This semester, my goal was to settle into my internship with a clear project set before me on which I could make progress without having to wait for other people to have meetings before having anything to do. First semester, my project was very closely tied to Chester Eastside’s goal of rebuilding the burnt-down Third Presbyterian church (which had been its previous home) into a community center. The hope was that this new space would allow CEI and other Chester nonprofits to expand their services. I was in charge of helping organize meetings CEI and the Chester Historical Preservation Committee board members with community leaders and people who might have relevant connections, experience, or knowledge. However, the board members are very busy, and it quickly became clear how difficult it would be to have the meetings happen at all, much less keep me busy scheduling more of them.
This semester, although my project has not completely changed, it has shifted. I still am involved with what I like to call “grasstops” stakeholder engagement – in fact, on Tuesday I ran a joint board meeting focusing on these stakeholder meetings since my mentor, Andy, could not be there – but my main focus now is stakeholder focus groups. After meeting with two new CEI board members, one who is the city controller and the other who teaches social work at Widener, we decided to run a series of meetings with different groups of CEI stakeholders. These meetings would hopefully not only gain information about what people would like to see should we succeed in rebuilding the church, but also to generally gather valuable information on the impact/potential impact of CEI services. The first of these focus groups, which will take place at one of the hot meals lunch programs with people who use that service, will be next Friday.
It is exciting to see my work moving forward at a much faster pace than last semester. I have gotten to connect with more people within CEI aside from Andy and have met with three different board members at two different times about the project as well as future work I could do at CEI. These new conversations have also forced me to think critically about my project itself. When first pitching the idea of gathering feedback from local community members to one of the new board members, she put frankly “So you want to have a meeting with community members so that you can say that you did it, check a box, and move on?”. This is of course something I am being intentional not to do, but seeing someone else who also saw this trap reminded me to be very careful to not fall into such easy pitfalls.
Another big challenge for me this semester as we set up stakeholder focus groups is the onset of fear in the Chester Latino community stemming from Trump’s recent crackdown on undocumented immigrants. When considering how to run these focus groups, we now have to consider whether people will even want to leave their houses to attend, and if they do attend, we have to be very careful to preserve their anonymity.