So far, so good

On Tuesday I went back to Princeton to participate in a panel sponsored by the Princeton Varsity Club, Alumnicorps, Princeton-in-Asia, Princeton-in-Africa, and Princeton-in-Latin America, which was designed to get more varsity athletes interested in these public interest programs.

It was nice to be back on campus for the first time, and I realized as I fielded questions from the audience, that I've already learned and experienced so much since graduating just a few short months ago. My p55 experience has allowed me to learn about the nonprofit sector as a whole and about working as part of a mission-driven organization.

There's nothing like telling a room full of people about the benefits of doing an Alumnicorps fellowship to reaffirm your own appreciation for the position. Being forced to articulate aspects of my experience so far (such as "what has been the most rewarding", etc) provided me the chance to reflect.

My visit to Princeton was a short as this blog post. It wasn't even long enough to stop by the Bent Spoon! But it was definitely worth it.

ps- Every year the NYT does a pull-out section on issues relating to charity and philanthropy. Last week, I read through all of the articles in this year's section and typed up a brief snapshot of the coverage. Check it out on the Foundation Center's PhilanTopic blog if you're interested! You can find the post here.

Meandering

Faded and tattered, the Puerto Rican flags strung from window to window flap in the wind, baring through each shred the blues of early morning. Passing under them on our way to the administrative offices, my supervisor and I acknowledge silently their haunting presence, as if their wraithlike bodies kept watch over a community similarly out of time and place.

As we make our way beyond this street, my supervisor stops to greet clients from the clinic on the street, which surprises me since confidentiality is so important at the clinic. For me it is a new kind of community outreach, one that goes beyond the walls of any institution and spills out onto where people shop, eat, and live. Casually checking in on clients, we stop and go in an unhurried rhythm until we reach the offices, but by then, I realize that the promenade was not intended to reach any particular destination but rather to reach out to clients that we hadn’t seen in a long time. On our way back, we take a different route, but in my mind I still see those rent flags from the other street and wonder if they solemnly still cling to the line that keeps them in place.

NewSchools and Waiting for Superman

This past summer, I moved to San Francisco to begin my fellowship at NewSchools Venture Fund, a venture philanthropy firm that invests in social entrepreneurs working to improve public education. In addition to supporting early stage organizations as they grow into sustainable solutions, NewSchools’ mission includes acting as a hub for education innovators – from school leaders to policymakers – to share best practices in order to more effectively drive systems change. As a non-profit that applies capitalist principles to solve problems yet seeks only social returns, NewSchools constantly confronts the challenge of attempting to gauge a new idea's functional value within the context of stark cultural, political and financial realities.

This fall, NewSchools partnered with Participant Media and Paramount Pictures on a variety of initiatives related to the release of the documentary Waiting for “Superman”. In addition to organizing and hosting screenings of the movie around the Bay Area and joining the film’s pledge progress meter, NewSchools is currently producing a short video to be included with the film's spring DVD release. As part of this project, I have traveled to New York City and Los Angeles as our team has conducted interviews with a diverse group of education experts – including Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp and Newark Mayor Cory Booker – as well as students, teachers and parents at innovative organizations such as School of One and KIPP LA Prep.

The personal side of clinical trials: life at the BCC

Pager buzzing frenetically in my hand, I jog through the hallways of UCSF’s Breast Care Center to consent a patient for one of the clinical trials that I am helping to coordinate. Breathless (and, admittedly, a tad nervous), I arrive at the door of the patient’s exam room, compose myself and knock. I hear a muffled “come in,” and I turn the handle.

This scene has repeated itself several times over my past four month’s at the Breast Care Center. What has not repeated itself is the scene I find on the other side of the door. Some patients are surrounded by a mob of friends; some are with sisters, partners, children; a few are alone. Some are in their 70s, and some are only two or three years older than I am. In the hour or so before I am paged, most have received the news that they have breast cancer, and so I often find tears or stunned gazes. But I also meet stoics, and the occasional patient whose response to meeting me is a broad grin and a joke about how young I look. As I discuss the trial with these patients, their responses are equally variable, and one of the most challenging aspects of my job this year has been learning how to guide and tailor these conversations for each patient and every situation.

For many of us, myself included, the words “clinical trial” have mixed connotations. We all benefit from successful clinical trials—they are the gold-standard by which we determine if new therapies are safe and effective. But these words also conjure stories of ethical misconduct, fibbed data, and incomplete analysis, not to mention the risks of untested treatments. Before I arrived at UCSF, I knew what clinical trials were. I understood the concepts of control arms, of double-blinding. I’d read about trials that had brought miraculous new drugs to market, and others that dragged on for years, eating millions of dollars, only to yield null results. But I had never really thought about how these trials are actually orchestrated. Who makes sure that extra study lab tests are run for study patients? Who dispenses experimental medications to patients? Who analyzes their specimens to determine how patients respond to new therapies? How does a patient’s complaint of nausea make its way, several years later, onto the list of expected side effects for a new drug? Who tracks patients five or ten years after they have completed treatment to assess survival? While a few doctors and scientists will write their names on the publications resulting from a trial, the entire operation of a trial actually involves a huge cast, a massive engine with interconnected parts. My job as clinical coordinator is to make sure that the spinning parts remain greased—I schedule appointments, I enter data, I answer patients’ questions about the trial, I make sure that patients, tissue specimens, chemo orders, physicians, etc. arrive at the right place at the right time and for the right purpose.

The trials I am helping to coordinate assess new chemotherapy drugs to treat breast cancer, as well as a host of biological markers, tests and imaging techniques. Our hope is that not only will we find new drugs to treat breast cancer with, but we will also figure out how to tailor treatments to individual patients, using the specific biology of the patient’s tumor as our guide (see a recent Wall Street Journal article about one of the trials I am working on here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703882404575520190576846812.html).

The broad scientific aims of these trials are certainly inspiring, but one of the unexpected benefits of my job is the relationships I’ve been able to build with patients. I see each of our study patients about once a week during her several months of chemotherapy. I hear about children and grandkids, I swap travel stories and eat home-made chow-mein. And I listen to each woman describe her experience on the physical and emotional rollercoaster that is breast cancer treatment. It is these personal connections that are ultimately the most rewarding aspect of my job.

Making a difference through play

A couple of weeks ago, I witnessed the conclusion of a project that continues to validate for me the importance of the work that CityBridge Foundation is doing in education. Two of my colleagues had for weeks been organizing a playground build at a local DC public school. While the school had playground equipment for the older children who attend the school, the three- and four-year-olds had only an empty fenced-in area where they could play with balls and hula-hoops. The staff at one of CityBridge's corporate partners would build an arts-themed playground for these kids over the course of two days, with the support of an organization called Learning Structures, which specializes in building playgrounds. I'd heard about the design for the playground: a large wooden play structure with towers, a climbing wall, a stage and a slide; a four-sided chalk easel; and a set of musical pipes that made noise when struck with a wooden block. But when I went to help out at the event with a few other CityBridge staff, I was blown away not only by the magnitude of the project but the dedication of the roughly 30 corporate volunteers.

On the Thursday before the build, I helped to haul what seemed like an endless pile of lumber from where it had been delivered down the street to the front of the school, in preparation for the volunteers to come on Friday. It was definitely hard work, but so fun to get out and work at the school; curious kids, parents, and teachers passed by every once in a while and asked us what we were up to, and were clearly excited when we told them we were building a playground.

I didn't attend the build on Friday, but when we pulled up at 7 am on Saturday morning, the frame of the playground structure was standing tall outside the school, the easel was almost completely together, and the music structure was finished. There was definitely a lot more work to do, though: putting together the floor of the stage, securing railings to the play structure, sanding and sealing the wood, affixing the slide. It was so awesome to see the volunteers pulling up early on a Saturday morning and getting so engrossed in the work. It was a long day, and I spent most of it either sanding or painting (no power tools for me!), or lending a hand on various other projects when needed. It was amazing to me that by 3 pm that afternoon, the entire playground had been finished: we watched as the last piece of wood was drilled into place, and then stood back to admire the work. The stage was the best part - on the back, one of the volunteers had painted a beautiful mural based on a Dr. Seuss drawing. A few teachers, the school principal, and a couple of kids with their parents were there throughout the day. It was incredibly gratifying to see the kids take a first ride down the bright red slide, and run across the play structure from tower to tower.

I was completely impressed with the powerful show of dedication and drive that got this playground built over the course of just two days. In a very tangible way, it showed how making a difference in the education of DC's children can occur in broad policy sweeps (a new teacher's contract, or a tougher teacher evaluation system, to name two), but also through smaller acts...like creating an amazing play space for a group of deserving kids.

Getting Settled In

I have had a couple of busy months recently. I moved into a new apartment at the beginning of October, which was an experience to say the least. Moving in New York can be a stressful experience, but overall the move was pretty successful. After breathing a huge sigh of relief, my roommate and I went straight to work to make our new place a much homier space. Upon hearing that I had moved, a receptionist at one of my assigned schools urged me to make my apartment my comfort space simply because “one needs to find a way to escape from the hustle and bustle of this city.” I have taken his advice very seriously and have made countless of trips to furniture stores, Target, Marshalls, TJMaxx, Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and Kmart. I must admit that I still have to get used to the rules of city shopping. I need to just come to terms with the fact that most stores only have a limited amount of items. I also have to acknowledge that the majority of stores do not honor weekly Sunday ads unless you bring them in. I guess these are the little things you learn as you try to search for home décor on a Princeton Project 55 budget.

Moving to a new neighborhood also has its perks. I am now living on the Upper West Side, which is full of shops, cheap restaurants, and bars. In addition, I am now very close to Riverside Park and able to go for an evening jog whenever I feel like it. However, the best part of my recent move is that I am literally 10 minutes away from work. It is quite amazing!

Things at work are also falling into place. Over the last five weeks, I managed to meet with every single one of my 89 students; I was quite proud of this accomplishment. I learned quite a bit a lot from this first cycle of visits. I now am aware of the logistical difficulties that may prevent me from meeting with students. Additionally, I now know that kids have such a short attention span, that you have to barrage them with reminder emails and phone calls. I am hoping that all of these strategies will make my second cycle of visits run smoothly. Overall, I finally feel that I am getting settled in and love it!

Rico the Pirate Chicken

In honor of the recent holiday, I thought it might be appropriate to tell a short story about this year's Halloween celebration at Bethel New Life's youth mentoring program. Like most good stories, it began with a folding table, fifteen round pumpkins about the size of a soccer ball, and many fistfuls of multi-colored feathers.

We wanted to give the kids in the program a creative activity for Halloween, and painting pumpkins seemed like a great one for the kids we serve, who range in age from five to fifteen. (The thought of carving the pumpkins, while a favorite seasonal activity of mine, with a dozen kids hopped up on Laffy Taffy and fun size Milky Ways scared me more than anything else this Halloween.) When we presented them, along with paper plate palettes of acrylic paint and two old shoe boxes filled with a random assortment of arts and crafts supplies, the kids clamored for the biggest and most misshapen pumpkins of the bunch. When the kids, all in ill-fitting plastic smocks that drooped from their shoulders, had finally settled back in their seats with their bulbous orange canvases waiting expectantly in front of them,  they picked up their paint brushes and got to work.

I'll pause here for a moment to let you all imagine, like I did that afternoon, what your typical painted pumpkin looks like. If you're anything like me, you're imagining pumpkins painted with crooked jack-o-lantern type smiles, green countenances made to look like witches or, with a defter hand, maybe even Frankenstein. Pretty standard, right?

This is not what we got.

I was sitting next to Bobby, a nine year old in the program, who'd asked me to help him with his pumpkin. Admittedly, Bobby is one of my favorite kids in the program -- he generously laughs and my terrible pun jokes and, even though he has a lot of trouble in school, he's one of the quickest and brightest kids I've ever met. While I watched in silent awe, Bobby immediately dug his hand into one of the old shoe boxes and pulled out a handful of artificial feathers and began taking them and stabbing them into the side of his pumpkin. After seven or eight feathers were sticking out from the sides and back of his creation, he turned to me and stated plainly: "It's a chicken."

I looked around the room to gauge the other kids' pumpkins, and saw them gingerly pouring glue and glitter onto the stems, winding pipe cleaners into antennae, and using paint as an afterthought. I turned back to Bobby, who was gently applying a layer of paint to each feather and had just completed a glittery construction paper beak. I asked him what his pumpkin's name was. He paused for a moment and said, "Rico. His name's Rico. He's a pirate chicken." With that declaration he added a large eye patch over to Rico's right eye and then continued working, making a stringy, frazzled beard for Rico out of some pipe cleaners and colored paper.

I am constantly amazed by the kids I get to work with in this program. They are smart, motivated, wickedly funny, living in a world outside the door of our classroom where they are constantly being told (by their friends and often even by their parents and teachers) that they shouldn't be any of those things. Many of them have no support, no one looking out for them, and no one telling them all the good reasons that they shouldn't sell drugs on the corner like their older brothers. Kids with less strength, with less of an ability to buck the system of failure inherent in this neighborhood, lose to drugs and crime every day on the Westside. So every day I see these kids show up at the door, wanting to come into our program, seems like a gift, another day that we've won over some seriously terrible odds.

Bobby signed the gluey, glittery plate under his pumpkin and told me that, when he was rich and famous, I could sell Rico for a million dollars.


Names, except for those of pirate chicken pumpkins, have been changed.