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