November: Giving Thanks

Having read the Positive Youth Development chapter (Lerner et al.), and learning how much work there is around shifting the paradigms to that of an assets-based approach around children, I am thankful for the innovative research being done at the Gardner Center, and the hard work of Redwood City 2020 to incorporate this research into action. I am also thankful for the amazing opportunity I have working at highly respected organizations that are doing incredible things. 

Important Announcement!

As I'm sure you've noticed, the week-by-week structure of this blog became increasingly hard to maintain as I found myself with more and more responsibilities. So, from this point forward, I will be focusing on smaller, event-based entries. I feel that this will encourage me to blog more, and will allow me to really reflect on events and experiences that have an impact on my work.

However, I still wanted to provide updates of my year (how has it already been 10 months?!). For the next week, I will post a summary of a month's work, starting with November, and ending with May. These will be short, but will still be loosely based around a central theme. Look out for these posts!

Thank you for your patience, and be sure to check in over this next week! 

Weeks 16-18 (10/28-11/8): Alignment

The weeks now are flying by. With the strategic planning retreat on the horizon, the amount of work I have is steadily increasing. I’m also finding that I have more responsibilities. For example, on Monday (10/28), I attended a Ready Schools Team meeting, and reported back to the small workgroup about research pertaining to the academic benefits of having smaller class sizes (according to the Tennessee STAR Experiment, advantages were minimal and seemed to fade after the third grade; more beneficial would be improving the quality of teaching).   

I’m also handling more responsibilities internally with Redwood City 2020. I’ve been emailing the core partners for their own strategic plans and needs assessments, in order to get an idea of our partners’ priorities. Eventually, I will group all of their priorities under common goals (health, safety, academics), so we can see what areas our partners are focusing on. This will tell us at Redwood City 2020 what we are doing a good job supporting, and what we can do better in the future. The partners’ needs assessments will give us a better idea of why our partners chose the goals they chose, and will then inform our own goals moving forward.   

The theme, then, for this week is alignment. As a community collaborative, it is important that we are in alignment with all of our partners. While Redwood City 2020 wants to have agency in the direction it takes in the next 4-6 years, being in line with our partners’ interests is essential in ensuring that everyone can work together. This is example of alignment in collaboration is extremely valuable for my work moving forward, both in my role as a fellow and beyond. 

Week 14 and 15 (10/14-10/25): Architects of Change

As I become progressively busier with new projects, and as weeks begin to meld into each other, I’ve decided to cover two weeks of work in one succinct post. This post is the first of such posts.

I spent much of the next couple of days focusing on the Prevention Partnership project; I sifted through various clearinghouses online (some of which were frustratingly unusable due to the government shutdown) and recorded various instances of evidence-based, peer-reviewed alcohol and drug prevention interventions. I compiled the best, most relevant interventions in an Excel sheet and made copies to hand out at the Prevention Partnership meeting on Wednesday.

At the meeting, we gathered the Prevention Partnership partners and explained to them the call for evidence-based practices in the new work plan. Many partners, as it turns out, were already using evidence-based practices, though they weren’t aware of that. Others needed more help. In the end, though, everyone was on the same page. We used the meeting time to establish a timeline and other deadlines by which the partners should have their revised proposals submitted to us, so that we can compile them into one work plan and submit that to the County. Overall, it was a very productive meeting!

The rest of the week passed without any incident of note. The following Thursday was the monthly in-person meeting with Manuelito and Jana. We met at the Redwood City 2020 offices, and discussed my role with the Prevention Partnership, the importance of the upcoming Redwood City 2020 environmental scan, and opportunities for my own professional development.

The grand opening of a Healthy Corner Store marked the end of the week. Although the irony of serving pizza and pastries at a healthy corner store was lost on no one, the meaning of the event was significant nonetheless. It was a nice change of pace to be in the community supporting one of RWC2020’s initiatives that I had read so much about. Hearing from straight from the mouths of the youth that worked so hard to put this store together I hope that this is the start of a trend that allows me to be in the community supporting various initiatives as much as I read about them!

For these youth, I've themed this week's post "Architects of Change." The Youth Leadership Institute, who headed up the Healthy Corner Store project, is comprised of local youth who want to change their community for the better. They approached all the store owners, convinced them to give their stores a healthy makeover, trained the owners how to take care of produce, and physically rearranged and cleaned the stores themselves. These youth are setting the foundation for future change, upon which a huge skyskraper of their influence will one day be built. 

Week 13 (10/7-10/11): Melt Away the Busy Day

A more superstitious person would not be surprised that Week 13 was my busiest week by far. I spent all of Monday compiling a funding report for the Shinnyo-en Foundation, documenting all of the goals and action items that Jana, Manuelito, and I had set, and doing a bit of reflection in the process. This report was only meant to be a check-in, but it was a really good opportunity for me to reflect on what I had done in the first 3 months (already?!) of my fellowship.

The next day, Manuelito, Jana, and I all met with Katie, Ben, and Ineko from Shinnyo-en Foundation at the new Redwood City 2020 office. It had been quite some time since we had all been together, but it was incredibly helpful to sit down and talk about my fellowship. We quickly went over my work plan and also learned about the opportunity to attend the National Service Learning Conference in Washington, D.C. I’ve never been east of Texas, really, so I am extraordinarily grateful for this opportunity to learn and do service in our nation’s capital. We spent the rest of the meeting time reflecting on the fellowship thus far, and other ways I can serve from this position.

After the monthly Redwood City 2020 team meeting on Wednesday, I worked on my Prezi for the presentation I would be giving to the Gardner Center staff the next day. The weekly staff meeting at the Gardner Center is a good time to learn about what projects other people are working on. So, for many people, my presentation on my fellowship was their first introduction to what I have been doing. People know I am the Shinnyo Fellow, of course, but I think they were unsure of the specifics of what my responsibilities are. I addressed these and spoke about my upcoming projects for the next hour and a half, and got some very helpful feedback, as well as recommended resources for the projects that I am working on.

Friday, on paper, was supposed to be my “down” day: my presentation was over, I didn’t have meetings planned, and I had no reports due. One thing I like about this fellowship, though, is how dynamic it is; new projects can pop up at any time. And this is exactly what happened! Jana returned from a meeting and asked for my help in informing Redwood City 2020’s strategic planning process via collecting the strategic plans of all of our core partners. This was a chance for me to reach out and make some connections in the community, so I was excited to get started. A few hours later, Jana came back from another meeting with yet another idea for work I could do; this time, I would be helping the Prevention Partnership make their proposed work plan focus more on evidence-based practices. So, my “down” day, funnily enough, ended up being one of my more productive and work-driven days yet! 

The theme, then, for this week is “Melt Away the Busy Day.” This sentiment expresses how I felt this past week: I’ve found that the more work I have, the more the days seem to blend together, and the faster the weeks seem to move. I definitely appreciate the slower days now, but still think that I am working at my best when I have to juggle a few projects (within reason, of course). I also feel more accomplished at the end of the day, and feel more justified in spending my evenings relaxing with old friends or forging better relationships with my newest friend, Netflix. Reflecting back on this week, it is pretty appropriate that this is how my Week 13 happened. And I feel very lucky to be able to say that.

Week 12 (9/30-10/4):The Importance of Young People

This week marked my first involvement with a particular initiative within Redwood City 2020: the Ready Schools Initiative. This group of individuals is comprised of teachers,  educators, and others, dedicated to making sure that children as young as preschoolers are ready for the transitions to kindergarten and later to elementary school. I attended the monthly meeting and immediately jumped in to one of the work groups. I was happy to be able to help so quickly: the group I joined wanted to find research supporting the idea that small class sizes make for better outcomes down the line. My ears, almost reflexively at this point, perked up at the mention of “research,” so I volunteered to try to find such a study. 

When I asked for Manuelito’s guidance later in the week, he directed me toward the Tennessee STAR experiment, which seemed perfect, as it seemed to support small class sizes. However, he brought up the point that this experiment was done in a specific population, at a particular time. Additionally, the effects seem to wear off after about 3rd grade. This got me thinking about how any experiment can truly be replicated, or how people can use research as evidence for informing policy, which I had never really considered before. I’m hoping that I can find a similar study that focused on a population more similar to Redwood City’s, but, if not, I hope to convey both the information as well as any qualms I have about the study to the work group next month. I’m learning that one can use research to support just about any stance, so it’s important to think critically about any piece of research and the motivations behind it. 

On Thursday, Manuelito and I met with Jana over the phone to prepare for our meeting with the Shinnyo-en Foundation that would take place the next Tuesday. We prepared an agenda for the meeting and documented all the talking points that we wanted to highlight. Overall, a very efficient meeting! Additionally, at the staff meeting, we viewed “Uncommon American,” a movie about John Gardner’s life and influence. Before the video, I had no idea what a big deal he was, so I was incredibly pleased to learn about him, and proud to work at the institution that bears his name. 

The theme for this week was “The Importance of Young People,” mostly because of my work this week with the Ready Schools Initiative. The work that they do definitely highlights the importance of serving young people, as we want them to have the best outcomes as possible. Young people have this habit of eventually becoming adults (I’m still working on this myself), so I think it’s incredibly important that we give them everything that we can in order to help them succeed. I’m very happy that I have this opportunity, and hope to make the best of it.

Week 11 (9/23-9/27): Stepping Stones

Like weeks past, I spent this week preparing for future weeks. This week, though, I got to inch ever closer to making this link between data and action. I spent Monday putting the final edits on my work plan, using the goals set out in the original grant agreement from the Shinnyo-en Foundation as well as the action items that Jana and I had come up with at Redwood City 2020. With this work plan, we nailed down concrete goals and projects and timeframes within which to complete these goals and projects. These goals included heading up a project about preschools in the area, putting together a series of youth development resources, and, of course, keeping up with this blog. I'm sure new projects will continue to pop up, so this work plan is intentionally pretty flexible, but it's still nice to have a general guideline off of which to work. And I’m incredibly excited to have more on my plate. I’ve always felt that I perform better with more responsibilities, so I hope to be efficient and effective as my role continues to grow. 

Besides more meetings (YDA and staff meetings at the Gardner Center), I didn’t do much out of the ordinary this week. I started becoming familiar with Prezi, a more dynamic way of giving presentations, for my presentation at the Gardner Center on October 10. Thus far, I’m finding that you have to think very differently from planning out a presentation for PowerPoint. Things are zooming in and out, and there’s so much more possibility for artistic freedom, which I like a lot; I feel like a director making a movie about circles and arrows. Check out my practice Prezi here; it’s not about anything, I was just playing around with the frames and colors. But it was a lot of fun (Don’t click through too fast, you might get motion sick)!

“Stepping Stones” refers to these baby steps that I’m making toward translating this data I’ve been compiling into action. I started out doing lots of reading, and now I’m getting more and more opportunities to use what I’ve read to make a tangible difference. Please continue to follow me on this journey!