It's September already!

This is my very first post for the blog and I am very excited! (I moved to Chicago in mid-August and started my fellowship August 20th; hence, the late post).

This year I am working with Free Spirit Media, a non-profit organization that provides free media and video production classes to high school students on Chicago's West and South Sides.

My internship is off to a slowish start due in large part to the fact that the climate in the public education system in Chicago is extremely tense. CPS (Chicago Public School) teachers are planning a strike due to the longer school day approved by the city of Chicago. The longer school day has been approved in order to curtail the escalating violence in Chicago. Since 2008, more than 530 youth have been killed in Chicago with nearly 80 percent of the homicides occurring in 22 African-American or Latino community areas on the city’s South, Southwest and West sides. I was having lunch with two friends in Hyde Park, and my friend a Chicago native said, "In Chicago, we go to Afghhanistan for coffee." When you really think about how more youth have died in Chicago this year than soldiers killed in Afghanistan in 2012, you realize how bad the situation is. Literally,  youth walk around their neighborhoods fearful. It is an actual war zone. Every single weekend, youth are killed in Chicago. every single weekend. (I think my next post will be about the unfortunate popularity of the Chief Keef movement, a Chicago rapper who a lot of my students listen to).

Right now, I split my time between the Development Office (writing grant proposals..etc) and North Lawndale College Prep - Collins where I help lead classes during the school day. Soon I will be switched to Power House High School where I will be helping with the after-school program four days a week.

Nevertheless, my two weeks with Free Spirit Media have been unbelievably eye-opening. The education system in Chicago is incredibly segregated. NLCP and Power House are near 98% African American. Theses students never leave their neighborhoods on the South and West sides and do not fully understand that there is a whole world of opportunity outside of their communities. Poverty rates are extremely high, over 50% in North Lawndale. Outside of their teachers, a lot of the students have never communicated with people outside of their race.

After helping to lead four class periods last Friday, I was asked to help grade some of the students journal entries. I quickly realized that a lot of these high school students cannot fully put sentences together. The education system in this country is a mess. There is absolutely no reason why any high school student should be set back in life because they have not had access to a proper education. I think about my nine year old cousin who goes to a Catholic school in the suburbs of Chicago and how at nine years old he's already so many steps ahead of these high school students and how unfair that is. These students are bright, and ambitious but unfortunately have not had the same opportunities as everyone else. I hope that by giving them these media production skills, allowing them to learn how to operate high-tech cameras, produce documentaries, use final cut pro, FSM is taking one step in closing this unfair achievement gap.

I'm excited to be a mentor this year and looking forward to an awesome time here at FSM! The environment here is amazing and everyone has been so supportive and kind!

It's the first day of May which means I've been at NEF for almost an entire year!  During this year, we have rebranded our organization as the New Markets Support Company and have a new website (www.newmarkets.org) which I am in charge of -- until the next fellow!  One of the most exciting parts about being the first fellow at an organization is watching the fellowship role mold into a formal position with distinct responsibilities.  One of these responsibilities is to produce an external annual report for our website as well as internal report that digs deeper into the impact data our projects have generated.  I've had a great fellowship year, and I know NEF is excited to continue its participation in the AlumniCorps program!

Character and Setting

My latest project for the kids in the evening program at the Carole Robertson Center for Learning is a podcast to the editor. We're going around asking each other questions like, "What changes would you most like to make?" "What about the world frustrates you?" "What is going well?" "Do you think it's possible to change other people?"

Now, there is one boy in the evening program who is a mess: always a little ragged, always foul-mouthed and peripatetic. (Although he is unexpectedly respectful of the voice recorder; he always asks if it's recording before launching into offensive lyrics, and if it is on then he paces and waits.) He wandered into our interview session today and instead of allowing him to interrupt us, we decided to interview him.

In response to the question "Do you think it's possible to change other people?" he answered in the affirmative. "How is it possible?" asked his interviewer.

He thought for a long time. Just before the interviewer got frustrated and moved on to something else, he muttered, "The setting."

"What?" he interviewer demanded.

"The setting. Change the setting."

"Setting means place and time," explained the interviewer a touch condescendingly. "You mean place and time?"

"Yeah, man, but, you know..." he trailed off and eyed the floor.

"You mean more than that?" I began. "You mean--?"

"I mean like everything. Their attitude. Their atmosphere. One thing at least. You gotta change the setting."

When the interview was done, he bounced away, grabbing a pool stick as he headed out the door, gone before I could say anything about it. Later I saw him doing pull-ups on the triangular bar holding the library door open. Even later, I stood in the art room and he hopped past the window in the alley outside, grinning widely, waving with one hand, giving the finger with the other, on his way home.

He rarely listens, he is frequently disrespectful, and many staff members worry about him. He's endearing, he's surprising, and he's deep. I really hope he can find a way to change his setting one day.

The Show Must Go On

The way I have been feeling lately defies description, but I think that it must be closely related to the assessment made by two of my coworkers at the Carole Robertson Center: "You're tougher than you look. We thought you'd be long gone by now."

The rhythm of my life is this: I do my job, and I recover from doing my job. The lows are low and the highs are high. One such high came this past Thursday when a cast of seven actors from the youth program put on the play we'd been working on developing together since late October. Seeing the pride they took in the finished product, however imperfect, was an incredible experience.

I bought t-shirts on sale and used fabric paint to decorate them with the name of the play. When I handed them out to the cast there were a lot of questions. "You spent your own money on these?" "Can we keep these?" "I'm hanging this on my wall!"

Twenty minutes before the play started, one of the girls in it asked me, "What are we doing next?" She's ready for a project, and she's ready now. I laughed, and asked for the weekend to recover.

Sunlight!

Today is the first day in a while that the sun has come out in Chicago.

After 4 years of relatively temperate winters at Princeton, I got used to just wearing a light jacket in February. But Chicago's weather is of an entirely different magnitude.*

Apparently this has been an easy winter but I have a hard time imagining what a difficult winter would look like...

One of my mentors, Peter Freeman, gave me some great advice for surviving the winter: Get out! Never one to pass up the wisdom of my elders, I'll be traveling to California to visit some friends in early March, the perfect way to get over S.A.D.


* It should be noted that I hate cold weather and that there are plenty of people who don't mind the weather here at all.

We Have Several Dreams

It's been a long time since I posted. The holidays are always a hectic (and sometimes stressful) time for the staff at the Carole Robertson Center, but we pushed through and now that we're back to our regularly scheduled programming I am regaining my sense of excitement.

Today I walked around the Center with a couple of the girls in the youth program asking kids, teens, and staff, "What's your dream?" and brandishing a voice recorder. We'd done the same thing, with a different series of questions, a couple months ago when we were building the documentary theater piece that we will be performing in late February; we interviewed participants and staff about their experience at the Carole Robertson Center, their hopes for the future, and their knowledge of Carole Robertson, the Center's namesake. The theater piece, which I'm directing, will be performed by a group of seven really enthusiastic girls and one earnest boy from the Youth Program, and will be part of our flotilla of Black History Month projects.

Back to "What's your dream?" In a couple weeks we're hosting a fashion show/performing arts showcase called Rip the Runway, which is a chance for the youth program participants to strut their stuff. Rip the Runway audience members will eat dinner at tables with centerpieces devoted to the dreams of each interviewee. Most of the kids we talked to described what they wanted to be when they grew up, and many wanted to be doctors, nurses, or teachers. When asked why, they said they wanted to help people. A couple of the staff members interviewed talked about what they would be doing if they weren't doing this (music, art, and writing, mostly, and I am definitely guilty of falling into this category), while others took the question more generally and told us that their dream was for world peace.

Nice. After the craziness of the past few months, that's my dream now too.

Dread Knots and Shifting Desire

This fellowship year has provided me the unique privilege reflect on the types of change I'd like to see in the world. Whether through attending the PolicyLink Equity Summit in Detroit in early November or exclusive Princeton sponsored networking events, I've met a vast array of people who are offering interesting solutions to very real challenges.

I've struggled, however, with the question of whether these privileges and opportunities actually work to eradicate the types of structural inequalities I'm working against, or simply reify them.

One of my job responsibilities is to help teach people of color from Chicago's West Side how to navigate corporate - and often white - work environments. While I'm offering a real service to people who otherwise might be passed over, I often feel as if I'm normalizing the clients to the white supremacist patriarchy. For example, many clients come to class with hair styles which are quite common in North Lawndale such as dreads, afro's or braids on men. All of those hairstyles, however, prove to be barriers to employment. So we typically advise people to cut their hair in a way that white people will find less threatening.

But I feel my time would be better spent educating prejudiced employers that every black man with dreads is not Lil Wayne. Instead, when I meet people of power and privilege I have to perform an exaggerated congeniality to ensure that they don't find me (a lilliputian, Princeton educated man of color) threatening.

Oscillating between the militarized ghetto's of Chicago's West Side and garden parties in Lakeview is such a thoroughly disorienting experience that I struggle to imagine what a meaningful engagement between the two worlds might look like.

The Windy City in November

It's raining in Chicago and the closer you are to the lake, the windier...which means umbrellas won’t keep you from getting wet. I work in the West Loop, which is part of downtown Chicago, and my office, the National Equity Fund (NEF), is located on the river and not too far from the lake. Needless to say my trenchcoat is getting a lot of use.

I’ve been at NEF for almost 4 months now, and feel like I’ve really gotten into the swing of things. I work in the New Markets Tax Credit department, which invests federal New Markets Tax Credits into real-estate in low-income areas. These credits are allocated to fund a variety of projects, ranging from community centers to grocery stores to charter schools. My specific role is to become the “community impact expert.” This entails understanding the variety of tools that exist for measuring and reporting on the community impact of our investments (particularly nonfinancial impact) and analyzing our community impact system. I was surprised when I first started my research that not much literature exists on nonfinancial impact measurement (think jobs created, goods and services provided to low-income communities, environmental sustainability), especially as it relates to the New Markets Tax Credits. The existing literature is scarce because the investor demand for nonfinancial performance measurement is relatively new. Looking at the “triple bottom line” (people, planet, and profit) rather than just the “bottom line” (profits) is a recent trend for investors.

I’m originally from the Midwest, and though I had visited Chicago numerous times, living here is another story. I’ve become familiar with Chicago’s many neighborhoods (instead of just the Museum Campus and a few blocks on Devon Ave.) as well as its public transit system (no car this time around). In fact, I’m a pro Chicago bus-rider; and I’m sure that once it hits zero degrees outside I’ll appreciate that buses stop every block. In addition to riding buses, I’ve also been able to explore Chicago a fair amount since moving here. It is a fun, beautiful city, though very spread out and segregated. I especially noticed this while training for a Halloween half marathon (the Monster Dash—I really recommend it for all you runners!); demographics and neighborhood services really do change block-by-block.

It looks like my lunch break is over and thus, so is this blog post. Have a great week and Veteran’s Day weekend!

A Fall of Firsts

It’s officially fall.

If the changing tree colours weren’t enough to tip off everybody here in Chicago, the highs of about 10 degrees C this week should do it (50 F for all you Yankees). And as I started to pull out all of my sweaters to deal with the new chill, it finally hit me – I’m really not at school this year. I know, I know, for most people that realization would have come back in September, but I guess it took the important changes that come with the fall season – the weather, the acceptability of eating pumpkin pie, and the start of the hockey season, of course – to really enforce the fact that I’m starting my post-college life. It’s the first fall I’ve worked full-time, the first fall in 4 years that I haven’t had a mid-term menacingly creeping up on me, and the first fall in about 15 years that I haven’t been training for hockey season. Needless to say, a lot of changes at once.

That being said, those changes have already brought about some great experiences. I’m on my third month of work at the Better Boys Foundation, an out-of-school program that works with youth in the North Lawndale area of Chicago. We provide typical after-school services such as mentoring and tutoring, but are also home to an awesome and unique apprenticeship program for the older participants. To avoid an epically long and detailed post I think I’ll leave the full explanation of the program for next time, but suffice to say the kids are happy and actually eager to work in their apprenticeship field. It’s nice to see. My official job title is ‘Volunteer Coordinator’, but in the last month or so I’ve been segueing into the development side of things to work in Agency Marketing and Communications. There’s been somewhat of a learning curve that has come with the transition, but it’s good to have a few challenges thrown my way from time to time. The most frustrating part so far has been mastering the waiting game, since a lot of my tasks seem to depend on outside processing. In particular, the processing times for our volunteer’s background checks have been less than reliable (aka extremely long), and it's left most of my volunteer recruitment efforts at a standstill. I guess that would be a lesson in itself – I’m here for a whole year, and I need to resist the urge to get instant results and satisfaction. The impact I want to make may take a while.

Outside of work, the city itself has been great. Really. I love it. Now that I feel more settled with work and my apartment I’m trying to take more time to explore, to find my favourite places before it gets too snowy, and to work on remembering how to find and make new friends (yes, after college you have to go out and make friends, they don’t magically live next to you anymore. Very tragic). Will I eventually hang out with more than just my roommate? Will I find my token “spot” in a coffee shop or bar that I frequent like all cool movie and tv character seem to do? Will I be able to survive not just the fall but a whole year of firsts?

I guess I'll let you know!

Still Settling In

I've been in Chicago for a few months and I'm getting into the swing of 'things'. The first few weeks were exhausting, mostly because I didn't know where I was a lot of the time. For some reason there are several 6 way intersections in my neighborhood. Poor road design and confusing - or non existent - signage compounded my terrible sense of direction.

During those hazy weeks I also spent a lot of money. The 'setting up' costs of living in a city are pretty high and difficult to anticipate. I was aided by a generous grant from the Bank of Mommy. If I could do it again, I would've rented a van or truck, got furniture from Salvation Army and gotten a moving service to help get stuff up the stairs to my apartment. It's still cheaper than buying new, low quality furniture.

The other thing I noticed upon my arrival is the stark socio-economic and racial divisions in Chicago. It's kind of like being on campus: There are lots of different groups in close proximity, but the groups rarely intermingle, and when they do its often awkward.

It's pretty tough to find meaningful engagement across difference in Chicago. The first few weeks here I spent a lot of time trying to see which neighborhoods I felt most comfortable in, and I was shocked to realize just how hostile entire parts of town can be to black and brown peoples.

As someone who presents as 'Black' I've felt most comfortable in the West and South Side - where I work doing prisoner re-entry stuff. Otherwise, I'm often the only person of color in the restaurant/conference/bar/party/lounge.

I've been pretty conditioned to entertaining stupid and offensive questions from well-meaning white people (the worst kind). Luckily, my workplace is primarily filled with women of color and its nice to not have to debate the existence of racism. There are a lot more comfortable, safe and productive conversations around racialized oppression. That's perhaps the biggest and most satisfying difference from going to Princeton; I don't have to defend my life experiences to the same people who are actively oppressing me, my friends and family.

Chicago ideas?

Dear Chicago (current and/or former) fellows,

I will be visiting Chicago next month and am looking for some "must see" spots. So, I'm reaching out to my network of Chicago "locals" to get some ideas! I would love to see the Art Institute, but other than that, my itinerary is flexible.

What shouldn't I miss on my trip to the windy city?

The Interrupters

The Interrupters is a movie all the fellows should go see, but especially my Chicago compatriots, and I'm not just saying that because 1/4 of the movie takes place in one of the neighborhoods the Carole Robertson Center (where I work) serves, or because my drive to work features in not one, not two, but three scenes.

Some of us work in very volatile neighborhoods, and the danger factor is not something we blog about often. For the most part, this is because we are not directly affected. We're not held at gunpoint or threatened. Nonetheless, one of the parts of my job that has been the most educational in the past two weeks is the daily walkover. We offer a service to students who attend nearby schools: staff members will go and meet kids when school lets out and accompany them back to the Center. I recently replaced a coworker whose schedule got switched around on one of these walkovers, and so every day two staff members and I make the fifteen minute walk to a nearby charter school to greet the kids.

The first week of walkover was a breeze. The second week, there were three separate incidents that had the police swarming the neighborhood and had us going to our supervisor and strongly recommending that we spring for a bus. Parents offered to pass the hat. One mother decided that she was going to take off work and drive her kids to the Center every day.

Watching The Interrupters, I couldn't get the faces of the kids I work with out of my head. It was one of those viewing experiences that left me shaken and sure that someone needs to do something. I'm doing all I can at this point in my life. I'm not huge and imposing and I don't know the neighborhood inside out and I am not an organization with endless funds. Still, I'm not going to let CeaseFire out of my sights just yet.

On the life of a professional gay

Greetings from the fabulous, unpretentious, and (very, very) affordable city of Chicago. I am halfway through my thirteenth week as the Director of Community Relations & Outreach at the Center on Halsted, the largest center for the LGBTQA community in the Midwest. The work has been surprisingly challenging. The staff is amazing, thoughtful, and intentional. The experience has been a real education. Let me share three important lessons I have had to learn.

1. Community organizing is hard. I remember being very pretentious about how I was going to be a community organizer in Chicago during my last two months at Princeton. One of the founding tenets of community organizing is that people have solutions to their problems. Community organizers serve as catalysts who create solutions-driven synergies between different stakeholders. Well, guess what? People have different, and at times divergent, agendas, biases, and fears. In response to high-profile violent incidents and the resulting, and at times divisive, community dialogue, the Center decided to form a task force to think strategically about how to make our neighborhood, Lakeview, safer and more inclusive for all.

That was the first major project I was to spearhead. 30 + 1:1 meetings and three confidential strategy sessions later, we launched the Lakeview Safety & Inclusion Coalition (LSIC). LSIC is a neighborhood-based coalition of residents, business owners, elected officials, clergy, vulnerable young adults, and social service providers. Forming it was surprisingly challenging. Maintaining its relevance and expanding its potential is even more daunting. But every challenge around LSIC has been a learning opportunity. Now that the summer months are over, LSIC is working quietly on strategic initiatives to make Lakeview better prepared for next summer.

2. Living fully takes deliberate practice. I certainly miss the convenience and proximity to opportunities that my beloved Princeton gave me. But I have to say that I adore the life I am leading - or more accurately, I love the challenges that my current life is throwing my way. Yes, I still have to deal with some anxieties. But my anxieties are not based on letter grades, papers, or problem sets. I find myself anxious about how to know that I am making a meaningful impact, how to be creative without overstepping the boundaries of my job, how to give voice to the visions that inspired me to come to Chicago -- really cool questions, don't you think?

Don't get me wrong, though. I work very hard in order to excel at what I do. Yes, I have had a lot of 60-hour weeks. But the cool thing is that when I leave this Center that I love so much, I can leave it behind. In fact, I choose to leave my work behind. Not only because I can but also because I must in order to take care of myself. That's often hard, especially for those of us who belong to the passionate kind. But boundaries are necessary. After work, I will usually go to the gym (2 blocks away) -- huh huh, professional gay = gym bunny; it's inevitable. And when it comes to food, ouuuh HONEY. The Center is attached to a Whole Foods. Trader Joe's is not far, and my neighborhood, Rogers Park, has phenomenal fresh markets. And when I get home, I know that some great, fresh food and some smooth vino is always on hand. Living fully, taking our time to enjoy whatever we are doing and/ or whoever we are with takes practice, deliberate practice. But trust me, it's totally worth it.

3. Chicago is just fabulous. Don't even get me started. Yes, it is an egregiously segregated city. And no one in AlumniCorps is immune to the ramifications of that segregation on their work and daily lives. But I am SO grateful that all the fellows are aware, and experience some discomfort with the depth of segregation in the city. Discomfort is important. It keeps us grateful for our privilege.

But Chicago... this city has SO much to offer. We just love to get it in and have a good time here. I love Lake Michigan so much. I don't know how many times I have biked along it, or just sat by it on many evenings this past summer. The food is just fabulous. Take my upcoming birthday for instance. Once I leave the Center after work, I'll be going to Happy Hour with the Ivy League and Sister Schools LGBT Alumni Association. Then, I'm going to a dinner party thrown by the Regional Coordinator for AlumniCorps in a fab space that overlooks the Lake and the Chicago River. And this weekend is going to be full of brunch, jazz, food, workouts, and the good life. Living the life of a professional gay in Chicago. Oooouuuhhh.

How is P55? Awesome.
What do I like most about it? The challenge it is giving me to do what I love and live fully.
Do I recommend it? Yes. Yes. And YES.

Go P55.

First Week Finished

Roosevelt intersects with California as a boarded-up warehouse. There’s a pothole you have to avoid, and then you’re running down south next to the park. At 19^th Street you take a right. After a few blocks, you pull up in front of one of three branches of the Carole Robertson Center for Learning.

The Center was named after one of the victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. When I showed up on Monday for orientation (which consisted mostly of six square blocks of forms, occasionally livened up by the seriously friendly staff members in charge of making sure I understood what I was signing) I was handed a brief article by Angela Davis. Davis writes,

…it occurred to me that the way the memory of that episode persists in popular imagination is deeply problematic. What bothers me most is that their names have been virtually erased: They are inevitably referred to as ‘the four Black girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing.’ Another traumatic moment occurred in 1964 when James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were killed in Mississippi. A decade earlier, Emmett Till was found at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. These boys, whose lives were also consumed by racist fury, still have names in our historical memory. Carole, Denise, Addie Mae, and Cynthia do not.

Part of my work at Carole Robertson will be an oral history project. This week I talked with Michelle, the teacher I will be working with most closely, about how we might go about it. She was very excited when I mentioned the possibility of such a project, especially when I floated the idea of one focused on the Center, which is celebrating its 35^th anniversary this year. She told me about how, right before I arrived, the director addressed students and parents and asked whether anyone knew who Carole Robertson was. None of the students did.

I’m at the Center in a very vague capacity as a “School Age and Youth Literacy Specialist.” I perch in various locations around the building and do my thing. On Tuesday, “my thing” consisted of helping to inventory and organize roughly ten million books provided to teachers through a grant. Wednesday, my thing was a different thing: hanging out in classrooms and getting to know the kids I’ll eventually be working with. Thursday was more meetings and lesson planning and getting to know more about the Center as a whole. Today: more kids, ice cream, games, and teaching approximately sixteen teenage and preteen girls how to fold fortunetellers, which they called cootie catchers. Next week and into the foreseeable future, the real thing: theater and creative writing and oral history oh my!

We’ll see what the kids like best—I’m guessing theater, and I’m trying to plan accordingly—but I’m going to try very hard not to lose sight of history. It’s the reason any of us are doing what we’re doing right now.

For now, I’m looking forward to the Labor Day weekend, as I have been throughout this first (exhausting, confusing, awesome) week. Like many other Fellows, I’m not sure that what I’m doing this year will be something I want to pursue for the rest of my life, but I’m trying to make everything I do meaningful, from lesson planning to helping clean the floor after snack time. The sense that the Carole Robertson Center is part of history helps.