Update on Project Activities
This week we met with our community partners that represent The City of Mountain View. In that meeting we refined the initial draft of our survey, decided on project scope and determined final deliverables. Regarding project scope, initially the goal was to collect data in-person that would represent the entire city. However, the amount of canvassing necessary to produce that data was deemed to be too much for a quarter-long project. As such, the survey to gauge the connectedness of Mountain View residents will first be delivered electronically. The plan is to advertise the survey across The City of Mountain View’s social media channels. Once some preliminary responses are collected, neighborhoods that are not well represented on that survey will be canvassed or reached via a community liaison, such as a City of Mountain View’s Spanish Speaking Ambassador. We plan on presenting our findings to a member of the leadership team of Community Services Agency, a nonprofit that provides basic necessities to those in need. We may potentially present to the Trancos dorm as well, given its theme of equity and social justice. What We Observed and Learned When creating and revising the survey, we had some interesting debates. One was how to best represent the location of a survey participant. Our community partner is interested in knowing geographically who within Mountain View is connected to the internet and who is not. Thus, geographic information is incredibly important, but something like a street address is too identifiable. In addition, we want our survey participants to represent the entirety of Mountain View, which means ensuring that the voices of individuals without an address need to be heard. With the help of our community partners, we decided to ask survey participants to identify their neighborhood, as defined by The City of Mountain View. This approach has its benefits, such as the fact that a permanent address is not necessary and an included visual makes determining the correct neighborhood doable even if one does not drive and may not know the roads well. However, income disparity within a neighborhood can be quite vast. For example, some neighborhoods have homes that sell for over 3 million dollars, while within that same neighborhood a few streets away, some of the lowest income Mountain View residents reside. Even though we are making a region so broad, we need to ensure that the voices of the affluent and those connected to them within a neighborhood don’t drown out those that don’t have access to wifi. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Our next steps include finalizing the survey to be advertised on social media platforms and attending the City of Mountain View’s Spanish Speaking Ambassador’s meeting to recruit survey participants that may not be digitally connected. As we begin interacting with the community, our group took time to reflect on our current engagement with our community partner, as well as our upcoming in-person engagement with the Mountain View community. As was mentioned in class on Monday, we want to be mindful of our partnership. This is why we chose to create an exit plan now for the end of the quarter detailing how we plan on transferring knowledge. We also are trying to be listening to the residents. For now, that means ensuring that the survey is bilingual and includes demographic/income options that span a wide range. When we interact at the City of Mountain View’s Spanish Speaking Ambassador’s meeting we will heed the warnings in “To Hell with Good Intentions.” Rather than be like the “North American volunteer armies from Latin America - missionaries, Peace Corps members and groups...organized for the benevolent invasion of Mexico,” we want to listen and react to residents. We need to be open to the fact that we may need to change our survey if it isn’t meaningful to those that don’t speak English or aren’t digitally savvy. Update on Project Activities
This week we had our first meeting with our project partners, Alex Andrade, the Economic Development Manager for the City of Mountain View, and Christina Gilmore, Assistant to the City Manager for the City of Mountain View. Our meeting focused on developing context regarding the demographics of Mountain View, existing digital/civic literacy resources and programs for low-resource individuals to access the internet. While this project will focus on exploring the demographics of Mountain View residents that have access to computers and the wifi, as well as their knowledge of pre-existing programs, the motivation is rooted in the 2020 Census. The 2020 census will likely be distributed digitally, thus making digital inclusion a higher priority now more than ever. If an individual or family does not have the resources able to register for the census, there can be widespread economic impacts such as decreased funding for federal projects. While the individuals without a digital access face hurdles to civic engagement, they also face economic disadvantages. For example, if unemployed, an individual will be employed seven times faster if he/she has access to the internet. What We Observed and Learned Housing costs in Mountain View are incredibly high, with the median cost of a single-family home in the millions. These skyrocketing housing prices have attributed to the homelessness population in Mountain View tripling. Many residents now live in cars or RVs. In addition, Mountain View residents include immigrants, some undocumented, that do not speak English. It is hypothesized that these groups also have lower rates of digital access. Engaging with both of these populations is crucial to ensure that the 2020 census represents all demographics of Mountain View residents. As our team ponders a future without a digital divide, we question the competing nature of the sustainabilities defined by Mariam Greenberg in “What on Earth Is Sustainable?” Access to the internet provides economic benefits, as well as civic involvement: the City of Mountain View relies on its website as its main communication platform. While digital access favors justice oriented sustainability by ensuring that all residents have the same access to jobs and information regarding programs like AT&T and Comcast’s reduced cost internet, it may compete with eco-oriented sustainability. Wifi connections and necessary hardware like computers increase energy consumption and the ecological impacts of some hardware components, like lithium batteries, are immense. In addition, we wonder about the impact on community. We need to be observant. Perhaps central places where residents go to gain access, like a library for example, are important cultural institutions and public meeting places. Eliminating the need to commute for digital access may impact the cultural aspect of sustainability. The idea of free, public wifi in certain areas of Mountain View was mentioned. We wonder if that would result in a similar phenomena as environmental gentrification. Would free wifi in residential areas result in increased home prices, which are filled by residents that can afford to have their own personal internet connection? Critical Analysis/Moving Forward In the next week, we hope to create an initial draft of the survey that we will distribute to determine who in Mountain View has digital access, how they practice that access, and awareness about digital literacy programs. Our biggest question is in regards to distribution. How will we best engage residents that are not connected? Traditional means, like an online survey, won’t reach the entire citizen population. Christina has suggested talking with members of the City of Mountain View’s ambassador program that is composed of monolingual and bilingual residents that learn about civic resources, and can then share that information with their communities. Alex has suggested connecting with residents at Council Neighbourhood Meetings and seeing if we can distribute the survey through them. While the citizens at these meetings are more civically engaged than their peers, their current roles involve disseminating information to their communities, and can perhaps serve in that same capacity for distributing our survey. Update on Project Activities
Over break, the group continued to reach out to more businesses through email to participate in the online survey. Over the week-long break, we were hoping to have our online survey reach 75 -100 responses. However, we did not receive the amount of participation we anticipated. As it stands now, the survey has a total number of 35 responses, which is not enough to be used as relevant data. Fortunately, the group was able to take another field visit. We have begun collaborating on the presentation. We plan to have the presentation and the paper done by Sunday. What We Observed Over the weekend the group visited downtown Mountain View’s Castro Street to follow up with the businesses that were suggested by Alex Andrade, or that we visited previously and did not hear a follow-up from. Those businesses were East West Bookstore, Books Inc., East Valley Music, Peet’s Coffee, and Scratch. For all five businesses, we received their business cards so that the group could send them our surveys again.During the visit, the group observed many “help wanted” signs in a lot of the retail stores. We documented the trend by camera, along with the trend of new businesses moving into open spaces. We also took field notes on the characteristics of Castro Street during business hours. Next Steps The team goal, as stated earlier, is to have the presentation finished by Sunday, along with a draft of the final deliverables to Alex Andrade. Next Tuesday we are fortunate enough to have the opportunity to present our findings and their implications to the Mountain View City Council. We will use the opportunity to receive helpful feedback. On Sunday between 4-6 P.M. the group is also meeting to practice the presentation and iron out any wrinkles within it. We also are making our last push for businesses to participate in our survey, in particular the employees. The group will be calling and emailing the remaining businesses that have not followed up with us. As an incentive, every business that chooses to participate in the survey will be entered into a 50 dollar raffle, the winner of which will be determined next Friday, December 8, 2017. The hope is that the incentive and/or persistence will help boost the number of participants responding to our survey. Update on Project Activities
We sent out direct emails to businesses we previously visited in order to remind them about the surveys and ask them to promote to the employee survey, in particular. We also mentioned we will return to Mountain View over the break, so any businesses who would like to talk with us in person can do so. Alex Andrade offered some information regarding the city’s past with regards to housing, and we plan to heavily incorporate this element into our paper and accompanying presentation. Our surveys themselves unfortunately lack relevance right now due to only 34 responses, but we hope to exceed 75 or 100 responses by the end of the break so that we can feel confident making conclusions with our data. What We Observed and Learned After sending many individualized emails to business owners in Mountain View, we learned that many do not even employ minimum wage workers. Despite Alex’s news that one tech job creates five service sector jobs, we did not receive information about these employees from big name companies in Mountain View. We will either need to change our approach with these companies or focus on the smaller businesses where almost, if not all, employees work for minimum wage. During the Salinas presentation in class, we noted many useful tips on how to interact with and present to another community. First of all, we realized we need more pictures of Mountain View’s business layout and (if allowed) workforce so that city managers understand the stakeholders in the minimum wage situation and what they bring to the city. We also decided we should highlight direct quotes from workers and business owners in our presentation and paper in order to make our work more relatable and in order to let the citizens of Mountain View, rather than a group of outsiders from Stanford, explain the circumstances they face daily. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Since our entire team will stay on campus over the break, we plan to dedicate our time to finishing our surveys, meeting two more times with workers and business representatives in Mountain View, and drafting our final deliverables. We will plan our visits around Thanksgiving and go during morning hours in order to increase the probability that business representatives and employees can make time to speak with us. Throughout the week we will also make a final push with the ongoing online surveys on social media, email and any other outlets we can find. We must greatly expand our results before the end of the break or we will not obtain an accurate representation of the city’s thoughts on both sides of the minimum wage ordinance. We will also try to meet with Alex again in order to establish a specific timeline for presenting to the Mountain View city council. We will also verify his expectations for our paper so that we can put our best feet forward when we begin drafting over the break. We will make sure to use our voices not to tell Mountain View what to do but rather to offer the city council enough evidence to make its own conclusions. Finally, we will focus our break on taking pictures and gathering direct quotes from citizens affected by the minimum wage ordinance so that their stories speak for themselves. Literature review on other high-minimum-wage cities should help us in making comparisons and projections for Mountain View’s future. Update on Project Activities
This past Sunday we met with Alex on campus to discuss our updates and thoughts over the past few weeks. We first discussed the two digital surveys that were sent out previously for both employers and employees. Although there were some technical difficulties for some participants to fill out the Google Forms, we customized them to ensure accessibility. Furthermore, we mentioned that we only have around 40 combined employer and employee entries so far. Assuming one business hires 2 employees, we have only heard the voices of about 13% of downtown Mountain View’s businesses. As a result of this dilemma, we agreed to extend our surveying out to the broader Mountain View Chamber of Commerce to capture the entire city. Although Alex did want to focus on downtown Castro Street, we realized that it will create a survey bias and there will be a disfocus on the holistic situation of Mountain View. Lastly, we will be outreaching to certain businesses that indicated that they would like to meet our team in-person on the Google Forms. These visits will be conducted during our Thanksgiving Break because of the convenience of schedules. What We Observed and Learned Last week Vivian Chang of the San Pablo Economic Development Corporation came to class and presented on her experiences dealing with community-serving retail and economic development in her city inside Contra Costa County. Although Alex has filled us in on his position and experiences, it was eye-opening to see a different perspective on economic development on the other side of the Bay Area. We learned that communities need to strike an appropriate balance between the development and catering towards independent and chain stores. Furthermore, we learned that to immerse ourselves into the environments of cities and towns in which we previously were not a part of, we should establish connections with various community nonprofits to provide a framework for the stakeholders involved with community development activities. Her visit to our class reassured our notions on the dilemmas associated with economic development and how we can focus our thoughts even more while we begin to produce our deliverables in the next week or so. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward On the surveying side, we mentioned previously that we will be outreaching to the entire city of Mountain View via their Chamber of Commerce point-person of Bruce Humphries and Tony Cyrus who are friends of Alex and Julie. We also finalized a time to present our findings to the Mountain View Downtown Committee on December 5th from 8-10am (they meet on the first Tuesdays of every month). Lastly, after Vivian's presentation in our class, we took away two critical thoughts as we continue our project. The first is understanding that without a clear leadership of policymakers that are accessible to the public, there can be no realistic changes to a community because they hold the political powers for tangible social change. The second is that we should understand what Mountain View’s “story” is (i.e. what is the current social, economic, and political situations in the town from a policymaker and a resident’s perspective?) and how can we market this story to make a compelling argument to Alex and our stakeholders? |
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