Stanford University Urban Studies &
Urban Summer Fellowship
Student perspectives of community-engaged learning and research across the United States
While I am participating in the Urban Summer Fellowship cohort, my fellowship is that of Community-Based Research. I have been researching the local housing and development situation in North Fair Oaks and the surrounding cities, working with the organizations Faith in Action Bay Area, Community Legal Services of East Palo Alto, and Youth United for Community Action. Re-reading my last post, I noticed that a) I essentially went on rant about the housing crisis b) I sounded pretty darn confident about my position and the work that I was doing. It makes sense to me to build on what I have already shared on this blog, so I can assure you now that a) yes, I still feel just as strongly, if not more, about the severity of this crisis, and b) my current confidence comes more from a security in my passion rather than my conviction that I am doing or saying anything profound. Many of my significant moments this summer were when I had conversations with people that illuminated contradictions and issues in my convictions; these conversations clarified into a few questions I have been pondering about equitable community development. I'd like to share some of these questions now.
1. In the face of gentrification and displacement, how do you assure that public investments in long neglected low-income communities are both intended for and in practice benefit current residents? With the threat of neighborhood change, how do you balance the needs to stabilize the community and improve it? How can that be done practically? At one point in the summer, my peer Alicia and I found ourselves appalled at the prospect of public investment: 'Don't they know that adding more sidewalks is going to increase property values, attract developers, and displace people?! How dare the government give the low-income community more sidewalks!' And that sounds absolutely ridiculous; obviously, everyone deserves sidewalks. In the last post, I wrote about the current public investment in North Fair Oaks: The County Manager's office is running a campaign called "NFO Forward", a beautification and rezoning effort. Projects have included building more sidewalks, installing public art, reducing dumping, and improving Middlefield Road, the central business area. They congratulate themselves for their excellent "community involvement" and have a community council that can make recommendations to the county, but based on what I have seen and heard from community organizers, this involvement is extremely unrepresentative... And regardless, the beautification and rezoning efforts do not make up for the years of the county's neglect of the public infrastructure. All of this public investment has been deserved by the current residents for years, but that deservingness is not why the investment is coming; these efforts are for the higher income residents who are not here yet. Turns out, this was definitely not the whole story. A few weeks ago, we met with Linda Lopez, a member of North Fair Oaks Community Council. Linda Lopez has been organizing in North Fair Oaks since she was a high school student in the 1960s, and she has been working since then to get the County of San Mateo to invest and improve her community. She gave us a major history lesson on the history of community organizing in NFO, the beginnings of the community council as an unofficial body in the 1970s, and her perceptions of the current relationship between the community and the county. While Alicia and I had previously held a pretty negative view of the district supervisor and NFO Forward, Ms. Lopez emphasized it as a symbol of progress: the county is finally improving the community, what she has been working towards for the past 50 years. After hearing from Ms. Lopez, Alicia and I started to discuss question one almost daily. We also learned from Ms. Lopez that all of the current projects being carried out by NFO Forward are simply the result of a comprehensive planning process that culminated in 2011 with the North Fair Oaks Community Plan. I have heard varying things about the degree of community accountability and involvement in creating the Community Plan, and I would love to learn more about it. A question that follows from my first is: 2. How can local governments better serve previously neglected communities, increase trust and become more accountable to current residents? How can governments do a better job of working with and for community members? How can principles of community organizing be embedded into government practice? What successful models are there for this? In East Palo Alto, there is a much more recognized tradition of community organizing than in Redwood City or North Fair Oaks; from what I've seen currently, community organizers such as our supervisors at Youth United for Community Action have a much stronger relationship with the local government than the groups we work with elsewhere. We are working on a toolkit for residents in North Fair Oaks to use as they engage with the development process, and we are writing about and using as a model the practices that our community partners in East Palo Alto use. But even in East Palo Alto, the burden falls on the community organizers to do the legwork and "speak for the community" at every development proposal and every ordinance being discussed. They are exhausted. In the middle of the summer, I visited a friend of mine and told her about what I was learning. I grew up in a mostly white middle-upper class neighborhood in Belmont, and she grew up in mostly white middle-upper class San Carlos. I told her about a city council meeting that I went to in Menlo Park, where the city council was discussing an interesting offer to build a new main library. The main topic in public comment was the library inequality between West Menlo Park and Belle Haven, the lower income predominantly black neighborhood in Menlo Park East of Highway 101. In one comment, a woman shared that the Ravenswood High School District (located in East Palo Alto, but also where Belle Haven residents are assigned to go to school) is in the bottom 50 of the 800 state school districts. As I told my friend about the meeting, what we discussed the most was: 3. How did we go to a high school 15 minutes away from Belle Haven and not know about this staggering inequality? I learned about this particular neighborhood because I was paid by Stanford this summer to go to city council meetings as a part of my research, where I witnessed Belle Haven residents not only condemn the city council for its flagrant disregard for the city's low income black residents, but also quote remarks from council meetings 10 years prior, when Belle Haven residents made the same statements. Of course, this lack of progress over 10 years is only surprising to me because of my unawareness due to my own privileges. Bringing us back to the fact that I grew up so close but had no idea. I think the phenomenon of social separation (the effect of segregation) is at the core of my interest in housing. Housing determines not only so much of our physical life chances-- safety, education, assets or lack thereof, etc.-- but also in many cases our social perceptions of our world. At least, it certainly did for mine. 4. How do we create mixed-income communities full of opportunities for everyone to live work, learn and play? (Under the assumption, of course, that mixed-income communities are worth creating.) I'll leave us on that note. It has been a true privilege to be able to explore this topic more in depth this summer. I've been able to identify some better questions than I started with, and I'm honestly very happy with that. -Nani Friedman
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This summer at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was an incredible, formative experience: to be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I first arrived in Washington. I knew I had questions about life on the Hill, about the culture of DC, and about my interest in US foreign policy, and while I figured that this summer would help address at least some parts of those questions, I really wasn’t sure to what extent. Interning for the Senate during this tumulus period in political history was especially fascinating (and a bit crazy and unbelievable at times), but, more importantly, the experience helped orient my interests and gave me some insight into what my next steps may be post-graduation. It helped me assess my preconceived notions of what it means to work for the US government, as well as how I imagined the US government operated.
At the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), I was assigned to two separate portfolios that I worked on, each with a pair of staffers. By working with staffers so intimately, I was able to learn more and contribute more; by working on two separate portfolios—the Economic Statecraft and East Asia portfolios—I was able to delve deeper into two of my main interest areas within the field of American foreign policy. By writing policy memos and analyses on topics ranging from governance aid in the Asia-Pacific to North Korea sanctions to anti-corruption efforts across the world, I was not only able to improve my writing and editing abilities, but I learned about the breadth and depth of the United States’ diplomatic efforts, and, though a crude way of putting it, generally just How Things Work. There was a steep learning curve at the beginning, but the support from the staff within the Committee was unparalleled. Given DC (and the Hill)’s cutthroat culture, I was very surprised by this at first. I’ve always been interested in international relations and diplomacy. However, prior to the last academic year, for the most part, I’d focused on US-EU relations. While still interested in the relationship between the US and the EU, a course I took on Korean society in the spring spurred my fascination in US-East Asia relations (US-Korea in particular). I took this summer to really flesh this out, and, by being assigned to the East Asia-Pacific portfolio, I spent a significant chunk of my time working on North Korean policy and US-ROK relations. I didn’t know too much about the specifics regarding North Korea before this summer, and, as a Korean-American, it had been one of my goals to invest more in educating myself on the historical, political, and economic relationship between the United States and the Korean peninsula. July was a particularly heated time for North Korea news due to escalating threats and pressure. Being able to work on North Korea-related legislation during perhaps the most strained time in history for both South Korea-North Korea relations and North Korea-US relations was an eye-opening experience. It was fascinating to compare the American media’s portrayal of the North Korea crisis to my family and friends’ (the ones based in South Korea) reactions to what I knew through working for SFRC. Throughout my internship, beyond writing, researching, and questioning, I also had the opportunity to attend hearings and meetings. The hearings were often for ambassadorial nominations; as someone who’s interested in entering the Foreign Service, being able to witness these nominations, as well as being able to contribute to these nominations by writing questions for the Senator, was a special learning opportunity. I was able to learn what it takes to represent the United States abroad, and listening to the nominees’ responses to Committee questions forced me to re-evaluate my motives for wanting to pursue a career in diplomacy. Elaborating more about the people I worked with: the SFRC team was a small, tight-knit group that had a distinctly collegial feel, despite the range in age and experience. Looking back, this atmosphere helped me understand the importance of the people you surround yourself with, not only in a professional context, but in a personal context as well. Though this summer was full of drama (from Scaramucci to Healthcare to Kushner), there were several slow days during Senate recess; it was during those periods that I took the time to really get to know my colleagues and learn from them beyond work assignments. DC does have a very, very distinct culture to it; working with and talking to my co-workers helped me understand how to navigate it, how to embrace it, and how to survive it. Though I enjoy policy work and though I loved the specific things that I focused on this summer, I learned that moving forward, for me, the people and environment I surround myself with are much more important than the specific type of work that I’m doing. I plan on prioritizing these two things when looking for opportunities after Stanford. I’m so thankful and grateful to have had the opportunity to devote time and energy to both my personal and professional development this summer. Being able to catch a glimpse of the inner workings of the US government—especially during this period—was so formative, and it played a large role in what I’m thinking as I enter my final undergraduate year. The friends and mentors I’ve met through SFRC are invaluable, and I learned so much from their expertise, their generosity, and their honest advice. My time at SFRC helped me better understand my naiveté and my shortcomings, as well as where I can allocate my skills and passions to best serve society. DC, I’ll be back. - Sungmoon Working at the Washington DC’s Department of Energy and Environment at the Urban Sustainability Administration (USA) this summer has been a learning experience in ways in which I did not expect. Unlike any other experience I have had before, interning in a city government setting has taught me about the highs and lows of local government, working in an office environment, and myself. Coming to the USA every day and interacting with individuals inside and outside of the DC city government for the last eight weeks has helped me to better understand what having a public service career means, and how I want to shape my future career.
This summer, my experience at USA has been shaped by a variety of meetings and small projects as well as my one major assignment, drafting the city’s Green Building Report for 2014-2016. I have been exposed to the breath of the city’s sustainability and clean energy work. With my small editing and formatting assignments, I have not only become a better writer and editor, but also learned about the vast projects that USA engages in from creating a vision to achieve net-zero, developing grants to encourage city residents to engage in sustainable behavior, implementing sustainable infrastructure policies, and teaching youth about climate change and urban sustainability. Completing these tasks has exposed me to the extensive bandwidth that sustainability work at the city scale encompasses from trainings for individuals to community engagement to local policies to national and international initiatives. I had no clue before starting that working at the local level in a seemingly narrow focus, urban sustainability, would include such a depth and breadth of work. With these experiences, I have gained an understanding of the impact that USA has on city policy and residents. At the start of the summer, I was very keen on learning about green buildings and clean energy because that seemed to be critical ways that a city could address climate change. To me, the issue seemed fairly cut and dry: draft policies, implement them, and track them. But, nothing is that simple or clear even when all stakeholders support addressing global warming. After writing the Green Building Report for 2014-2016 for DC, I was relieved of my previous clarity. Making sure that policies are comprehensive, and then actually implemented and enforced requires significant funding, effort, and time. To draft the Green Building Report, I was responsible for learning about the legislation, plans, programs, successes, and failures of the city in terms of green building from 2014-2016. Consolidating all of that information into one report was difficult, yet I think the most challenging aspect of creating this report has been grappling with my interest in green buildings. Before this fellowship, I was extremely interested in green buildings and their potential because it seemed so necessary for mitigating climate change. Now, after reading and writing about green building policies and performance, my understanding of the topic has evolved. Increasing energy-efficiency and reducing water use are extremely important for reducing a city’s footprint. But, achieving the implementation of green buildings and utility reductions today is not as much about technology, but more about implementing and enforcing good policies and making such improvements economically viable and environmentally aggressive. Individuals in the field know how to achieve green buildings, but the process of converting the building stock is slow and complex. While I know that the regulations and policies are crucial to mitigating climate change, this experience has encouraged me to explore other avenues by which change can be catalyzed. The moments and projects of this experience that I have found the most engaging were those in which I had the opportunity to see the intersection of environmental issues and other challenges, be them related to equity, technology, or community engagement. For example, I loved touring Weinberg Commons, a net zero multifamily retrofit development because it combined the aim of reducing energy use and providing affordable housing for low-income residents. I was very interested by how the project was able to combine two District goals to increase the efficacy of the project. The intersection of the goals to create a better product was fascinating. In the future, I hope to explore other interdisciplinary topics related to sustainability. Finally, at USA, I have had the opportunity to begin to explore what work in sustainability really entails. Not only have I received an intensive look into sustainability from the local government perspective, but I have also been exposed to numerous other lenses by which one can approach sustainability issues. I have had the opportunity to sit in on meeting with a delegation from China, to tour a net-zero affordable housing development, to meet with individuals who have worked in green affordable housing non-profits, and to participate in meetings with technical and architectural consultants. Being exposed to these various angles by which one can approach equity and climate change issues under the umbrella of sustainability has been eye opening. I had no idea that this topic that I was interested in was so extensive. A career in sustainability does not mean a career in policy, consulting, or engineering, but could consist of various positions that cut across those disciplines yet have the same focus of sustainability. I am incredibly grateful to have had this opportunity to work at USA and for the DC government. I have learned an incredible amount, developed and honed skills, and have gained a better understanding of my interest in sustainability. Moreover, I have been able to contribute to the USA team and support their work. Moving forward, I hope to continue pursuing my interest in sustainability by examining different avenues by which that topic can be addressed: in the non-profit, public, and private sectors, technical and non-technical roles, as well as in terms of clean energy, health and food, and transportation. Working at USA has opened my eyes to the possibilities to explore. -Maeve Hello, all! As a refresher, this summer, I was an intern for LifeMoves, a nonprofit serving homeless families and individuals in the San Francisco Bay area. More specifically, during my internship I was a camp director for the LifeMoves Summer Adventure Camp at the Opportunity Services Center in Palo Alto. Each LifeMoves family shelter and drop-in center operates a day camp for school-aged children, ages 5-14 years old. At the site where I was working, the children we served aren’t actually homeless; most of the children live in permanent low-income housing upstairs, and the rest of the children commute to camp from nearby locations such as East Palo Alto. My role as camp director was to plan and oversee seven consecutive weeks of fun and educational activities for the campers, including a field trip to the Palo Alto Apple store, a scavenger hunt in the park, making slime, and making lava lamps. We had a very small (almost nonexistent) budget, so I really enjoyed the challenge that came with having to be creative and utilize free public resources and cheap do-it-yourself experiments and arts and crafts activities.
Overall, this internship has made for one of the most satisfying and rewarding experiences of my life. I loved that every day that I came into work, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Yes, I always knew the plans we had during camp, but that’s the amazing thing about working with people: they are impossible to predict. In this way, my internship constantly kept me on my toes and challenged me in new and unexpected ways; one day it might be that our food donation was no good, and had to be thrown out, and I had to come up with and cook a new lunch for 15-20 kids, using what was in the kitchen cupboards; another day it was that two campers weren’t getting along, or that one had a breakdown; a different day it might be that the camp counselors weren’t doing what they were supposed to, or weren’t behaving in a way that was appropriate. All of these instances happened, more than once in fact, and instead of being frustrated by the way that problems seemed to arise out of nowhere, I actually thrived on it. I now know with more certainty than before that after college, I want to find a profession that allows me to work with people on a daily basis. I love the dynamic and stimulating work environment that comes with a job filled with interpersonal interactions, and I am so glad that this summer gave me the chance to confirm this preference for myself. After camp ended, the last two weeks of my internship were spent preparing for the Opportunity Center’s Back to School Backpack Drive on Wednesday August 16th. The Drive was held to distribute free school supplies and backpacks to low-income families in the Palo Alto School District. I did community outreach with my co-director, cold-calling families that we had information for, and giving them the details of the event. I also processed and organized donations, sifting through piles of notebooks, binders, pencils and backpacks and setting up the Opportunity Center like a store. The day of the Drive was a huge success; we gave away 135 backpacks, and served about 150 low-income children in the Palo Alto School District, outfitting them with fresh school supplies for the 2017-18 school year. I really enjoyed serving the clients that day, and I was able to use my Spanish skills to speak to the customers, who mostly all preferred to speak and be spoken to in Spanish. I was so glad that I got to help with something as important as this Drive, because I am very passionate about education and believe it is one of the only ways to close the income and inequality gap in the US. However, the Back to School Drive reminded me that it is very difficult for low-income children to succeed in school when it is difficult or impossible for parents to afford the necessary supplies for the school year. I will never forget that one mother at the drive was moved to tears as we helped her get supplies for her five children; she kept saying what a huge help it was for her, and that it had been a very difficult year. Helping with the Drive reinforced to me that I would really love to continue to work with the low-income Latino community in the area—a community that has been severely marginalized by language barriers, job opportunities, and housing costs. After the Back to School Drive on Wednesday, I got to see my kids from camp one last time, since they started to come to the after-school program on the last Thursday and Friday of my internship. It was really nice to see the kids one last time and chat about their school days; their multiple hugs goodbye let me know that this summer meant just as much to me as it did to them, and walking out the doors of the Opportunity Center one final time was a very bittersweet departure. However, as I told the children, I will be back to visit! --Olivia |
AuthorThis blog is authored by Stanford University students engaged in summer fellowships through the Cardinal Quarter and the Program on Urban Studies. All writings and thoughts belong to the Fellows and do not represent the opinion of the sponsoring programs. Archives
September 2018
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