Blog Posts

Margaret Mahoney

BLOG POST #1

• Since starting to work with Violence in Boston (VIB), it has been interesting to learn about the social issues and creation of different programs that are taking place in my new community, Boston. When reading about VIB, I was surprised to see how COVID-19 indirectly and directly affects violence and food insecurity. With kids out of school due to COVID-19, many parents have no choice but to take off work and stay home which, in turn, leads to loss of income and the inability to pay to have a constant supply of food in their home. One program that helps to solve this issue is Backpack 68, which is designed to provide enough food for children for the 68 hours they are at home from the end of school Friday to Monday morning. From the readings in class, I’ve also learned that not only has COVID-19 affected food security, but also sexual violence victims. Many victims are unable to escape their perpetrator because the survivor relies on them for economic stability, which makes it especially hard right now because the country is experiencing a recession due to COVID-19. This semester, I am responsible for collecting data on poverty and violence rates to present at town hall meetings which will help to inform the Boston residents about the connection between the two categories. My hope is that this data will spark more conversation between community members about ways they can help give support to low income families and decrease violence. I’m still figuring out how to make the connection between violence and poverty with the data I’ve been given. I’ve looked at some data from the census website about violence (only stabbings and shootings), which gives a daily update. I have also requested data from the Boston Police Department but have not received any. I'm excited to continue to work with VIB and monitor and connect the trends in the data and figure out what they are telling us.

Sophie Larbalestier

BLOG POST #1

• Since starting my work with Violence In Boston (VIB), I have learnt more about physical violence that takes place in and around Boston, the difficulties of running non-profits, and I have begun posting on the Instagram and Twitter accounts. While I haven’t done much so far, my eyes have been opened to an entirely new side of organizing and planning, as well as the livelihoods of many across our country. Specifically, on Wednesday (10/07), I posted about two incidents that took place in Revere and Roxbury where one woman was stabbed and a bystander heard around 7 rounds of gunshots fired. After receiving the Twitter notification, I immediately created the post and put it up on VIB’s Instagram and Twitter. Throughout the day, I was constantly checking my notifications because I wanted to do my best in posting in a timely manner; this is crucial to VIB’s work of education across the city and I wanted to do my best in contributing to this. In relation to class with Professor Jean-Charles and Professor McGuffey, I wanted to highlight the idea that violence is not individual. When I was scrolling through the VIB Instagram, Roxbury and Dorchester were two neighborhoods that appeared the most. When thinking about the prevalence of violence in Boston, it appears that the most incidents (an assumption I have made based on VIB’s social media) take place in Dorchester and Roxbury demonstrating that more areas face more brutality than others. “Violence is embedded in social hierarchy” and we, as people of this country, must recognize that there are institutions in this country that continue to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and violence (McGuffey). This cycle directly impacts the Black community. In Dorchester, 43% of the population identifies as Black and in Roxbury, 59% do; these are the two areas that receive some of the most violence across the city. Throughout the rest of the semester, I hope to learn more about how to make a difference in communities that face great amounts of violence through VIB’s program and I hope that by completing the work in Social Media and Finance, I can help Coco and Monica with their administrative tasks.

Kate I Kemp

BLOG POST #1

• This week in my BARCC Lab we finished the final draft of our first lesson plan to teach the YLC students. The lesson discussed Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, and intersectionality. We started the lesson with a statistic exercise, where the students will guess how common police violence, rape... etc. is. We then went in depth into the founding of the BLM movement and its growth in the past year. Then we discussed the #MeToo movement, and how its founding differs from its explosion in 2016 on twitter. Next, we discussed the importance of intersectionality, along with Black Feminism and the #SayHerName movement.

• It was rewarding to take the material we have learned in class and use it to educate others. I believe that education and spreading awareness is one of the most effective ways to solve social issues like racism and rape culture (although institutional change is obviously needed as well). It is especially important to educate young people. While the students we will be teaching are in high school, it is still crucial to spread awareness to those who are developing new ideas about the world. Being able to take in new information that has changed my perspective and share it with others is very fulfilling. In the future, I want to continue to educate others and myself to help further social change.

• Our group will do two more lessons with the YLC, one about cross-regional context for sexual and racial violence, and another about rape culture in general. I am excited to continue learning about these issues in our class and then translating them to teach to high schoolers.

Anushka Fernandes

BLOG POST #1

• Before I began to post on the social media platforms for Violence In Boston (VIB), I noticed trends of certain areas where the violence occurs. The two communities of Dorchester and Roxbury seemed to have the most incidences of violence from the VIB social media posts. Those two communities both have a higher population who identify as black. The cycle of violence seems to continue in these communities, while other communities may seem unbothered by these incidents. The whole community of Boston, not just the areas where the violence is occurring, need to find ways to combat that cycle. When scrolling into the 2017 posts, those two communities still took up a large portion of VIB’s social media. If these trends have been prevalent for that long, I am curious to see if any programs or initiatives - aside from VIB- have been created in an attempt to combat that violence. If there were, how were they received in the community, who were the ones running the organizations, and what impact did it actually have.

• In controlling their social media, I would love to see a decline in violence just by having to post less frequently. As mentioned in class, especially in times of this pandemic, I assume there will be incidents that do not get reported, but hopefully, there will be a declining trend of violence occurring. In that trend, we should see the number of posts about violence go down. The data from “Community and the Crime Decline: The Causal Effect of Local Nonprofits on Violent Crime” (Sharkey, Torrats-Espinosa, and Takyara) showed a decrease in several forms of violence - murder and violent crime - with the help of non-profits so I hope to see that trend continue with the help of VIB.

• Lastly, I am glad to see VIB having such a large impact on the members of these communities through social media. Unfortunately, there were some comments on social media of backlash to either the posts or the organization in general, but a majority of the followers were appreciative of the information. It is interesting to see how people get mad at the organization and the social media, rather than get mad at the violence being reported on.

Caitlin Park

BLOG POST #1

• Although my lab group and I have only been working with Violence in Boston for a short period of time so far, it has already been such a rewarding experience. Through Coco and Monica and the rest of the staff we’ve been able to learn more about the Boston community’s needs and how VIB provides for those needs, like their food pantry, their work with the Boston Food Bank, and their BackPack 68 program. I love seeing how truly in touch VIB is with their community; everyone there seems to genuinely and wholeheartedly care for the people around them, which is so lovely to see.

• A connection that I see between my on-the-ground work and the materials we are reading and discussing in class is one that I did not expect—the use of art to deliver a message. When my team and I visited VIB’s Social Impact Center this past Sunday, October 18th, we were all surprised to see how much art covered the walls and how much of an impact it made on us. There was a mural by a graffiti artist, one by an artist called London Basquiat about Boston and the Black Lives Matter movement, a mural made entirely out of duct tape featuring black musical artists, and a few more. It reminded me of how we talk about expression through performance, poetry, writing, and movies in class like No! The Rape Documentary, The Bluest Eye, and the many poems we’ve read and analyzed in class.

Eliana Perez

BLOG POST #1

• For the past couple of weeks, my group and I have been posting on VIB's social media accounts. While doing this, I've noticed trends where violence occurs, primarily in Dorchester and Roxbury, as well as the trends of when it occurs- being overnight, especially during the weekends. My day is designated day is Friday, and I was assigned a weekend a few weeks ago where I had to post several times. In addition, I've noticed how over long weekends violence also rises. I've learned how violence rises during the summer and declines over the winter due to psychological reasons, and I'd like to see if violence declines from when we started posting to when we finish. From what I know, Dorchester and Roxbury are some of the underprivileged towns in the Boston area, so I wonder if any schools/organizations around have done anything to help. This relates to what we've learned in class where violence occurs in underprivileged areas.

• My group and I have not fully figured out the logistics of the finance portion of our responsibilities, however, I am confident that we will figure out a sustainable way that will shorten the time we utilize to formulate and send out the emails and we will get it going soon. I hope that we end up making a sustainable change for VIB's future volunteers, as well as successfully help out Coco and Monica so that they could redirect their attention to greater things and grow VIB.

Aliysha Malone

BLOG POST #1

• During this week, I had the amazing opportunity of visiting the Social Impact Center. The Social Impact Center is Violence in Boston’s community center for residents of Boston who are in need. When visiting the Social Impact Center, I do not know exactly what I was expecting, but I was completely awestruck. I think I had the idea that the center would be more of a general community center with a food pantry, a gathering area, a kitchen, etc, however, I was greatly mistaken. As I first walked into the center, I was mesmerized by the artwork. Highlighting black musicians, the city of Boston, black victims of brutality, black survivors, and more, I felt a warm and safe feeling that I have never felt before. The detail in the artwork was insane, whether it was used with the medium of paint, spray paint, or duct-tape, one could see that this work took hours of dedication and that each and every artist was inspired to create something extraordinary, just for this organization. I also learned that some of the artists donated these works, which was truly inspiring. Walking through the tour lead by Renesha Jackson, I was astonished by the one of a kind features that this center provided. The center was fit with a recording studio, a podcast room, an entire radio station, all with the necessary equipment, a food pantry, with an abundance of supplies other than just food, offices for staff, and much more. It was eye-opening to see just how much goes into starting a community center that is not funded by the government, one that is special, run by real, human people who have experienced life similar to the people they are trying to help.

• It was also a once in a lifetime experience interviewing Monica Cannon Grant, the founder of Violence in Boston. We specifically asked her reasoning as to why she created the Social Impact Center and what her goals for the Social Impact Center are for the future. She gave us a heartfelt, but precise answer of exactly what her vision is for Violence in Boston which was pretty cool coming from the founder herself.

• Since the whole purpose of visiting the Social Impact Center was for our group to get the full idea and purpose of the center specifically, in order to effectively translate our thoughts into the newsletter, we started brainstorming for the newsletter immediately after. Our newsletter was based on our experience at the Social Impact Center and it was targeted towards the Social Impact Center opening as a whole. We included images of the many rooms of the building, the artwork we encountered, and our short interview with Monica. We were able to record our experience through audio, so we did not, miss any details from our trip. I wish for our next newsletter to be just as effective as this one, but hopefully with even more insight from Violence in Boston.

Vanessa Jean-Gilles

BLOG POST #1

• I’ve been working on the newsletter team for VIB, and we recently took a visit to the social impact center in order to gather some information for our monthly newsletter. As Caitlin mentioned in her blog post, the walls of the center were full of beautiful artwork from people who were given free rein on what they wanted to say through their art. Looking at the murals reminded me of the idea of how much art can be a powerful form of expression for people who have been through traumatizing events in their lives, and how it can be used to move the people who are viewing it to make a change. Something else that I feel connects very well to the goal of the social impact center is the idea that self-care is self-preservation, and the social impact center being able to provide all of these different programs for the people in these underrepresented communities to take advantage of offers them an outlet to voice their thoughts and feelings as opposed to holding it all in, which we know can have detrimental effects to one’s mental and physical health. By offering access to a wide range of forms of self-care, from a food pantry to a podcast room, I feel like VIB is able to tackle the issue of violence in an unconventional but very important way. Although VIB’s overall goal is to make a difference in the communities in Boston that violence affects the most, they understand that this change begins with the individual, and the fact that they have set activities in place in order to create a productive space for individuals will have a greater impact on the community as a whole in the long run. Although we’ve been working with VIB for a relatively short period of time, I would definitely be interested in continuing to work with them as well as other organizations beyond this class.

Juliana McKessy

BLOG POST #1

• I am part of the social media team where we all occupy certain days of the week in which we post alerts about violence in Boston giving the location, act of violence, and time. Similarly to the comments of other members of the social media team, I have noticed that there is drastically more violence in Roxbury and Dorchester, two underprivileged areas in Boston. Given the fact that we only post for instances of physical violence, something that I have been wondering over the course of my experience is how prevalent sexual violence is in these communities and the general Boston area and what types of sexual violence arise the most. Given all of the knowledge we have received from class on sexual violence and how it is interpreted through an intersectional lens, I wonder how it applies regionally. Since we learned that sexual violence is most common in communities closer to the poverty line, I assume that the frequency of sexual violence correlates to areas where physical violence is the most common.

• Besides posting for VIB, something I have gotten out of this experience is learning more about Boston not only from what we post but also from what is not included. The accounts we receive notifications from post not only about the forms of violence in Boston that we post about but also instances of theft, police violence, riots, carjackings, missing persons, and car accidents. I often find myself reading the notifications even when it is not my day because I have realized how much I appreciate being informed about life in my area.

• Overall, I have had a greatly positive experience working for VIB and I hope that together we are all able to lift some of the weight off of Monica and Coco's shoulders as well as offer new ideas on how best to manage the financial data as well as their social media accounts.

Lamar Duncan

BLOG POST #1

• Working for VIB has been great so far. Currently working with the Social Media and Finances team, my group has been posting and updating violence/crime in Boston using various social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter). Personally, I post every Tuesday (12 AM- 11:59 PM) & I’ve taken great pride in being active to the alert pages I follow and try to update the public as quickly as possible. I feel like on Tuesdays, I have the power and a voice to let VIB’s followers know what is going on, where violence is occurring, and most importantly, how to avoid these occurrences and stay safe. One pattern I wanted to raise with the class is the constant and consistent violence alerts I see coming from the city of Roxbury, more specifically. I have a friend who is currently a senior at Northeastern University and resides in a frat house off-campus in Roxbury. Talking to him, I've learned that Roxbury is “sketchy," as he described it. He and his roommates are often cautious of the surrounding neighborhood and its crime. Twice this year, their garage space was robbed but caught on camera and I was shocked to see the film. Nonetheless, Roxbury has a high crime that ranks the neighborhood as one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Boston.

• However, some disconnections I see between working with VIB and taking the BLM/MeToo course is that I haven’t read much about black on black violence we tend to see occurring in Boston and the neighboring towns. As I am very aware of the African-American racism from the waning days of Reconstruction through the early 20th century, I would now love to use this already known perspective to then explore how this persecution occurs against people of the same color and how this violence has been detrimental to our own kind. With Roxbury at my focus, I want to explore

-how Roxbury’s societies, communities, and other environments are organized, and how the populations (both black and white) interacts, which are some connections I see with our class lectures.

-evaluate the historical, cultural, social, political, and economic factors that have helped define and shape the African-American experience in Roxbury and Boston overall.

-focus on the study of crimes and their causes, effects, and social impact that will help the city obtain resources necessary to predict and prevent further criminal behavior like the nonprofits we are currently working on within the lab portion of class.

• A source from the Harvard Crimson really caught my attention that I wanted to share about Roxbury-

• “Until June 2, Boston's predominantly Negro section of Roxbury was a peaceful community. In the areas of education, job training and placement, recreation, welfare, sanitation, and housing, its residents were working quietly and steadily through various programs for the improvement of their neighborhood and their lives.” I really want to explore how June 2nd changed the narrative of Roxbury and explore the increased violence that followed.

• https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1967/6/15/roxbury-quiet-in-past-finally-breaks/

Jasmine Maturana

BLOG POST #1

In the beginning of our class’ time working with VIB, I was not too excited about working on the Data Analysis team. It definitely wasn’t my first choice, but I was prepared to try my hardest to enjoy it as much as possible. At first I believed that I would do better in a more active, hands-on team, but this team turned out to be quite the experience. We started out meeting with Monica and Coco, the founders of Violence In Boston, and figuring out our plans for how the rest of the semester was going to look. As it turned out, this team wasn’t very scary or intimidating as I thought it would be. From our meeting it turned out that we did not have much to do at all for the time being. Our job was to simply collect violence and poverty rate data from the Boston area and at the end, when the time came from the town hall meeting, we would present our findings to the public.

This task seemed simple enough, and since we were told to use the most recent data, we had to wait until December to finish our presentation and show those rates to the class and town hall. Throughout those weeks lab time went by pretty smoothly and my team and I worked well together. We would FaceTime and message on our own time and catch each other up whenever we needed to. It was great to experience a collaboration like this one. I was excited to see our end result.

Sophie Larbalestier

BLOG POST #2

• Over the past few weeks, my knowledge of violence, the greater city of Boston, and connections between VIB’s work and our “Where #BLM Meets #MeToo” class has grown immensely. I continue to post on Violence In Boston’s Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook accounts weekly and I recently completed my first full weekend of receiving Twitter alerts and creating posts to keep VIB’s community updated with information about their home and the violence that occurs within it. Working with VIB has helped me put our class into a real-world context and I am so grateful for the opportunity to have done something so impactful. I have been reflecting on the past semester, my first in college, and when I think about the classes, experiences, and people that have impacted my life the most, I continue to come back to the work I have done with VIB. I have now been exposed to an entirely new side of Boston, one that is a large part of its being, but rarely spoken about. In the future, before traveling to any new city, I will always take this knowledge with me and know that there is so much more to an area than what the mainstream or social media puts forth. I believe this directly relates to Professor Jean-Charles’ lecture about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Danger of a Single Story and why it is integral to include multiple narratives about places around the world because this is how we will finally be able to understand them accurately in a greater context. I believe Violence In Boston is working to do just this: educate and bring awareness to the greater community about each and every experience across Boston. I feel so lucky to have had the opportunity to complete such great work with an incredible organization. Also - because of their impact - I will be looking for organizations back home in LA that have similar value and I hope to do work with them.

Eunice Kang

BLOG POST #1

• Working with VIB and more specifically within the town hall/ data analysis team over the past few weeks has been an extremely rewarding experience. Our team has been responsible for collecting crime rate statistics from several sources and analyzing them with respect to surrounding factors such as poverty rates. Ultimately, our goal is to present the data analysis at a town hall meeting during the month of December to better inform residents and potentially higher officials within the city of Boston. I am especially grateful for the opportunity to analyze data on crime rates given the climate we are in including the increasing representation of the Black Lives Matter movement and U.S. presidential election all amidst life during a pandemic. Through our work, I was able to see the disproportionate impact of certain factors like COVID-19 particularly on communities of color.

• Although our team has had a few challenges in communication and clarity in our specific goals, we have been able to discuss with our fellow classmates as well as Professor Gross to gain feedback on our presentation. We are currently in contact with VIB to have a few more technical questions answered but we are focusing on collecting data and organizing our slideshow in the meantime. Additionally, after speaking with Professor Gross, I hope to include another aspect within our presentation that includes a personal narrative of someone within the Boston community who has been affected by certain acts of crime. I look forward to further brainstorming and finalizing our project for VIB and I am impassioned to continue in the field of research within this topic beyond this class and in my future career.

Kate Kemp

BLOG POST #2

• Since my last blog post, the BARCC Lab has presented their first lesson and will be presenting their second lesson this week to the YLC group. We will work on the third lesson this week and present it on Monday. I was a little bit unsure of how the first lesson would go, but the students in the YLC group were very enthusiastic and responsive. It was about Black Lives Matter and the #MeoToo movement, as well as the intersections between the two. We had a nice balance of teaching and discussion, and the students did a good job of using the information we provided them with to come to their own conclusions. The lesson this week will cover the United States, Caribbean, and African contexts for sexual violence. The third lesson will deal with Rape Culture, and we are planning on making it very discussion-based since the students have had a previous lesson about Rape Culture.

• I enjoy using the information we have learned in class and translating it into a lesson for high school students. Putting together the lesson plans and powerpoints helps me organize my knowledge of the subjects. Leading discussions helps me and the students talk through the issues and examine different viewpoints. I am excited to lead the second lesson and start planning the third lesson.

Anushka Fernandes

BLOG POST #2

• While continuing to work with Violence In Boston, I noticed that the same places were the ones being more commonly reported with having violence. In my first blog post, I discussed seeing any potential change throughout the weeks of running social media, but personally, the numbers have stayed about the same in terms of quantity of posts and locations. However, it still needs to be noted that some incidents are also not being reported in general, so there could be some fluctuation that was not taken into account. Going along with this, I thought about Professor McGuffey's lectures when discussing that the rate of reporting during COVID and the pandemic. With people staying at home more, and having less resources to reach out, the numbers may be different, but it is difficult for us to keep track of that. While many of our posts on the social media page deal with shootings or stabbings, incidents that most likely result in a hospital trip so it is easier to note, there may be more incidents of violence that we are not seeing. I was also curious to see if the election had any effect on violence in Boston, but the number of posts remained around the same as other weeks.

• For the finances aspect of VIB, we just recently figured out the mechanism that we will use to send out these emails to the donors. With the pure number of donors that we had to deal with, it highlights how many people in the community want to help and support these non-profits and care about what is going on in their community. I think this also shows how much work these non-profits have. They are probably overwhelmed with so many other tasks that I am glad we could do this one thing to help and hopefully create productive systems that are easy to use in the future for them.

Caitlin Park

BLOG POST #2

• I’m in the newsletter team, and we have now been working with VIB for slightly longer than a month. We sent out our first newsletter on November 1st, and I unexpectedly felt so proud when I saw it hit subscribers’ inboxes. It was so gratifying to see our work all put together in one newsletter and it made me realize how much I enjoyed designing it and putting it all together. We haven’t started working on the second newsletter for VIB yet but hopefully we’ll be able to begin on it soon. The reason we haven’t been able to start on it yet is because we haven’t been able to easily get in touch with the Violence in Boston team and although that has been a bit difficult, it makes me take a step back and wonder why. Them being so busy and caught up with their work is an amazing thing; it means that they’re completely invested in their communities and helping and uplifting underprivileged people. On the other hand, it also means that there is much help needed and work to be done.

• Another thing that I’ve noticed occurred to me after reading my classmates’ blog posts, particularly Sophie’s, Anushka’s, Eliana’s, Juliana’s, and Lamar’s, who are part of the Social Media team that posts frequent updates on violent incidents that occur in Boston. All of their posts mentioned the areas of Boston that tend to be the most violent: Roxbury and Dorchester. VIB’s Social Impact Center--which was the focus of our first newsletter--is located in Hyde Park, which is about 15 minutes away from both neighborhoods. Learning this made me wonder why the Social Impact Center is located where it is. Of course, it could just have to do with availability, but I believe that the location is strategic, regardless of intention. It’s a close drive away from the most dangerous parts of Boston where the most help is needed but it’s also separated from the violence in those neighborhoods as somewhat of a safe space away from more likely endangerment.

Aliysha Malone

BLOG POST #2

Although I had high hopes for the second newsletter, there are some obstacles that have made it harder to complete than the previous newsletter. Our biggest challenge would have to be communication. Communication is a key component in making group projects successful, especially if the group is working from two different locations. In this case, our “group project” or task was crafting a second or even third newsletter possibly for Violence in Boston. We found that it was difficult making the newsletter for the non-profit with zero to no communication with them at all the second time around. Yes, it was frustrating, but there was simply no one to blame. Our lab class meets once a week for one hour and fifteen minutes. Violence in Boston is run by a number of dedicated individuals that need to run the operation on their own schedule in order to comply with their personal schedules outside of the organization. Our two particular agendas as class members and independent organization workers are not the best in terms of having the ability to effectively collaborate and learn their ultimate vision for the newsletter. However, my classmates and I are aware of what the members of Violence in Boston have on their plates, especially during the holiday season. Even though they could not meet with us, my group decided that it would be best to construct a newsletter off of the information we already have about the organization mixed with our own ideas as well. For the second newsletter, we decided collectively to write about the upcoming Thanksgiving Drive and we were thinking of having a “year recap” section that focused on major events for the year. With our new plan, we believe that we will be able to construct an excellent newsletter given the circumstances of course.

Fabiana Alves

BLOG POST #1

• When starting to work in my BARCC lab group, we began by planning lessons so that we could teach them to the YLC students. Essentially, we took key concepts that we learned in class and made them into a lesson. Our first lesson focuses on the #MeToo movement along with intersectionality. We approached this lesson by talking about police violence, rape, and statistics on rape. From that, we segued into the #MeToo movement and how it all began, but also what it stands for.

• Going into this, my group members and I were nervous to facilitate this hour and a half long lesson because we were inexperienced in teaching and we did not know what to expect. We weren’t sure if we would have enough material to teach for an hour and a half and we were also worried that the students would not be as interactive and engaged as they were. This was a concern because our lesson was also geared to be discussion-based. I think that our first lesson went very well and went much better than we had originally anticipated. The students were very responsive to our lesson and gave us insight that we had not even thought about prior to our lesson, so it was nice to learn from each other.

Juliana McKessy

BLOG POST #2

• As my time working with VIB has progressed, I have grown more impressed with the work my group has done and how well we have worked together. We developed a color coding system for each social media post depending on the location of the violence and effectively established a new mail merging system for the organization to use in the future to get their donor letters out efficiently.

• After a couple more months of following trends of violence and working in social media, the same locations are still where violence is the most prevalent: Dorchester, Roxbury, and occasionally Mattapan. Given the holiday yesterday, I was surprised to see how much violence was still reported throughout the city with multiple shootings occurring in Dorchester, Mattapan, and Roxbury. Additionally, although we do not report on it, I have noticed that there has been an increase in missing persons reports as of the last week and am wondering why that might be.

Eliana Perez

BLOG POST #2

• Since my last blog post, my group and I have further found a way to make our work more sustainable for future volunteer groups. First, we have color-coded the locations that we get notifications for most of the time and it visually depicts which areas get more reports of violence, and recently it has been Roxbury. Also, @violenceinboston has reached 10,000 followers, and my group and I thought it was cool that we were able to experience hitting that milestone while managing their page.

• Additionally, we are in the progress of using Mail Merge to complete the donation letters which will hopefully be done by the end of this week. We have struggled with that over the semester because doing each one manually didn't seem possible knowing there were easier ways of doing it. However, after finding an easier way, due to the communication barrier, it has been hard to come to an agreement but we are getting closer to finally being able to figure out the logistics and get it going. I definitely feel that if we were doing this project in a non-pandemic world and had the opportunity to meet with Monica at least once a month, we would have definitely gotten the finance portion done a lot sooner.

A.J. Enwereji

BLOG POST #1

• My work with VIB( Violence in Boston) has been a great experience. I have been exposed to the dangerous activities that take place in the inner cities in Boston. This program is very important because you just do not see these things in the news. The cities help to shed light on the black on black violence that takes place in Boston. I am a member of the newsletter and website groups and we had the task of visiting the impact center. It was a great experience as we interviewed the people there and were able to pick their brains. We took great pictures for the website and I even got the opportunity to freestyle behind a wall of great rappers. We also saw the victims of the BLM movement. Murals on the wall included Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.

• I was very impressed with the art expression that was on display, how they were able to express these tragic incidents in forms of art. This is very important because sometimes the news of tragic racial incidents can be overwhelming. The center does a great Job with with softening the trauma and expressing it in a different way.

Margaret Mahoney

BLOG POST #2

• Over the past couple weeks I've started to notice patterns of violence in the Boston area. I follow VIB's instagram account and have seen the notifications of incidents of various forms of violence. From seeing that, I've noticed connections between the violence data I've looked at in certain areas of Boston, and the locations of specific incidents that are posted on Instagram. Roxbury and Dorchester have relatively high rates of violence and I've seen a handful of posts reporting incidents in those places. My team and I have mainly just looked at numbers with crime statistics, so it has been super interesting, yet sad, to see individual events that add to the crime statistics as a whole.

• Last week we started to put together our final presentation to present to the class and at the town hall meeting. In doing so, we've discovered different ways to show violence statistics, or the prevalence of it in certain areas, such as heat maps and location pins on a map. The heat map shows least to most dangerous areas, where the least is light blue and most is dark blue. I've also been able to see connections through locations of violence and dangerous areas using the heat map. We have not only looked at violence statistics, but also rates of poverty. I haven't been able to find poverty rates for specific areas in Boston, only Boston as a whole which is 20.2%. At the end of our project, we are going to analyze the relationship between poverty rates and violence statistics so I'm interested to look more into that. It's been rewarding to be able to feel like the work my team and I have done is going to help make a change in the community by presenting it at a town hall meeting. I'm hoping at the town hall meeting that we will be able to brainstorm ideas with the attendees about how we can all make a change and reduce the rates and statistics that we presented. I would also like to continue to work with VIB or be involved with trying to reduce violence in Boston after this class and for my next four years in Boston!

Fabiana Alves

BLOG POST #2

• After my groupmates and I facilitated our first lesson to the YLC students, we began to plan the other two lessons as well. Our second lesson focused on the geographies of sexual assault where we talked about it in the U.S, Caribbean, and African context. In this lesson, we taught the YLC about sex tourism and showed them a clip from the video we saw in class about sex tourism in the DR, we touched on the idea of the myth of the black male rapist, the way colonialism plays a role in sexual violence, and state-sanctioned gender-based violence in Haiti, specifically during the Duvalier regime.

• Our third and final lesson was about rape culture in a media, music, and social context. For this lesson, we spoke about the different ways in which men and women are portrayed in the media, how rape is normalized in popular television shows/movies, and we showed the music video for Blurred Lines and had a conversation about that. We ended off this lesson talking about rape jokes and the effects that they have.

• Teaching the YLC students was a really rewarding experience because although they were familiar with a good amount of the topics we were talking about, they still told us that they felt as though they learned so much. I felt good to be able to take what we learned in class and teach it to other people in an effort to promote awareness. I enjoyed my time facilitating these lessons because we were able to have very insightful discussions with the students, while also learning other perspectives.

Lamar Duncan

BLOG POST #2

• As my time working for VIB's social media and finance team has progressed, I have been very impressed with my group's ability to find new ways and resources to develop an efficient mail merging system for donors. We first started with an exploration of Mailchimp and from there, we have researched and tried many different systems to efficiently send donor letters. We've experimented with different outlets, and have proudly found a system that is cost-efficient and innovative. What I love most about our work at VIB is that our innovations and research is more about what we leave for VIB in the future beyond our class.

• Our new color-coding system, Mattapan-Green, Jamaica Plain-Red, Roxbury-Purple, Dorchester-Orange, SOUTH END-Blue, and Miscellaneous-Black, has given our @violenceinboston Instagram page an aesthetic where our followers can locate where violence is most commonly occurring and almost works like a Citizen app. Citizen is a mobile app that sends users location-based safety alerts in real-time. It alerts people to nearby emergencies, and like we do for VIB, both work to promise “awareness” of nearby danger. The color-coding also makes it easier to track data and find out what's happening where.

• With Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years Day all being Major American Holidays, along with Black Friday, I wonder if there will be a holiday crime rate spike?

• I also wonder what my experience is like working our social media page once every Tuesday versus someone who works on a weekend, per se?

Eunice Kang

BLOG POST #2

• As our group is finalizing the presentation of our data collection and analysis over this past semester, I am both impressed with my group’s progress and hopeful in better informing my classmates and eventually the residents of Boston. Our presentation focuses on both a general overview of VIB as well as statistics including the most recent homicides and shootings, comparisons in violence from 2019 to 2020, and poverty rates specific to cities in Boston. Due to COVID-19, the town hall meeting will be less formally conducted on VIB’s Facebook live platform. Although this has slightly shifted the general audience and therefore changed the focus points of our presentation in comparison to previous years’ works, I am impressed with how we were able to adjust to the changes and provide new sources of information such as heat maps.

• Unfortunately, due to a few factors, we were unable to include the aspect of a personal narrative of someone directly impacted by acts of crime within the Boston community. However, after discussing with Professor Gross, we have decided to research and include an article specific to the slide in which we present the most recent crime rate data as another approach to providing a narrative behind the numbers. Over the next week, I hope to find more ways in which we could make our data presentation more interactive to our audience. Finally, as the semester comes to an end, I hope our group will be able to provide a thorough outline and possible ideas to explore for other groups moving forward.

A.J. Enwereji

BLOG POST #2

• When we visited the impact center, we had to go through Roxbury and Dorchester, which are two of the most dangerous cities in Boston. Having taken a look at the social media posts that the social media team put up, I found out that most of the criminal activities have occurred at Roxbury and Dorchester. It made me think about the reason why these two cities are the most dangerous cities in Boston. These cities are funded by tax payers money and the citizens are not wealthy so the police attention is limited. This is basically what VIB is trying to draw attention too. I am happy I was able to use my knowledge of the issues the black community faced and use it in daily activities especially this VIB project.

Vanessa Jean-Gilles

BLOG POST #2

• After the release of our first newsletter, we shifted our focus toward getting two more out for the months of december and January. However, that was a bit difficult to follow through with because of the other commitments that the leaders of VIB face. As the semester has gone by, the amount of work that VIB has done and continues to do. Even though our team didn't get to write as many newsletters as we had hoped, we were able to get the experience of visiting the social impact center to see the plans that VIB has for the cimmunities that they serve up close and personal. Their main focus is on neighborhoods like Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan. I used to live in Dorchester and I went to high school in Roxbury, so I've witnessed firsthand the amount of violence that exist in these areas. Being able to see what VIB does in order to better neighborhoods like these give me hope for the future of the people who live there.

• Although our overall goal in creating the newslwetters was to inform donors on what VIB is up to, it also gave us insight into all the hard work and dedication that it takes to run a nonprofit organization like VIB.Through our work, we saw the importance of having organizations like this that are directeed towards benefitting places that are plagued with violence of all forms.

Jasmine Maturana

BLOG POST #2

• As time went on we were presented with a few challenges. My team and I needed more communication with Monica but it was difficult to get her on hold. We had a few questions, such as who would be attending the town hall meeting, when and how it would be held, as well as how the actual presenting would look like. While it is still a bit unclear, it turns out that the town hall meeting will be streamed over Facebook live and other platforms. Coco let us know that we did not have to be the ones to present, Monica could do it for us if we felt uncomfortable, but it was something that we wanted to do ourselves. This was actually one of my main concerns coming into this group, I have never been someone who enjoys public speaking, despite having experience in it and it actually feeling quite rewarding it also comes with tons of anxiety for me. But I realize I need to get over my fear and have public speaking be something that doesn’t even phase me anymore. Sadly the town hall meeting does not yet have a set date, but I will be able to exercise my public speaking skills in front of the class nonetheless.

• Our work with VIB will be something I will be able to take with me in other aspects of my life. Being more conscious of crime rates and what is going on in places around me, as well as places I am not familiar with, is important. It is important to be more aware of your surroundings. I am excited to finally present to the town hall when the time comes around January.

Daniela Cardenas

BLOG POST #1

• When first starting the lab the idea of creating lessons and teaching them to high school students seemed like an exciting yet daunting way of expressing the materials that we had reviewed throughout the lectures this semester. I personally had never done anything like this, so I was not sure what to expect from the experience. We met with Coco from BARCC through Zoom to break down the issues we were discussing and make these larger topics more comprehensive for the targeted audience, the YLC students.

• At first the ideas of these lessons were not as tangible to us, especially because it was not a personally interactive lab due to the current pandemic. It was not until Coco proposed the idea of using specific lesson plans that we were able to depict tailored discussions and activities that would make understanding this information more engaging. We included polls with statistics we learned in class from materials like Kurby Dick’s film The Hunting Ground and works of literature like Salamisha Tillet’s poem I died and was born on the same day. We would also include youtube videos with topics ranging from black feminism and sisterhood from the mothers of victims of police violence through the African American Policy Forum’s message “An Open Letter from the Mothers of #SayHerName to the Mother of Breonna Taylor”, child sexual violence with the Unreported World’s documentary “Selling sex: underage victims of sex tourists in the Dominican Republic”, and gender based violence in media seen in songs that have topped charts like Robin Thicke’s music video “Blurred Lines''. With the assistance and feedback from Coco we were able to transform these mediums into the visuals that we would soon present. It was through Coco’s notes that we were able to create lessons that were focused on conversation based interactions with the YLC instead of presentations in which we would simply be speaking to the students.

Daniela Cardenas

BLOG POST #2

• Once we were actually able to facilitate the lessons we did with the YLC students, we realized that our initial worries for these presentations weren’t necessary. When communicating these ideas with the students we realized that they were very passionate about the issues that we were discussing. This allowed a space for conversations that were mutually constructive. After the first lesson we took a survey in which the students provided feedback to convey the information in more captivating ways. We were able to teach them new information and expand the themes that they were already familiar with through specific organizations and groups. They were constantly answering questions and were even able to bring up new ideas that we previously had not thought of. Specifically, they brought the ideas of fetesization of women of color when speaking about the myths of promiscuity that surround Black women subsequently halting survivors from reporting the perpetrators of their experiences with sesxual violence. Another impactful idea was brought up in the last lesson about the context of rape culture in the media when they noted the profits that the porn industry makes from unsolicited videos and child pornography. It was contributions like these and many others that kept the lessons continuously interactive.

• As our lessons had come to an end and presentations were approaching, the lab consisted of more reflection based ideas. We were able to translate the work that we had done by breaking down each of our steps onto the BARCC and VIB website. In our last meeting with Coco we had discussed a way of seeing reflections from the students in order to gain another perspective of the outcomes of the facilitated learning. The original idea had been to create a video that included memorable parts of the presentations, ideas that they learned and overall final thoughts. Although we weren’t able to continue this route in order to secure the confidentiality of the students’ identities, we were able to use small reflective paragraphs to express the same messages.