Process | Kickoff Meetings
Brief notes and reflection from the team kickoff meetings
This week, I had two kickoff meetings meeting the community team and project support team. I was introduced to the team members and we talked about our overall goal and next steps.
Community Team meeting
In this meeting, I met with Scott and Ashley of New Sun Rising, and Denise and Taris who represent Sto-Rox non-profit organizations. I was excited to finally meet them in person and hear more about their role and mission around community-based design. Even though they did not use the term directly, in my mind, what they are doing is ‘designing’ with their community. I was reminded of how thankful I am that my team members are deeply embedded in the community. They will be a crucial bridge between me and the community guiding the quality of relationships I will have with the community members.
For example, Denise talked about her organization's future in an interesting way. She shared that another partner organization was providing the social service and taking up the role that her organization once provided to the community. Since another organization is filling in that gap, she did not want to repeat the same effort and was staying flexible, seeking another place that the community might need help in. I hope that I have the level of self-awareness and humility to know when to step back and evolve myself for the mission of the community.
That led us to discuss why would a community needs participatory capital. What is our understanding of participatory capital? Scott, Executive Director of New Sun Rising who brought everyone together, talked about how even the well-intended grants and investments are two to three times removed from the community. The outside philanthropic efforts often did not understand the community, their values, maturity, therefore the core need. Without this understanding, the resources get spent on the inappropriate project.
Even the well-intended philanthropic efforts are two to three levels removed from the community’s voice, failing to deliver the full potential for impact.
While brainstorming on our workshop plan, we talked about ‘know-how’ as the onus for the cycle of diminishing impact and the importance of providing resources for ‘knowledge’ with funding. The resource gets invested without contextual knowledge of the community, the recipients have the resources but doesn’t have the ‘knowledge’ of how to utilize the resources, the community fails to meet the expectation of the funder, the funders look for safer investment opportunities which often lead to a bigger organization, the big organization that is detached from the community seeks more surface level, showy- short-term type of projects in order to receive more funding, this ultimately cut off a direct feedback loop from resource to the communities’ voice. This cycle reinforces and minimizes the impact for the resource’s potential, frustrating all parties involved, driving away resources from the community in need.
So the know-how is a key part of this effort. Lack of capital is a symptom as much as the cause. So we need to consider barriers such as poor financial wellbeing that the community is facing wholistically. We should set our fund recipients for success with not only the monetary resource but also with knowledge resources.
Lack of capital is a symptom as much as the cause. We should set our fund recipients for success not only with the monetary resource but also with knowledge resources.
As the next step, we will be looking into some of the criteria for the design workshop participants. These 5 community participants should be people who represent the most optimal representation of Sto-Rox’s value and future. We will talk about the criteria for the selection and make our choice in a month.
Support Team meeting
The next morning, I had a meeting with people from a national grant foundation who is interested in our pilot study. They have been working in a community-based, participatory capital project space for a long time and will be a valuable resource for us.
I shared my research plan. In response, researchers of the foundation shared some of their insights and other case studies that we might look into.
Scott shared how Sto-Rox is an intersectional diverse community with a range of social and racial backgrounds and this makes our pilot study as a representative case study for national context. To my brief research, the population of Sto-Rox has been declining since the early 20th century. But with the boom of tech, healthcare, educational industries, Pittsburgh is changing. I want to look into more about how these changes are impacting Sto-Rox.
Researchers directed us to learn about the Uijma project that conducted extensive research on participatory capital. Inspired by the solidarity movement and racial equity activism, the project came up with 5 different community groups to govern, evaluate, and implement participatory capital. Considering the project progression, we talked about the tension between efficacy, efficiency, and equity. This would be the tension that our project has to grapple with as well.
The tension between efficacy, efficiency, and equity; this would be the something that our project has to grapple with.
I believe there are two advantageous factors for our Sto-Rox pilot study that might be different from the other projects. One, we are working with a relatively small Sto-Rox community population (about 12,000), and second, grounding firmly in community-based design methodology, we are partnering with multiple community organizations that are part of the community. This will allow our project to reach the heart of the community quickly and smoothly, and keep our finger on the pulse of the community.
This also brought up the topic of trust and relationship. As an outside designer, ‘positionality’ and building trust beyond it, is often an issue. This is something that I have been considering from the moment I proposed this thesis topic. However, I feel confident that I am in good hands. With Scott, Kristin, and community leaders, I will be experiencing and reflecting on this issue. We often talk about the action research framework in the context of an ethnographical research process that presents inherent asymmetrical power-knowledge dynamics. Action research includes researcher and designer as one of the actors who is influencing and changing the outcome. It also embraces that the research process can fundamentally change the researcher, therefore the research question itself. I would be diving into this material as well.
Action research includes researcher and designer as one of the actors who is influencing and changing the outcome. It embraces that the research process can fundamentally change the researcher, therefore the research question itself.
Reflection
Closing the kickoff meetings with the team, I am beyond excited. I have been thinking about the wonderful tension between big and small pictures. This may represent a variety of different things for my thesis; national vs. local, action vs. theory, or systematic vs. individual impact. The two kickoff meetings I had this week tells me that I will be pulled in both directions consistently throughout this process. I am excited to reach for these small and large goals through continuous feedback from the team, group reflections, self- awareness.
