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

Prep Work

Hi all, just thought I'd give another update on the project. Since my last post, we have begun work on designing the curriculum for the small-business workshops. We had a meeting this past Wednesday to pour through resources and modules we have found on small business, entrepreneurship, and financial literacy.

One of our strongest resources so far is The Intersect Fund. They have an amazingly successful micro-finance program and it's awesome to be able to use them as a resource! We are also looking at material from Freedom from Hunger (an NGO that works to find sustainable solutions to hunger and poverty), Jamii Bora (a micro-finance initiative and business academy in Kenya), the NC Latino Community Credit Union, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

In addition to starting work on the curriculum, I've also recently heard back from the IRB. Going through the IRB process has been a pretty substantial test of my limited Spanish skills as I had to provide Spanish versions of the various forms involved with a research project. There were a few small changes I needed to make and I submitted them on Monday. Hopefully we'll hear back soon so we can start building partnerships with local organizations and meeting potential workshop participants.

Thanks for reading,

Ben

El Inicio

Hello and welcome to the blog documenting my CBR-SURF project this summer! For my project I am going to be exploring the concept of micro-finance within the Chapel Hill and Carrboro Latino community. For a little background information, the idea for this project developed from the time I've spent working with the Community Empowerment Fund (CEF) over the past year. CEF falls under the umbrella of the UNC Campus-Y and works to alleviate homelessness and poverty through the use of micro-loans, savings, financial workshops, and resource identification. During our pilot program, we served 8 borrowers and after a year of working with these individuals we were left with very mixed results. As a result, CEF began working to find ways to improve borrower connection to the program, increase repayment rates for our loans, and reach out to even more members of the diverse Chapel Hill/Carrboro community.

For my SURF, I will be evaluating the initial pilot and using the results of this investigation to design a small-business education program for potential borrowers. In particular, the project will focus on the Latino community and be taught in Spanish. While there is a lot of work to do and the exact specifics of the trainings and community partners we will work with are very fluid, the overall goal of this project remains the same: to explore the ability of a trainings course to improve the success of a micro-loan and ultimately serve as a tool for poverty alleviation.

We just had our first organizational meeting yesterday so there will be more posts coming soon. Thanks for reading!

-Ben