[lang_en]Showcase Article for Public Service Center’s Paul and Priscilla Gray Value-Added Internship
by Danielle Martin
I like to describe myself as a storyteller in search of community. But then, I’m not always the most well spoken person in the room. And sometimes I look up and find myself up to my neck in community. SO perhaps the biggest gap is between the way I see myself and the reality of the places I end up.
Once I made this realization, my choice to work as a Masters in City Planning graduate student (at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies & Planning), focused on community building with media in Lawrence, MA, seemed obvious. It’s a place rich in both stories from the industrialized past and the economically depressed present. However, it’ really the new stories bubbling up about the future that drive me, catalyzed by growing networks of relationships and fueled by collective intelligence and power.
I’ve been doing multimedia, youth development and organizing with community organizations in the Boston area since 2000. I’ve seen many efforts effectively utilizing new media and technology tools go from initial excitement to paralyzing frustration because they fail to build sustained communities or networks. So as much as I was excited to be a student at MIT, I was even more excited to get my nose into all the successful communities projects connected to groups like Lawrence CommunityWorks (LCW), a community development corporation, working on the ground in Lawrence.
As an organization rejuvenated by three DUSP alumni in 1999, LCW is a prime example of a group with impressive organizing capacity that hasn’t made the leap over the digital divide. As a research assistant with the MIT@Lawrence university-community partnership, I’ve had a few chances to visit this community center that does everything from voter registration campaigns to homeownership GED training to youth arts afterschool programs. After hearing about all the great things LCW can do, I had tons of ideas of new technologies and media they could adopt to take it further. But then I found out that other MIT students have tried to build tools for LCW, few of which they’ve been able to incorporate in their regular practice or successfully engage volunteers from MIT to help. And the answer didn’t seem to be as easy as just lack of access to technical tools or staff technology skills.
The more I asked why, the more I was directed to speak with Austin Carrol, LCW’s new part-time director of technology. He too agreed that the help LCW needed was someone to take the time to really ask how to build their capacity to use new technology tools (and to host students volunteers to help build them). We were both thankful to find out that the Public Service Center, with the help of Paul and Priscilla Gray, was providing a new kind of internship that would allow me to explore these questions during my winter break.
My mission, if I chose to accept it, was to assess LCW’s current use of new media and technologies for organizing and storytelling and make some recommendations for new, sustainable strategies for taking it further. I hoped to base my recommendations on a broader analysis of their communication goals and channels, conveyed not only in their current program materials but also in the way they talk about and organize their efforts in person.
This undertaking meant that I got a chance to sit in lots of meetings, both with staff and adult and youth members. I also conducted at least one interview with a staff from every one of the LCW’s impressive departments. In both of these venues, I not only listened but I was also giving opportunities to speak and share my experiences and new ideas. I asked a lot of intentionally “dumb†questions in order to get to the root of the challenges the staff and members faced in adopting new tools. The biggest challenge was finding room in people’s heavy schedules and making sense of some of their notes and reports as someone from the outside. Yet after only a few days, I felt very much at home and people asked for my help and expressed excitement about what I could contribute to their workflows.
In the end, I produced a summary of all the interviews, with a set of collective observations that Austin and the rest of the staff never would have had the time to compile in their busy schedules of actually doing the work in the community. My intervention became chance to reflect on how (and why) the key stakeholders of LCW communicate and chose certain technologies to do so. These reflections have been helpful in their current efforts to chose the most appropriate and sustainable tools for new organizing efforts to change local politics in the City and get the word out to other communities about their lessons-learned.
This work also helped me choose more appropriate tools for other MIT@Lawrence efforts, including a new project to involve youth to conduct and record oral history interviews in their community. After hearing about how the staff wished they could empower youth to own the project, we decided to try using Ning, a social networking platform, to distribute the initial versions of the stories so we could also provide a space for the youth to keep reflecting on their effort: check it out at http://uchistory.ning.com.
As a community practitioner, this experience was a uniquely valuable chance to delve very deeply into one question close to my heart in a way that benefited the community organization as much as it benefited me as student. This internship was a chance to explicitly identify the challenges to technology adoption in this type of community development program and capitalize on existing values and behaviors to better match the tools to the organization’s goals. I also made connections between existing resources in Lawrence and materials for further development, both at MIT and on through web research.
My assessment and recommendations became a critically jumping off point for the several current action research projects of the MIT@Lawrence initiative and local projects at LCW. In particular, the assessment has become a critical input into a practicum course in DUSP that is focusing on tools for telling the collective story of LCW’s new project to create new kinds “green†affordable housing and community space. I’m also continuing to work with the local political change efforts, under their Yes We Will campaign, to connect more students from both DUSP and the Media Lab to try using new mobile technologies to create new forms of citizen journalism and citizen engagement.
So now, when I arrive at LCW with a group of MIT students in tow to do research or present their ideas, I’m welcomed both as a friend and a colleague. And I see the fruits of my efforts in the work of their newly formed New Media Team or the video interviewing that was incorporated into their recent annual convention. I’m thankful I was given the space and time to get embedded enough in their organization to make more than superficial assessments and get to the core of what makes LCW tick. It’s allowed me to finally tell a more compelling story about media as a community building tool, to a community audience that is fired up to hear it!
Find photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ctcvistaqueen/sets/72157612556126409[/lang_en]