Update on Project Activities
This week, we were able to make great progress in the planning and collection of interviews. Since our last reflection, we have interviewed Mike B. who is the Development Director at Sunwork - a non-profit organization whose mission is to help make solar more affordable and widespread with the help of trained volunteers - and he is also a member of Carbon Free Mountain View Board which meets regularly to discuss and advocate for a more sustainable Mountain View. We also interviewed Jessian C. who runs a blog called Fun and Draconian where she writes about fun ways to live a greener lifestyle. Jessian also manages SF Approved, a site of green products she helped create at San Francisco Department of Environment. Lastly, Jessian serves on the board of the Earth Island Institute, which has been the organizing power for more than 200 grassroots environmental action projects and is currently overseeing a network of more than 75 projects. On Friday, November 16th, we are talking to Laura M., a board member at Canopy - an organization whose mission is to plant and care for trees in urban communities who need them most, often working with communities in East Palo Alto. We are still communicating with several other individuals, in the process of scheduling interviews for this weekend before break, and a few days throughout the week after the break. We are also meeting up with our community partner, Danny on Friday, November 16th, who conveniently happens to be driving past campus in the afternoon. This meeting will most likely serve as a check-in, and we are hoping to share a few of the stories we have collected so far as well. What You Observed and Learned Now that we’ve been able to conduct more interviews and get more raw audio stories, we are able to look back at what voices we are giving a platform to and which voices we haven’t yet done so for. We currently haven’t been able to interview low-income Bay Area residents, which is alarming considering low-income residents are the ones who will primarily lack the resilience and mobility to evade and recover from the effects of climate change. For example, the wildfires that are devastating California at the moment will most impact low-income residents who lack the financial means to escape from the smoke (due to strict work conditions) and lack the capital to simply purchase a new home. As we conduct our last few interviews, we should be cognizant of how we have been reaching out for possible interviews in order to best find sources from low-income residents. Additionally, we have encountered our first more emotional interview with Mike B. as he discussed the effects climate change could have on communities in the Bay Area if we fail to mitigate climate change. Although the interview didn’t have him emotionally distressed, it was an important reminder that we should always be cautious when seeking out stories about how climate change could directly impact an individual. It is easy to forget that at the end of the day, these events were personal and harmful to those we are interviewing, and we should always prioritize the mental well being of our interviewees before anything else. Finally, this week we had our meeting with Danny to discuss how much work we have accomplished and yet to do. This meeting came at a perfect time considering our group has been discussing how to reevaluate our relationship with our community partners, Danny and Michelle. Because they have offered their time and energy to take some of the work off our shoulders, we’ve talked about how this may best look like, whether it's through scheduling interviews or conducting them. During this week’s meeting with Danny, he reassured to us that if there is anyway he can help us out, to just tell him. We agreed to share the raw and edited versions of our interviews with him during Thanksgiving Break so that he can give us constructive criticism in our edits. Finally, we spoke to him about our financial constraints when traveling around the Bay to gather stories, and he offered his car and museum funds. This meeting helped concretize ways in which our community partners may help us, and how we can continue approaching them when requesting help. Critical Analysis and Priorities for Moving Forward As the quarter comes to an end we plan to finalize our project deliverables over Thanksgiving break. First, this weekend before leaving we will be getting at least two more interviews from IMMA. Then, throughout break we will each be individually working on the editing of the interviews we have so far. We have all downloaded Hindenburg and received a tutorial on how to use it by Cameron. We hope to collect a minimum of eight audio deliverables to be used as stories in the map at the tech museum, by the end of the week. Following this, we will return to campus and finish our last set of interviews. Ideally, we will be interviewing the last six people we need. This would allow us to reach the set goal of 14 deliverables. We are aiming to hit this number but if we are unfortunately unable to, we will prioritize quality of stories over quantity. We would edit quickly after on Hindenburg in order to be able to present all the deliverables on time together. Finally, we will be meeting on Monday evening, day one of week ten, in order to review the audio stories we have each edited, propose a plan for our final paper, and ultimately create our final presentation and begin to review in order to be prepared for the formal presentation on December 5th. Comments are closed.
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