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.