Today was an incredibly exciting day for this project for me, as I was able to officially schedule our first two interviews for next week. After pivoting our research to emphasize and center the voices of community activists, we got a lot more buy-in from the organizations we sought to work alongside. After a bit of back and forth with the Ballard Center, we agreed for me to come to their office on Monday at 11 am to conduct the interview. Then, shortly after, Warm Hearts agreed to meet at 2:30 pm on Friday, April 8th. While I am so excited that we will finally get the opportunity to do concrete outreach as we had hoped, there were a few things that notably stood out to me about the process. First, obviously, these organizations are full of busy individuals, so their availability is relatively limited. I quickly realized I needed to be flexible in the times I was free to meet with these individuals in order to ensure we could get these interviews to actually happen. Second, when I found out there was any availability at all, I felt like I had to jump on the opportunity right away. This has taught me a great deal about needing to be proactive and adaptable in order to ensure that the interviews are getting scheduled. After a long drought of not being able to get the community buy-in needed for a successful project, this has definitely been helpful in gaining the necessary motivation to keep the momentum moving forward.
Today I went on another round of flyer distribution. Honestly, I am hopeful that the better weather will take strides in advancing our engagement in our project. While I went mainly to the neighborhoods that were canvassed last week, I tried to expand on my distribution in the area surrounding Lawrence Memorial Hospital. This area, according to demographic factors, encompasses the socioeconomic status of individuals that we hope to engage with. Specifically, I canvassed the houses from 3rd and Mississippi to 5th and Mississippi. Then, I repeated that with the same two blocks on Illinois street. Instead of last time where I distributed upwards of 80 flyers, this time we cut that number in half given that it was our second round canvassing the same neighborhoods. While it would be incredibly nice if these flyer distributions worked out, Mohsen mentioned an interesting plan of reaching out to community leaders that I believe would be good to pursue if this outreach does not pan out. I believe the previous organizations that I have already reached out to may be more amenable to talking to us at a broader organizational level, rather than connecting us with private citizens. I understand their overall privacy concerns and while we wouldn’t do anything to violate this privacy, there may have been only so much they could do in connecting us with other individuals.
I am writing this week from the suburbs of Chicago being that I am back home over spring break. I wanted to write to give a brief update on the interview situation. After the first initial email that was sent out with interest, I have followed up several times to no avail. This seemingly begs the question: how do we get sustained interest? I suspect my problem was that I initially wanted to set something up for weeks down the line, because of spring break. I am thinking if I email back one final time with specific times we can meet this week, we may be more successful in getting something on the books.
However, the results from distributing fliers had not been as I had hoped. I will say, however, I think that the snow and the poor weather did not work in our favor. It's a very common trend in human behavior to not want to go out of their way to invest themselves in the community during times of poor weather. So, if we catch them on Wednesday or Thursday of this week, when the weather is starting to improve, I am hoping that the desire to engage in our project will increase. That being said, I was put in contact with a very promising individual named Becky Price over at the Ballard Center. One of the individuals I first reached out to called me back and gave me her contact information. From there, I called her to describe our project and she said she would get back to me in the next few days with some potential names if she discovered any interest. I am really hoping to utilize organizational contacts, as there is a level of trust those community members have amongst each other that could be very helpful moving forward with this project.
While I am ultimately trying to keep a positive spin on project development, I will admit that I am a bit frustrated. It's hard to see a project that you spent hours trudging through the snow to completely not connect with the community in the way you had hoped. However, I also recognize that it also means I need to be thinking out of the box and improving my tactics. I have to remember that not everyone in Lawrence has the same buy-in to discussing these issues for research as I do, and that I must try and really connect with the community if I hope to be successful.
Today I drove around Lawrence distributing fliers in an attempt to find additional interviewee’s for this project. I really wanted to get this done before I went home for spring break and inevitably, to some extent, checked out of school (and by proxy, this project). However, at 6pm yesterday, they called today off of school as a snow day. That being said, the project cannot stop simply because of the weather. So, I took this as an opportunity to get out of my apartment due to the cruddy weather. Immediately, I noticed a few things about this process.
First, my sense of direction in Lawrence is very convoluted. A lot of the neighborhoods we were looking to canvas were relatively close to the downtown area and as I was looking at some of the cross-streets on my map, I had to work hard to avoid areas that are traditionally undergraduate student housing. While many of them would be sympathetic to the cause, most undergraduates won’t have the deep ties and community knowledge that I believe is needed to successfully complete this project. As such, as I was driving, I was constantly reevaluating what areas to canvas. Then, I would cross-check these areas with the census tool that Mohsen provided. This census tool included information on the general socio-economic status of residents in Lawrence, and highlighted areas with the highest poverty rates. This allowed us to decipher the areas with the highest need to generate the best traction for our work.
Second, given the weather, I had to be very strategic with where I placed our fliers. A good chunk of the neighborhoods I visited did not have traditional mailboxes along the street, and I didn’t just want to leave them on the sidewalk. So, I found myself walking up to the front doors and sticking them there to try and keep them secure from the snow. A couple of times the wind got the better of them, so I’m thinking it would be smart to re-canvas some of the neighborhoods (especially the ones near Lawrence Memorial Hospital).
Third, Massachusetts Street gets a ton of foot traffic. As such, it is a very strategic place to put some of the fliers. Notably, I left some at Ladybird diner, a diner in the area known for its help of underserved communities in the area. I placed a few more on telephone poles across the area like I had seen done by other groups. Finally, I put them up in areas that had noticeable billboards with high foot traffic such as the Granada.
Given my own religious affiliation, I had hope that some of the local churches would be useful in helping us identify individuals we could survey. So, when I dropped off fliers at various churches in the area, I made sure to introduce myself so they would have a good impression of me. Ultimately, I am feeling fairly hopeful about the potential of individuals to reach out to us in the coming weeks.
In order to broaden our outreach, Mohsen presented the idea of creating and distributing a flier at our weekly meeting. I thought it was a great opportunity to integrate design skills to expand our outreach across campus and throughout our target communities. I sent him the initial mockup for the flier Monday, and just sent the revised flier with his corrections tonight. Alongside this, we have created a QR code to place on the flier where individuals can easily scan the code in order to access a google form through which we can contact them. Ultimately, our biggest goal was for it to be attention grabbing, effusive, and to give individuals as many ways to reach out to us as possible. I am still nervous about our lack of community buy-in for the project, and will be sending out a round of follow up emails tomorrow. I went ahead and drafted it tonight, but I believe the response rate will be better if they are received right in the morning. This past weekend, one of the biggest things I did was to write up a report for our advisor over at the Sierra Club, Ty Gorman, to check our progress. It was really interesting to see the progress we have made over the first few weeks of our project, and writing it got me incredibly excited for all that is to come in the future. Hopefully we can hammer down some concrete interview subjects for next week to stay on track with our plan. I am feeling hopeful, but also a bit nervous.
Over the past two days, I have been contacting as many community groups as possible, and following up when prudent. After sending out thirteen initial inquiries, I received three follow up responses. Two of them responded similarly to the way warm hearts did. They worried that the disclosure of private information would be against the individual's privacy rights, something that undeniably demands respect. However, it begs the quandary of how we plan to effectively reach our target audience for this project. Further, one can’t help but wonder if we should have contingency plans put in place if we are unable to identify individuals to interview. Mohsen indicated we may have to go door to door in our target areas, but I am not 100% certain as to what that would look like. Ultimately, the process of identifying interviewees has become a lot more challenging than I initially anticipated. However, instead of giving up we just need to adapt. In taking a more localized approach, I sent out three emails to different neighborhood associations in Lawrence, in the hopes of finding interview subjects through individual connections. If none of these pan out, over the weekend I think it could be prudent to look into social media as a conduit for making connections. Hopefully, we will be able to stay on track and schedule an interview on the books for next week as we had initially hoped.
After an unsuccessful outreach to Warm Hearts in Douglas County, I ramped up my outreach efforts to community groups today. The disappointment I initially felt from an unsuccessful first venture was quickly replaced with hope when I realized just how many organizations Lawrence has to aid community members. Between different churches, neighborhood groups, and 501C3 nonprofits, it wasn’t too difficult to identify groups in the area that prioritize helping at-risk communities. Mohsen indicated today that he wants our interviews themselves to center on the administrative burden different federal programs require. As such, when I was crafting my email template, I was sure to highlight that. Ultimately, this project seeks to unpack individuals' lived experiences with energy accessibility in Douglas County, and we hope to connect ourselves with individuals who hope to share their experiences. By the end of my first round of outreach to community groups I submitted requests on three websites (Catholic Charities Lawrence, ECKAN, Lawrence Mutual Aid Network). Further, I sent emails to seven different churches and organizations (Plymouth Congregational Church, First Lawrence Church, Explore Lawrence, City of Lawrence, Building Hope Lawrence, Lawrence Family Promise, and the Ballard Center). Since I am Catholic myself, I believe if I want to continue to look into churches moving forward, it may benefit me to reach out to other Catholic churches in Lawrence. The one I go to is predominately for students, however, so it may be best for me to focus my efforts on ones across town. At this point, I will shift my efforts into developing our interview guide, and updating this website with some of the educational materials I have reviewed over the past few weeks.