The last two weeks have been really exciting for our group, being able to see our project in the context of the community itself, as well as looking forward to designing our final deliverable based on the needs of the community and San Mateo county at large.
On Friday October 30th, our group led a focus group with a few members from the Climate Ready North Fair Oaks team to present our findings thus far. After reflecting on the most prominent themes from the master codebook in NVivo, we chose to focus our presentation on the following overarching categories: compounding stressors, information and resources, dealing with COVID-19, environment and climate, emotions and resiliency. Each team member incorporated specific quotes in both English and Spanish into their dedicated topic, as well as talking through any notable statistics (e.g. percentage coverage of helpful resources under the “Resource Availability” code). CRNFO were very responsive to the information we provided. The inclusion of a quick discussion of the interview demographics was useful for our community partners to put our findings in the context of the entire North Fair Oaks / Redwood City population. They were also able to draw parallels between feedback they’d received from other sources to the more personal stories that we added to the discussion. Much of the input and observations from the 4 CRNFO members covered a lack of accessible/understandable information in a variety of languages, the importance of culture in the community (churches play a key role and could be a venue for communicating information), the need for public shelters during the pandemic, and what resources people use when they can’t pay rent. Further to this, we were informed of a number of organizations and resources that would be interested in our work, or could provide useful information to our study such as RWC 2020, Undocu support, and the Community Collaboration for Children's Successes. We also really appreciated their critiquing of our presentation, for example, one suggested separating the quotes out onto individual slides to make them even more powerful and allow time for the audience to read the quote and focus on the point we are delivering. Another idea was to divide each topic out into its different sub-sections so an outsider can relate our coding categories to what we were seeing most across the interviews. These are definitely aspects of presenting that we will look to incorporate into our final presentation next week. Our team has now entered the most difficult process of the project where we must decide how our work can best benefit CRNFO and the community at large. In recent discussions, our focus has been surrounding the potential of creating an infographic. We have struggled with the following questions:
As for the first two questions, our initial vision was to create a visual that could be posted to social media accounts, allowing younger members of the community to receive information and educate others around them. However, after hearing feedback from the focus group, we learnt that churches play a key role in communicating information in North Fair Oaks and Redwood City. This led us to question the effectiveness an infographic would have if relayed over Instagram, as opposed to creating posters that could be shared in churches or other community service locations. In addition, we have to consider which members and generations of the community are experiencing the impact of multiple stressors the most, and therefore, where we should direct the bulk of our action. Other suggestions for the target audience include San Mateo county and policymakers who would be more interested in the themes that emerged from the interviews and potential next steps. Integrating demographics into our representations will also give readers a better sense of what was said in the interviews. After class discussions about technology and the future of sustainable smart cities, it was interesting to draw parallels between the potential of using technology to provide services, and how services are actually being implemented in Bay Area cities. San Francisco has been pinpointed as one of the top smart cities in the US, however, we still see such large gaps between the availability of resources and how technology is being utilised to allow sustainable and equitable access. If we had more time to work on this project, a next step could be to work with CRNFO and other tech-centered organizations to build in ‘smart’ aspects to the distribution of information and resources across underrepresented communities such as North Fair Oaks. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward After receiving feedback composed of a number of questions and suggestions, we have been able to narrow down and separate out the themes from our initial coding of the project transcripts into the general outline for our final deliverables (an expanded memo for CRNFO and an infographic directed towards San Mateo county). It will be important for us to reflect on the comments from CRNFO to provide a deliverable that is both timely and relevant to suit the community needs at present, as well as looking to help San Mateo county build a more sustainable community for the future. It is necessary that we find better ways to inform every community member of the information and resources available to them, and to make these more accessible in times of stress. Hopefully, building infographics that can be dispersed using a variety of platforms (social media, posters around resident locations, in churches and schools etc.) will help educate people across multiple generations so we can start a cycle of discovering information and passing it along by word-of-mouth to friends and family. Additionally, our memo being aimed at community organizations and policy makers is critical to moving forward with this project beyond the scope of Sustainable Cities. What makes this project special is that it will be benefiting the community of Redwood City/North Fair Oaks after this quarter is over. While brainstorming for our deliverable, we kept in mind the document we read for class on Plan Bay Area. We thought about how dense it was and how its length is participating in barriers of accessibility. As a result, the memo and infographic combination was born, with the well-being of the community being at the center. Comments are closed.
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