July Prompt

Sorry to be a few days late on the post, I've been travelling for the past few days and haven't really had a reliable internet connection.

Much about the current status of my project can be found in the previous post, but to summarize: After spending the first several months of my summer working on community relationships, curriculum development, and participant recruitment, we attempted to hold our first workshop on July 19th. Despite pretty significant efforts to recruit participants for the workshops/research study, no one came. While this was disappointing, the experience was not completely negative. In addition to being able to practice the workshop and test out our group dynamics, we were also able to learn a great deal about the trust and community presence needed to make the project happen. For now, the actual facilitation of the workshops has been put on hold while I work to make more of the individual connections that are necessary to recruit a group of interested participants.

On a specific level, my fellowship experience has been quite different from my expectations. Heading into the summer I envisioned a fairly large series of workshops that would involve many of the major organizations serving Latinos in Chapel HIll and Carrboro (La Cooperativa Latina and El Centro Hispano). While I was able to meet and begin building good relationships with these organizations, the circumstances just weren't quite right for a great deal of collaboration to occur. This accompanied with my underestimation of the difficulties of translating, locating a space, and recruiting participants made me realize that the scope of my project needed to be much smaller. This, however, was not the only experience that differed from my expectations. By the end of July (essentially the end of my CBR-SURF summer), and after putting a lot of work into the scaled down version of the project, I still hadn't been able to offer even 1 of my 6 planned workshops.

On a general level, however, the fellowship has certainly met my expectations. Going into the summer I expected it to be challenging, fluid, educational, and fun experience. It has easily been all those things and more. My vision of the project wasn't correct but I should have expected that. In research, especially community based research, things are constantly changing and as was the case in my project, you often don't discover exactly what you thought you would.

All and all, I really only have great things to say about the Abbey Court Human Rights Center. From day 1, Judith Blau, Rafael, and Alfonso have been nothing but helpful. From offering their space, to helping me build connections and relationships in the Abbey Court community, they have been a huge part in the progress I was able to make with my project this summer. Working with the Abbey Court HRC has been great and I look forward to building our relationship in the fall.

My faculty mentor, Dr. Darcy Lear, has also been an amazing source of assistance and guidance this summer. From when I submitted my SURF proposal in February to now, Darcy has been one of the most important parts of this project. When I began to run into problems of scale, she was there to sit down with me and help me straighten things out. When I started to lose sight of my research question, she helped me focus in on a question that was realistic and answerable. Darcy has also been a follower of this blog and through her comments and questions has consistently challenged me to analyze and critically examine my research.

You can almost say that flexibility has been the theme of the summer. As I mentioned earlier, the summer included problems of scale, difficulties with finding community partners, and most obviously, difficulties in finding research participants. If I had refused to stray from my pre-conceived vision of the project, I would have gotten absolutely nothing done this summer. Flexibility was an absolute must for this research project. WIthout it, we wouldn't have been able to build our relationship with Abbey Court, adapt the CEF small business curriculum to spanish, or go through the long and difficult process of building trust within the community.

That's all for the July questions but I would also like to take a few lines to talk about where I hope for the project to go from here. As I start resident assistant training in a week, my summer is coming to an end. While I wasn't able to answer my original research question of "how do we adapt our english small business curriculum to meet the needs of the Latino community?" wasn't answered, I was able to learn valuable information about working with the Latino community that will allow the project to further develop. That being said, I definitely plan on continuing the project this fall. With the increased student support that will come with the new semester and a few more weeks of working in the Abbey Court community I am sure we will be able to start piloting the workshops soon.

First Workshop Update

Last Monday was quite the day for my CBR-SURF project. It began with some hectic copying and finalizing of materials for the first workshop (I went to 7 different places to try and rent a projector screen). After getting everything together I had a late lunch with some friends before heading out to set things up at the Abbey Court Human Rights Center. By 6:00pm everyone was there (Instructors, volunteers/consultants and Judith and Rafael from the HRC staff) for a quick meeting and to touch base. It was the first time everyone involved was in one room at the same time. Pretty soon 6:30 came around. It was soon 6:35, then 6:45, 6:50 and still no one had shown up. By 7:00pm it was pretty clear that no one was coming. I wasn't quite sure what to think. I had thought that volunteering with the elementary school summer camp, giving presentations the the ESL classes, talking to parents, and passing out tons of flyers would be enough to get a small group of people to attend the workshop. I thought I had anticipated the challenge of gaining the trust and community presence needed for workshop attendance but what I learned, however, was that I had barely even begun to scratch the surface.

Thankfully, there was also a positive side to the experience. As I mentioned earlier in the post, Rafael, the Associate Director of the HRC was at the workshop (as he had been out of the country for most of the summer we hadn't met when I began working with the HRC earlier in the summer). Before we even had a chance to let the disappointment set in, he jumped in with massive amounts of helpful suggestions and ideas on how to move forward with the project. He began by talking about all of the programs the center had begun a little over a year ago. With all of them, he said, it took three or four tries before they began to build any kind of attendance. He also spoke to the difficulties of garnering support and interest in new projects. As a largely immigrant community, the members of Abbey Court were used to scams and false promises and thus would be very skeptical of a kid passing out flyers talking about "Self Employment" and "creating your own business." What was really great about the conversation with Rafael, however, was that in addition to identifying the problem, he also helped us address it. As a graduate student in sociology at UNC, Rafael has spent the past two years researching the day laborers of Carrboro as well as getting to know many members of the Abbey Court community. Because of this he has gained the trust of the community on a much deeper level than I ever would be able to achieve in a single summer and during the meeting he agreed to help me promote the workshop those that he knows in the community.

Even though they are not what I had anticipated, the next steps are fairly clear. If I want to even think about offering and refining these small business workshops, I need to take a few steps back and really invest myself in the Abbey Court community. The process started this morning with Rafael introducing the project to a couple of his friends at the BP Station and it will continue one conversation and one hand shake at a time.

Last minute preparations

It's Sunday afternoon and our first scheduled workshop is tomorrow! I've spent the past week finalizing all of the translations for the workshop handout as well as having our facilitator (Claudia Viveros) and my advisor (Darcy Lear) go through the material to catch mistakes, improve the phrasing, etc... It's been quite a bit of work to get this together but it's great to finally have a tangible product! In addition to Claudia and Darcy, I also want to take time to thank the translators for this first workshop: Maggie West, Linda Chamiec-Chase, and Lily Smith. All of these people have been amazing and without them none of this project would be possible.

In addition to finalizing the workshop material, I also spent the last week doing a lot of advertising. This included talking to participants the ESL and computer classes that occur at the HRC as well as passing out flyers to the parents of the children who hang out in the center during the afternoon. Here's what the flyer looks like:



Hopefully our efforts are successful and we'll have a decent turn out tomorrow. I'll try to post a quick update tomorrow night to let y'all know how it goes.

Thanks,

Ben

First Workshop July 19th!

It's been about two weeks since my last entry so there are quite a lot of things to write about.

As I mentioned in the last entry, I have really been forced to take a hard look at my project and ensure that it is both do-able and research focussed. Having begun to figure things out over the past few weeks the curriculum and logistics of the workshops have begun to fall into place. Entering the summer, I really had two goals for my project: one was to continue to explore the idea of whether or not a series of small business workshops increased success (loan repayment, business longevity) of a micro-enterprise loan, the other was to research how the plethora of existing small business workshop material in english needs to be adapted to be relevant to the Latino community. What I've realized is that for the summer at least, the second question is the most feasible one to focus on. The first question is more long-term and would really require a tested and solidified workshop curriculum in order to be answered.

With this in mind, the small business workshops this summer are primarily designed around piloting the trainings we have developed while obtaining as much feedback as possible so we can hopefully turn the pilot into something that is useful and relevant to the Chapel Hill Latino community.

Right now, we have two workshops ready to pilot. The first focuses on "Defining your Business" and provides several examples of successful micro-enterprises to help participants find and develop business ideas. With a general idea of your desired business developed in the first workshop, the second workshop talks about the importance of understanding your business' customers and competition. As mentioned earlier, this material will also be accompanied by a system to try and gain valuable feedback as well as test the usefulness of the workshops. This will include several questions before the beginning of the first workshop, designated space in each workshop handout for comments/suggestions/criticisms, and a focus group after the second workshop. If all goes well and it seems manageable, we will continue with the remaining workshops on Marketing, Pricing, and Legal issues.

Along with a solidification of the workshop model, we have also set the date for the first workshop! The training on "Defining your Business" is going to be on Monday, July 19th from 6:30-8:30 in the Abbey Court Human Rights Center. We've been doing outreach at the center's various programs over the past week so hopefully we will have to 7 or so participants we've been looking for.

This next week looks to be a pretty busy one for the project so I'm sure I'll have to plenty to say next Sunday.

Thanks for reading!

-Ben

CBR: June Prompt

June Prompt:

-Please share surprises or challenges you've encountered with your fellowship thus far

-Talk about the scope of your project. Has it changed? Become more focussed?

Looking at the first question of the prompt, so many things come to mind it's hard to know where to start.

Something that has really surprised me this summer has been the immediate interest people and organizations have taken in the project. In being a part of CEF this past year, I found it really difficult to convince community partners that we were worth working to. Developing partnerships and gaining support was always a very long and delicate process. With the Latino project, however, community groups have been much more receptive. Almost every group I've contacted was been willing to meet with me and all of those groups have been amazing in their willingness to connect me to their partners and share their own resources. With all of this interest and support, I'm really optimistic that the program has the potential to grow this semester.

My biggest challenge by far has been in finding people willing to teach the workshops. When planning for the summer both of CEF's native spanish speakers planned on being in town and would be able to teach the trainings. As the semester came to a close, however, both received some pretty amazing opportunities to travel abroad for the summer. Soon after I found this out I began what became a very long search to find more support in facilitating the trainings. I reached out to more CEF members, community business owners, student organizations, and summer classes but still wasn't having any luck. It was just really hard to find people who had free time and were confident enough in their spanish to teach. Feeling discouraged and not sure of what to do, I called my advisor, Darcy Lear. After hearing my story she suggested that I type up a description of what I was looking for so she could send it out on the Romance Languages listserv. A week went by and I had almost forgotten about the solicitation. While at the beach with my family, however, I opened up my laptop for the daily email check and found two new messages. Each was from a person interested in helping to teach the trainings. After some back and forth, I was able to meet with both of them and they agreed to help teach. Fast forwarding to now, we are now moving towards dividing the curriculum and seeing what workshops individuals are interested in facilitating. Things are finally coming together with this aspect.

Another of the big challenge has been finding a good space to hold the business trainings. Going into the summer, the ideal scenario was to be able to hold the trainings at the newly opened El Centro Hispano in Carrboro. It was going to be perfect, a large space (within bus or walking distance from potential participants) that would be a very comfortable atmosphere for Latinos. Unfortunately, however, things did not turn out exactly as I had hoped. Instead of opening in May or June, El Centro will likely not open until late July or August. And being the super prepared person I am, I hadn't solidified a back up and was left scrambling. Several locations came to mind but none offered the inviting atmosphere that would be needed to encourage people to show up. The process of dealing with this dilemma as well as the challenge of finding facilitators really leads into the second question of the prompt.

In trying to overcome the above challenges I came to a realization about the project. It was mid-June and I had barely solidified teachers or found a place to hold the trainings. It was going to be really difficult to finalize this 6 week training program for 20 or so participants. Overwhelmed and unsure of what to do next I asked Alexis (my grad student mentor) and Maggie (a 2009 CBR fellow and founder of CEF) to meet with me. In this meeting they reminded me that this is a COMMUNITY BASED RESEARCH PROJECT. It is a project that attempts to address a community need through research and collaboration between myself, community members, and community organizations. I was too wrapped up in the workshop component of this project and had lost sight of the fact that what I'm doing is research and only a pilot program. For the summer at least, I was thinking too large. The project needed to be scaled down so I could really focus on doing a good job and evaluating the program and its participants. Because of all this, the trainings are now going to be much smaller, probably 6-8 people. Also, the scaled down trainings are now going to be held in the Abbey Court Human Rights Center. With their small space, I had originally only thought to hold a few interest sessions there. With this re-focus, however, I recognize the importance of holding the trainings in a small and intimate space that will be conducive to both the research aspect of the project and the individualized attention that will make the training a success.

Meetings, meetings, and more meetings

Here's an update on what has been going on this past week.

I started off the week by having a more formal meeting with Dr. Blau and the Human Rights Center. We talked more about the potential for having information sessions at the center and she gave me some pretty invaluable suggestions on components that would make the workshops meaningful to our potential participants. If everything goes smoothly, these info sessions will start happening during the week of June 14th.

The past week also included several curriculum development workdays. With all of our materials to draw from, we finalized the framework for the workshop series and began to put together the materials for the first of the six trainings. Here is the outline for the different workshops:

-Week 1: Orientation and Inspiration

-Week 2: Products/Services & Customers

-Week 3: Pricing

-Week 4: Marketing

-Week 5: Bookkeeping

-Week 6: Legal Management and Presentations

Most of the first workshop is based on the presentation of successful small businesses as case studies. In general each example is first explained and then various questions are posed to the workshop participants such as "How should he/she set his/her prices?" The ultimate goal is to try and ask questions that relate to the general themes of the remaining lessons so we can determine what to focus on as we move further along.

Starting this week, we are beginning our massive translation effort. As much of the materials we have are only in English, we will need to translate the education materials, forms, and worksheets. Also, we're starting our "community office hours" this week. This essentially means that in order to recruit participants for the program, members of the project team are going to start volunteering at places such as The Human Rights Center, and Bread Ministry to start getting the word out about the workshops. Until next time!

Saludos,

Ben

IRB approval and Community Partners

So a lot has come together since my last post. To start, I was notified this morning that the project has received IRB approval. I don't know if I've ever been so excited to see an email in my life. With the IRB process completed I can now start the process of meeting community organizations and potential participants!

This past Saturday, we also had a pretty big break through on the community partner end. After some calling around, I was able to get in touch with Judith Blau from the Abbey Court Human Rights Center. This is a community center that provides english classes, an afterschool program, and countless other services to the residents of the Abbey Court neighborhood (a neighborhood with a fairly large Latino population). From just a short conversation she seemed very excited about the project and was fairly confident that we'd find people interested in taking part in the small-business trainings. We have a meeting set up for tomorrow to go over things in more detail and talk about the possibility of holding some interest sessions in the center itself. It's really great to finally start meeting people and delving into the human interaction that makes this project so interesting and rewarding.

Through a contact from the APPLES CBR committee I was finally able to get in touch with El Centro Hispano. It's looking like El Centro Hispano-Carrboro will open its doors within the next few weeks and from my conversations with one of the staff members there, it seems like they are very open to promoting the workshops! While a date and time hasn't been set yet, I hope to meet with staff from El Centro within the next week.

As far as what's going on in the next few days: we have a meeting at Abbey Court tomorrow morning and then another curriculum development workday scheduled for Friday afternoon.

Until next time,

Ben