex and Christina to make sure the voices that could be missed will be heard in the 2020 Census. Moreover, we were relieved to see the degree to which they involved community members to participate in the decision and strategy making process. Thanks to the guidance of our community partners, we were able to talk to key groups within Mountain View whose responses and stories heavily influenced the findings of this research project. Was there a particular "a-ha" moment during your project that shifted your thinking about sustainability or community-based work? Or if you cannot pinpoint a specific incident, what major learnings will you take away from this experience? One particular moment stood out to all of us, it was when we realized that the affordable internet plans offered by service providers such as AT&T and Comcast really weren’t serving the community they claimed to want to help due to low internet access speeds. Many of the members of our team assumed that we’d walk into the focus group with the Spanish Speaking Ambassadors and offer them a solution through these low-cost internet services. On the contrary, we quickly learned that many of the individuals in the room had heard of and even signed up for these internet services, but found them useless because of slow loading speeds. To make matters worse, in these situations, individuals often found themselves bait-and-switched to more expensive plans by the very same companies that claimed to want to help them. Connecting this to the larger idea of community-based work, it just goes to show how little outside researchers know before speaking with the individuals they hope to help out. This is why the participation ladder is essential. If decision makers do not give the citizens they are hoping to help some degree of citizen power, it can result in the implementation of solutions the people themselves have already discovered to be insufficient. Is there anything you might have done differently if you were to embark on your project from the beginning?
We’ve spent this week preparing for our final presentations to the city leaders of Salinas and the Human Cities Expo. We had a conference call with our fellow student-researchers at Hartnell and discussed our sub-project findings, but this discussion led to the realization that our sub-projects have truly branched off in very different ways. Some teams have significantly changed their time frames, or topics since we devised our scope of work, but each sub-project has still produced interesting results. Now, the challenge is to fit five sub-projects’ worth of results into one cohesive yet short presentation. Designing the sub-projects along parallel paths of inquiry would have made the research and presentation process run more smoothly. If, for example, we had all agreed to examine the same topics but relate them to income (do people of different income levels have equal access to parks? How does an area’s income bracket relate to the frequency of police patrols? etc.), it would have been easier to link our findings together in the end. Additionally, we would have been able to share some data sources amongst the entire group, ensuring greater consistency and decreasing the amount of time we would have to spend looking for data individually. At the beginning of the project, the roles and clarifications remained unclear and so it would be best to establish that first. However, it was a great way to learn how complicated and broad initial research can be. I would have picked a different methodology by working on the presentation first and continued to fill in with research on what I didn’t know. Carol mentioned that it was better to write first and then to consistently do research and I felt like that advice held true- it sufficiently helps! What was your greatest learning from your community partner and/or from your fellow teammates?
Was there a particular "a-ha" moment during your project that shifted your thinking about sustainability or community-based work? Or if you cannot pinpoint a specific incident, what major learnings will you take away from this experience? Our initial trip to Salinas yielded a number of impactful moments. For instance, Sam Pacheco remarked that he had only been to Chinatown once, when he took a wrong turn, during all his years of living in Salinas. This was one of the reasons I (Hannah) chose to examine segregation and patterns of racial distribution in the city. After all, a city with very little interaction between certain racial groups or neighborhoods likely lacks the communication and unity necessary to address pressing issues like the housing crisis. This helped me to realize that understanding the roots of division and exclusivity is essential to building a more sustainable community. This realization also makes me wish that we had worked with a partner who is a part of the Asian American community. In class, we learned a lot about research and how to conduct it in a community so that it is harmless. We also learned about how urban planners need to focus on the community that they are designing for rather then coming in with outside agendas. Furthermore, we learned that the class material was actually a lot more difficult in practice. |
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