The Ideas Box in the Bronx A Pilot Program in a Poor Urban Neighborhood in New York City
Documentary film workshop at Hayden Lord Park, July 2015.
Stéphane Tonnelat, Juan David Hurtado, Madeline Ochi, Matthew Enders-Silberman A Report to Libraries Without Borders December 2015
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Executive summary
During the summer 2015, Libraries Without Borders (LWB) deployed the Ideas Box, a portable library and media center designed for refugee camps, in Morris Heights, a mostly Hispanic and African-American neighborhood in the South Bronx, New York. ✔ From providing basic cultural needs to addressing local cultural inequalities The goal of the Ideas Box was not to bring books and internet access to a population isolated from the rest of the world, but to extend the services of the local public library to the inhabitants of one of the richest cities in the world. Thus the Ideas Box mission evolved from providing basic cultural needs in refugee camps to bringing an added cultural value aimed at addressing local inequalities of access to education, information and culture. In order to find a new mission for the Ideas Box in this new context, LWB partnered with DreamYard, a Bronx-based non-profit organization aimed at improving the education of children through the arts, and with the New York Public Library (NYPL). Despite the efforts of public schools and libraries branches, children growing up in this area, among the poorest in the USA, have few opportunities for social mobility. LWB, the NYPL and DreamYard agreed that the Ideas Box could serve as an extension of the public library into the neighborhood. The goal was to keep children “mentally stimulated”, in order to reduce the summer learning gap that scholars have shown to affect children of poor neighborhood when schools are closed.
✔ A definite need for more local library-type spaces After two months, this pilot program produced mixed results. On the one hand, the residents, especially children and their parents, welcomed the program. Over the course of seven weeks, the Ideas Box received more than 900 visits. The children played many games and some became regulars. The reception of the Ideas Box in the neighborhood showed that there was a
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definite need for free educational activities both for children and adults in a safe and welcoming environment, which is indeed a need for extensions of the public library.
✔ But a lack of contact with the local community On the other hand, the volunteers at the Ideas Box did not have a clear idea of what their mission was or what the needs of the people were. They were not trained to use the Ideas Box resources to teach. They lacked direct contact with the community. The Ideas Box was a stranger in an unknown territory. The goals of extending library services and addressing the summer learning gap were fuzzy. Were they addressing the right children? Were they teaching them knowledge that would help them at school? As a result, it is difficult to know whether the Ideas Box fulfilled the mission it had chosen. However, towards the end of the program, the volunteers met local organizers, who showed an interest in bringing the Ideas Box to their community, such as a large social housing complex nearby, pointing to the precise locations and people that need library services the most.
✔ Towards a placed-based solution to tailor humanitarian goals to local needs The late encounters with community leaders led to the main finding regarding both the possible mission of the Ideas Box in poor urban neighborhoods and its evaluation. The main mission of the Ideas Box in poor neighborhoods could be to serve as the meeting place where global objectives, such as a free education for all, financed by governments and philanthropic organizations, are translated into practical action at the service of a community. The Ideas Box already offers the space to meet, learn and play, as well as volunteers. It now needs to work with local communities, in addition to local institutions, to tailor its programs to answer real needs.
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Humanitarian Goals
Local Needs
IDEAS BOX A place-based solution to tailor humanitarian goals to local needs If the Ideas Box can provide a space of collaboration between the global humanitarian world and local communities, it will have made a significant step toward overcoming the classic challenge of philanthropy, split between (western) universalism and particularism. The Ideas Box can offer a cultural space where communities can address their own issues and work on solutions together with LWB. Rather than a ready-made service, the strength of the Ideas Box is in providing a unique place-based solution to cultural humanitarian aid.
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Table of contents Executive summary ..................................................................................................................... 3 Part I: Report Summary ............................................................................................................... 9 1- Context: The South Bronx, a New Environment for the Ideas Box ....................................... 9 2- Overview: Defining Needs, Finding Locations, and Partners .............................................. 11 3- Summary of Key Findings .................................................................................................... 17 4- Challenges and Areas of Improvement: Partnerships, Training, Locations, and Design ..... 20 Example of a Qualitative Evaluation Chart Aimed at Preparing Future Deployments of the Ideas Box in Urban Areas. ........................................................................................................ 24 Part II: Extended Report ............................................................................................................ 25 1- Research Questions and Context........................................................................................... 25 3- The Ideas Box Team: volunteers and teaching artists........................................................... 30 4- Variations in Attendance and Locations ............................................................................... 31 5- Hayden Lord Park: addressing the summer learning gap with regulars ............................... 34 6- Galileo Park: Adapting the Ideas Box to the Urban Context ................................................ 54 7 - Creating a community space on the sidewalk: the Laundromat ......................................... 61 8- Street Fairs: A Participative Multimedia Box ....................................................................... 73 9- Working with the local branch of the New York Public Library.......................................... 76 10 - Conclusion: Adapting the Ideas Box to the Urban Context by Working with Local Communities ............................................................................................................................. 84 11 – References ......................................................................................................................... 87 12- Methodological Annex ........................................................................................................ 88
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Part I: Report Summary
This report is a description and an analysis of the Ideas Box pilot program in the Bronx during the summer of 2015. Did the Ideas Box, originally conceived for refugee camps, find a mission in this new context? How was it perceived and used by the community? What problems did it help address? What challenges did the team encounter and how can it be improved? These are some of the questions discussed in part I (short version) and part II (long version) of this report.
1- Context: The South Bronx, a New Environment for the Ideas Box During the summer of 2015, Libraries Without Borders (hereafter LWB) opened an Ideas Box in Morris Heights, a neighborhood in the South Bronx in New York City.
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The Ideas Box, a colorful portable multimedia center conceived by Philippe Starck, a famous designer, was originally developed by the French organization Bibliothèques Sans Frontières (BSF) to serve as a library in refugee camps in Central Africa and elsewhere. Four different colored cubic boxes contain books, e-readers and tablets, computers, video cameras, a TV and projector, games, and arts and craft supplies. The boxes open up into tables with drawers and benches. Two additional flat grey boxes open up into four long tables and contain about twenty X-stools. The first three Ideas Boxes were deployed in three different camps in Burundi in the fall of 2014. They quickly found a user base as the new local library (Decaillon, Le Bris, and Signorino 2014). Since then, more Ideas Boxes have been deployed around the world. This success led the directors of BSF to wonder if the Ideas Box would be helpful in other environments. They decided to test it in poor neighborhoods, first in Paris (spring and summer of 2015) and then in New York City. In New York, LWB, the USA branch of BSF, partnered with a Bronx educational organization called DreamYard, a non-profit run by two theater actors who believe that children in poor urban neighborhoods can get a better education with the help of the arts. They organize classes and workshops at schools, camps and at their arts center in the South Bronx, one of the poorest areas in New York City. Through a partnership with Bronx Pro, an affordable housing developer, DreamYard is the manager of a small private park located in Morris Heights, a mostly Dominican and African-American neighborhood in the South Bronx. The park is open only during the summer season, from May to September. During this period, school is out and many children in the area are not enrolled in camps or other educational programs. DreamYard wanted to use the Ideas Box to offer creative and educational activities in the park in order to give these children an occasion to “stimulate their intellect”, and thus possibly reduce the summer learning gap that often delays their school career. The leaders of LWB also wanted to test the potential of the Ideas Box as an extension of the public library system. Could it help the local branch reach more potential users? Could it help the New York Public library (NYPL) figure out new services for the community? The NYPL was interested and the local branch lent books to the Ideas Box and visited weekly.
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DreamYard hired four interns from the Bronx and LWB recruited four volunteer college students to help facilitate activities with the Ideas Box. Two professional teaching artists also worked with the Ideas Box for a total of four weeks. For almost eight weeks, from July 15 to September 5, the Ideas Box was open five afternoons per week, Tuesday through Saturday, from 1:30 pm to 5:30 pm in three different locations in the same neighborhood, two parks and a sidewalk, and for three days at street fairs in the Bronx. Stéphane Tonnelat, a researcher with the CNRS, joined the team to conduct this evaluation, with the help of three LWB volunteers, Juan-David Hurtado, Madeline Ochi, and Matthew Enders-Silberman.
2- Overview: Defining Needs, Finding Locations, and Partners A safe and accessible place for children and their guardians Angela1, an unemployed single mother with two children, discovered the Ideas Box three days before it closed for the summer. Her two kids had each written and illustrated a small book with Fran Benitez, the teaching artist working with the Box that week. The seven-year-old girl also participated in a large collective painting with the artist, while the boy, six years old, had started to learn chess. Stéphane showed him how to play the game using only the pawns on the board and was quite impressed at how fast the boy picked up the complex rules. When he told his mother that her son was good at chess, she radiated a wide smile. Her son had asked to come back to the Ideas Box after their first visit two days before and she was glad to do it. Sitting on a bench on Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard a few yards away from the laundromat in front of which the Ideas Box was set up, she enjoyed the shade and watched pedestrian traffic go by. “It allows me a bit of me-time.” She explained her family needs in very practical terms: "You see, kids are demanding. As siblings, they tend to be contentious, but they are very good with other people. Before, we were at the McDonald's play area and they argued the whole time. But they do really good here, cause they have things to pique their interest."
1
All the names of the participants were changed to protect their identity.
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This short quote illustrates a common need in this neighborhood that the Ideas Box helped address: free summer educational activities that children find interesting in a welcoming space for both the children and parents.
“Make your own book” workshop with teaching artist Fran Benitez by the laundromat, September 2015
The Summer Learning Gap and Adapting the Ideas Box to the City At the three locations combined, the Ideas Box received about 900 visits, including 700 by children. Important daily variations are explained in part II, by factors such as the local partnership and accessibility.
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End of the day at Hayden Lord Park, July 2015.
Hayden Lord Park, the location of the Ideas Box for the first month, provided a great place for educational and playful activities. Over the summer, children, mostly between six and ten years old, played many classic games including legos and chess, as well as games on tablets such as minecraft and codecombat. They wrote an “Ode to the Bronx” with teaching artist Kelsey Van Ert, worked on a documentary on the subject of bullying, dyed t-shirts and more. All of these activities kept them, especially the regulars, “mentally stimulated”, in the words of Tim Lord, the director of DreamYard. But the park was a little too much out of the way for the Ideas Box to attract new children not already at the park and engage adults. As the summer grew hotter, attendance declined for a number of reasons (explained in the long version of the report). The team wondered how to combine play with learning: how to attract children to challenging educational activities? To answer this question the Ideas Box team decided to explore two new locations with better accessibility: the nearby and busy public park and a busy sidewalk in front of a laundromat. As the boxes had to be taken out of storage and rolled to each location everyday, the team realized it was more than it could handle. The boxes were too heavy for daily
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transport and not easily opened and closed. The workers resorted to storing everything they needed in the orange box and switched to a set of lightweight cardboard furniture called Chairigami for additional tables and stools. Only the X stools, carried by hand, proved indispensable to creating a welcoming space. The workers soon realized that the teaching skills and ideas brought by the teaching artists were just as important as the content of the Ideas Box itself.
Identifying community problems and working with the public library As she talked more, Angela explained that she was a single mom and was not working at the moment. She used to work in food service and had a lot of experience in line kitchens. But her current job search was not very successful. She had given out the last copy of her resume some time ago and did not have anymore. At this point, the conversation revealed another common problem in the neighborhood, also expressed by many other adults who visited the Ideas Box. Many people are unemployed, or have low paying jobs with bad hours. The activities at the Ideas Box showed that some people would like to find a job, or get a better one, but are discouraged. They need not only practical help, but also confidence. An updated resume is a start, but they often don’t know how to do it. Not that they don’t have access to a computer or the Internet, but rather because they need help with presenting their experience in a professional way. They need help with figuring out the relevant information and using a word processor. The local branch of the NYPL offers free computer access, but it does not have enough staff to help people with resumes or other paperwork. In addition, many patrons are barred from using the computers there because of fines incurred for late books or DVDs. The library staff that visited the Ideas Box weekly helped them lower their fines so that they could regain access. Going out of their walls was an opportunity to win back some of these lost users and get new ones. It was also a way to change the image of the branch through games and craft activities for children. However, the librarians and Ideas Box workers were not able to lend books. As a result, only a few picture books out of the 250 books lent by the library were ever taken out of the bins.
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Paper plate animal craft organized by the local library at the Ideas Box in Galileo Park, August 2015. Source NYPL.
Meeting the Community and Gaining Trust Helping parents is another way of addressing the achievement gap. Studies show that in poor neighborhoods, it is the children of the poorest families who fall behind during the summer and do not do well at school (Alexander, Entwisle, and Olson 2007). Helping their guardians improve their economic situation may have a more lasting impact on their future than only working with the children. But that alone is not enough. When the local branch of the library offered a free resume writing workshop one Saturday, late in the summer, only two people
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attended. The librarians speculated that people were too ashamed to go to the library for help. This is why, during the last two weeks of the summer, the Ideas Box team decided to offer resume-writing workshops, which were met with approval by local inhabitants. Many people said they needed a new resume, but only a handful came back with the information needed to work with the Box workers on one of the laptops. The ones who did were happy and it seemed to have given them renewed energy to look for a job. Others however, like Angela, were discouraged or maybe they did not trust the staff with their private information. To gain people’s trust and help them, the Box would need to stay longer and engage in a relationship confirmed by concrete results spread via word of mouth. If her children had helped her discover the Box earlier, Angela may have taken the next step towards looking for a job. “So many organizations just come and go”, she said. It takes time to build trust, especially in poor neighborhoods, where many people feel that promises are often not kept.
Resume workshop on the sidewalk by the laundromat, September 2015.
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The example of Angela and her children, among other families, illustrates how the Ideas Box extended the reach of the NYPL and explored a few ways of helping inhabitants in the neighborhood. Families need more free and safe places where their kids can be motivated to learn, protected from the influence of their peers that can detract them from learning; and where parents, especially single mothers, can have a break and think about their situation. The “achievement gap” which affects children in poor and minority areas is not just caused by a lack of activities during the summer, but also by poverty. During the last week of the summer, the team was approached by grassroots organizations, including the tenants’ association of a large social housing complex and several churches, interested in working with the Ideas Box. These organizations saw, in the double mission of working with children and adults, an immediate benefit for their community. They were ready to host the Ideas Box and even staff it with volunteers. This evaluation report shows that partnerships with local grassroots organizations and the local library, supported by staff trained in education and social work could open the door to new missions for the Ideas Box in low-income urban neighborhoods.
3- Summary of Key Findings 1. The inhabitants of the neighborhood welcomed the Ideas Box. They did not feel patronized or see the origin of the Ideas Box in refugee camps as a problem. Oftentimes, humanitarian and social programs engender tense dynamics fraught with antagonistic emotions between workers and recipients. The workers can express contempt for the people they help, who in turn resent their benefactors (Fassin 2012). By associating with the New York Public Library and DreamYard, Libraries Without Borders introduced the Ideas Box as a service rather than as a charity, which helped avoid this vicious, antagonistic circle. This does not mean that some residents did not have doubts about the program, but nobody emitted criticism and the material was neither damaged nor stolen. 2. The New York Public Library also welcomed the Ideas Box and did not see it as a threatening competitor, but rather as an addition, completing their services to the community. The employees of the local branch visited the box weekly to register users. However, the close proximity of the Ideas Box to the branch (one to two blocks) drew children away from
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the library, which had the lowest attendance during the summer in several years. Despite this shortcoming, this experiment helped the librarians find new ways to regain patrons that had lost their library card because of late fines. This partnership is a testimony to the ambition of LWB to strengthen the ties between public services and civil society rather replacing underfunded public services, and thus, act as a band aid of a neoliberal development, a criticism often leveled at humanitarian organizations (Eliasoph 2011). This finding is tied to the previous one, because the idea of public service brings forth the notion of fulfilling rights rather than lessening the suffering of the underprivileged, which usually justifies the moral economy of humanitarian aid (Fassin 2012). 3. Over the course of the summer, the box welcomed more than 900 visits, an average of 24 visits per afternoon. 700 visits were by children between the ages of six and ten. They loved the Ideas Box and were eager to come back. Girls and boys participated equally and the team noticed an ethnic diversity of visitors comparable to the census data for the area. Towards the end, more adults participated as the Ideas Box welcomed a larger range of age groups. A small base of regular users built a sustained relationship with the Ideas Box workers. All participants enjoyed individual attention except during school visits. The activities may have helped the children at school after the summer break and thus reduced the summer learning gap. However, only a more systematic and longitudinal study would be able to measure the impact of the Ideas Box on school careers.
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Attendance varied greatly according to several factors detailed in the long version of the reports, such as location, weather, structure of the partnership and captive audiences. 4. The Ideas Box helped identify and address three needs specific to the neighborhood. 1 - A free and safe place to play and learn: parents with children under twelve, especially single mothers, were happy to have an opportunity for their kids to have fun while learning and for them to get a bit of free time. 2 - An informal place to discuss career issues: teenagers and adults of working age welcomed the possibility of crafting or updating their resume as a step towards improving their professional prospects. 3 - An open place of encounter and discussion: games such as chess, checkers, dominoes, connect four, play-doh and more were a good entry to discussion and created a social space of encounter across age, race and gender lines. The local library usually meets these three needs combined. This pilot experiment thus shows that there is a need for more library-type places in poor urban neighborhoods that a program like the Ideas Box can help fulfill.
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4- Challenges and Areas of Improvement: Partnerships, Training, Locations, and Design The main challenge faced by the Ideas Box workers was to figure out the goals of the activities they were offering to children. They knew they had to offer educational activities, but they did not know what they were supposed to teach the children. Both the aim of addressing the summer learning gap and extending the reach of the public library were unclear. Was it enough to keep the children “mentally stimulated,” as the director of DreamYard instructed at the opening of the summer, or should the workers have followed the school curriculum more closely? This problem raises the questions of setting clear goals with local and global partners. The interest of community organizations in the pilot program in the Bronx suggests that this could be done in partnership with local organizations and communities in order to best meet their needs, while still responding to the more general educational goals of funding organizations. Patrick Weil, the founder of Bibliothèques Sans Frontieres, explained, at the conference organized at the French Embassy for the closing of the pilot experiment in the Bronx, that one of the main motivations that drove him to get involved in cultural humanitarian aid was the realization that people in Africa needed to choose the books they wanted to read and not just receive the discarded collections of Europe. For humanitarian goals to meet local needs, a space of dialogue is thus necessary. The Ideas Box can be that space. As written in the executive report, rather than a ready-made service, the strength of the Ideas Box is in providing a unique place-based solution to cultural humanitarian aid. Partnerships and place-making thus constitute the main challenge for future programs.
Partnerships The Ideas Box aims to improve the literacy in the communities it visits. In order to evaluate the success of this goal, it needs feedback from these communities so that it can tailor the general objectives, financed by sponsor organizations, to local needs. In this aim, the team should work with local grassroots organization, especially if the Ideas Box does not stay for a long period of time. For this to happen, work needs to be done ahead of the deployment- meet partners at the community level, identify their needs, and enroll and train local workers or
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volunteers. This would help the Ideas Box to not only provide tools, but also a public space for communities who can in turn define their needs and how to address them. In addition to local communities, the Ideas Box needs to work tightly with the local public library to identify areas where the Ideas Box won’t be in competition with a branch, but rather conduct outreach for it. Professional librarians could use the Box as an annex, not only to register users, as they did this summer, but also to lend books and organize literacy activities tailored to the community. More importantly, once the Ideas Box is gone, the contacts established between the public library and the community could entice both parties to keep working together in innovative ways. This would extend the impact of the Ideas Box beyond its stay.
Staff Training The first challenge regarding community needs was complicated by the task of enticing the children to participate in demanding activities. The Ideas Box in urban neighborhoods is in competition with other places and activities and it needs to make learning attractive in order to retain users without sacrificing pedagogical goals. One DreamYard administrator suggested that the children should only be allowed to play on the computer tablets after they create something. This proposal however was not practical. More generally, this raises the question of designing ad-hoc educational strategies to lead children into challenging activities, which requires teaching skills. In the Bronx, the teaching artists hired by DreamYard and LWB brought professional skills that allowed them to draw children into writing, drawing and public reading. They were able to make these activities rewarding and demanding at the same time. Thus, to better answer needs, defined in partnership with a community, the staff needs to be trained to use the resources offered by the Ideas Box. Training is especially needed in the following areas: ●
Teaching skills: how to get children and teens interested in learning literacy (reading, writing, coding, counting, etc) and how to use the games, the books, the tablets and computers as educational tools.
● Social work skills: How to help the community with social issues. Practical skills include resume writing, job searching, letter writing, filling out housing applications, but also
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other skills such as listening skills, using games to socialize and working with people with physical and mental disabilities. The latter is a prevalent condition in the South Bronx and it is probably also common in other poor neighborhoods as well as in refugee camps. ● Evaluation skills: how to monitor the activities and provide feedback to LWB and the community. How to collect quantitative and qualitative day-to-day documentation in order to assess the impact of the program.
Urban Locations As the exploration of three different places in the same neighborhood shows, another strategy to attract people is to pay close attention to the location of the Ideas Box. The microgeography of the South Bronx is complex and attendance varied widely according to location, local amenities, partnership and the proximity of competing or complementary facilities (library, sports grounds, laundromat, sprinkler, shade...). Visitors came either because the place was very accessible and/or comfortable, near to a common destination, or because a partner organization brought captive audiences. Close attention must therefore be paid to the choice of the location, and must be done in partnership with the local community. More generally, the Ideas Box should be in an under-served area, near a busy pedestrian traffic area, near or on the path to public transportation, near a convenient storage area, comfortable enough (shade in the summer, heat in the winter, enough seating, a place with enough shade for the TV or projector screen…). It should also not be too close to the local library so as not to compete with it for patrons and reach a population more at risk of failing school than residents already visiting the local branch.
Ideas Box Design: plug-in rather than stand alone Finally, the last challenge consisted of retrofitting the Ideas Box to be both more mobile and versatile. If a location is not satisfying, it would be good to be able explore new places. This question however ties directly into the goals, skills and locations challenges discussed above. Bigger wheels would help roll the box on uneven sidewalks and climb up the eventual step or curb. In order to make it less heavy, the number of books and e-readers can be downsized, as the
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Ideas Box is not a place to read long texts, unless patrons can borrow them (something to arrange with the local library). Also, in the city, electricity can generally be obtained from a nearby store (making a generator redundant) pointing to the fact that the Ideas Box could be conceived of more as a plug-in rather than as a stand-alone system. This is a major difference between cities and refugee camps. The Ideas Box in the city should be able to tap into the resources of the neighborhood and thus find a place in the network of local actors. In conclusion, the lessons from the pilot experiment in the Bronx suggest four avenues for future deployments of the Ideas Box in poor urban neighborhoods of developed countries: a combination of community and institutional partnerships to refine needs and goals, training of the staff in education and social work, attention to micro-geography, and an Ideas Box design for the urban world. Some of these, such as partnerships with educational institutions, are specific to cities or regions equipped with such facilities. Similarly, design recommendations are tied to the urban environments. Others regarding community partnership, pedagogical training or choice of locations, probably have relevance beyond poor urban neighborhoods of developed world cities. The evaluation sheet on the next page aims at helping prepare the Ideas Box for future deployments. Part II of this report details the findings and challenges as they emerged at each separate location in the South Bronx during the summer of 2015.
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Example of a Qualitative Evaluation Chart Aimed at Preparing Future Deployments of the Ideas Box in Urban Areas. Evaluation criterion for urban settings Local Grassroots Organization partnerships Local Public Library or other institutional partnerships Training
Location
Contents
Design
0
1
2
There is no local grassroots organization involved.
Grassroots organizations are invited to use the Box but are not involved in its functioning. The local library lends books.
A local grassroots works with the LWB staff at the Box.
3
A local grassroots defines the needs and goals with LWB and co-‐ manages the Ideas Box. The local library is The local public The local library not involved. library lends lends books and books and other resources occasionally and sends staff sends staff. everyday. The staff is not The staff is The staff is The staff is trained to use the trained to use the trained in trained to use the materials in the Box. materials but not teaching and/or materials in the trained in social work. Box both for teaching or social pedagogical and work. social work and for evaluation purposes. The location varies The location is The location is The location is and is not specifically not very accessible and accessible, chosen. accessible but it remains the same comfortable and The Box has to be remains the same long enough for remains the transported for at least some the community to same. everyday. time (a couple discover it. It is located in an The Ideas Box is too weeks). area poorly close to the local served in cultural library. services. The content of the The content of The content of The content is Ideas Box is standard the box is the Box is adapted by LWB, adapted by LWB adapted by LWB the local library for the site. and the local and the library grassroots organization. The Ideas Box is The Ideas Box is The ideas Box is The Ideas Box is heavy and not easily easily opened and light and easily light, easily open and closed for closed. opened and opened and the day. closed. closed, and easily transportable.
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Part II: Extended Report Part II of the report gives a detailed evaluation of the Ideas Box pilot program in Morris Heights, the Bronx, New York. This report first explains the research questions and methods used, and then goes on to the main findings from each of the three locations where the Ideas Box was deployed.
1- Research Questions and Context Research Questions: Extending the Reach of the Public Library The Ideas Box was originally developed to serve as a portable library in refugee camps in regions affected by conflicts. It was first deployed in Burundi in camps welcoming Congolese refugees. Camps generally have schools, but not libraries. The Ideas Box strives to fill this void and, according to the first evaluation report (Decaillon, Le Bris, and Signorino 2014) fulfills three important missions typical of a public library: child protection, supporting education and strengthening community ties. Did the Ideas Box find similar missions in New York City? The context of Morris Heights in the South Bronx is quite different from a refugee camp. Besides the obvious fact that residents are not refugees, the neighborhood already has wellequipped schools and public libraries. Therefore, the Ideas Box’s mission in this new environment must be redefined. The main question for the research team was thus to determine possible missions that the Ideas Box could aim to fulfill in the Bronx. LWB and DreamYard defined two compatible goals. First, the Ideas Box could serve as an extension of the public library by reaching out to people who do not use the local branch. Second, as an extension of both the school and the library, the Ideas Box could compensate for the lack of free educational activities for children during the summer vacation and fill the learning gap prevalent in poor neighborhoods. In New York City, this period lasts just over two months, from the end of June to early September (right after Labor Day). Extending the reach of the library is a rather vague goal. In fact, public libraries in New York City fulfill many different missions besides lending books, music or videos. A recent report by the Center for an Urban Future lists some of the impressive achievements of the NYPL
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branches (Giles 2013). Mainly, they are conceived as community places where the staff organizes many different activities aimed at helping the residents. They are a place for children and for the elderly to socialize, a learning center for immigrants or second-generation NewYorkers, a place for homeless, for people seeking warmth in the winter and a refuge from summer heat. For a number of years, libraries have also offered access to the digital world. This includes digitized books but goes far beyond it. Computers are often used to pay bills online, to fill out various applications (housing, welfare, etc), type a letter or a resume, as well as play games. In immigrant neighborhoods, the library often offers English classes and serves as an official place to take language proficiency exams. Local branches also act as incubator for new businesses. Thus the mission of the public library is rather wide. And all of these activities are gathered under the same roof, making the library a lively community place for socializing as much as for learning and entertainment. Despite a common opinion that libraries may be outdated in today’s digital world (Weinberger 2012), attendance and circulation at local branches has gone up in the last decade. But, since 2008, cutbacks on funding have put a strain on the institution: staff has been reduced, hours have been cut, maintenance has been deferred and collections have been stagnating. The Center for Urban Future recommended that funding be reinstated, which the city council has began to do since 2015, but also that new partnerships be established in order to extend the benefits of the library to all New Yorkers. In fact, there have been many attempts to bring libraries closer to the people. Pop up libraries, for example already have a short history, besides the traditional library bus (Davis et al. 2015). Shannon Mattern (2012), a scholar of libraries, established a typology of these new initiatives. Some have political goals, some are nostalgic of a lost community, and others aim at beautifying public space. She observes that small ephemeral or out of the box libraries will never be as complete as the fully stacked and staffed branches and concludes that “perhaps the challenge now is to determine how these ever more prevalent provisional, opportunistic and guerilla projects can complement and strengthen our more traditional institutions and the cities they serve.” For the Ideas Box to serve as an extension of the library therefore means more than bringing books and culture to the inhabitants who do not visit the public library. It also entails offering a community space, where visitors can meet, talk, learn, help each other and play. This observation gives renewed pertinence to the findings in the recent report from the Ideas Box in the refugee camps in Burundi. Serving as a safe place to gather, to support learning, and to help the community could also be the goals used to evaluate the Ideas Box activities in the South
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Bronx. This is why the evaluation team aimed at documenting the life of the Ideas Box and not simply observing pedagogical activities.
The context: Morris Heights, South Bronx and the Summer Learning Gap
Figure 1: Morris Heights is a neighborhood located on the Westside of the South Bronx. The dots indicate the three locations where the Ideas Box was deployed. Map built with the online program socialexplorer.com
To understand the second goal of the pilot project in the Bronx, addressing the summer learning gap, a little more information is needed about the context. Morris Heights, part of Bronx Community Board 5, is a neighborhood in the western part of the Bronx, just north of the Cross Bronx Expressway. Together with University Heights, immediately to the north, this area is usually associated with the much larger South Bronx, south of the Expressway. The majority of Morris Heights’ residents are Hispanic, with origins in the Dominican Republic (“DR” in the neighborhood). About a third of the population is African-American and there is a smaller minority from the Caribbean and Western Africa (Ghana, Nigeria and more recently from some French speaking countries such as Guinea). Morris Heights is a poor neighborhood by national and city standards. The American Community Survey compiled for the years 2008-2013 reveals that 40.5 % of the population lives with an income that puts them below the poverty line, as opposed to 29.8% for the Bronx and 20% for New York City. Another 27.3% of the population is qualified as “struggling”, with income between one to two times the poverty level. The median income, $25,000 in 2013, is less
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than half the median income for the whole city. Not surprisingly, unemployment is extremely high at 25.4% in a city where the average is already high at 14.7%. In 2010, the neighborhood was part of the congressional district declared to be the poorest in the USA. This sad record only confirmed the reputation of the South Bronx as a poor ghetto, an image that DreamYard intends to uplift. Consequences of poverty include an elevated high-school drop out rate (8.1% in Morris Heights), a very high proportion of single mother headed households (36.3%), and only a third of the adult population with some college education or more. Recent studies (Sampson 2012; Sharkey and Elwert 2011; Sharkey 2013) have shown that social mobility in this type of poor minority urban neighborhoods is very low, if not negative. Since the 1980’s the children who have grown up in such areas have a higher chance than elsewhere to be economically worse off than their already struggling parents. According to other studies, one of the reasons for this vicious cycle of poverty can be attributed to the poor achievement of children at school, starting at the elementary level. Other important reasons are the stagnation of wages and mounting economic and social inequalities (Piketty 2014). A landmark study on the achievement gap in poor urban districts of Baltimore showed that, in a given neighborhood, the children from the poorest families are the most at risk of failing before they reach 9th grade (Alexander, Entwisle, and Olson 2007). According to the authors, the main handicap faced by these children is a lack of educational opportunities during the long summer break. Whereas the children raised in families that value education (usually because they completed at least some college) have a small chance of moving up the social ladder, children of poorer social-economic and educational status living in the same neighborhood suffer from a learning achievement gap accumulated summer after summer. This observation combined with economic data from the neighborhood means that a large proportion of the children growing up in Morris Heights have little chance at economic and professional mobility in life, in part because they do not benefit from creative and educational activities over the summer. An additional handicap is the high level of violence, domestic or on the street. Fear pushes many parents to keep their children indoors (Katz 2004). Conversely, if they let them out, it puts them at risk of getting involved in street culture inimical to academic pursuits (Contreras 2012). The local branches of the public library do offer a safe space and free activities for children and teenagers. However, they suffer from two handicaps. First, they are often far away
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and some parents are reluctant to let their children walk the streets alone especially when they are still in elementary school (11 year old and under). Second, teenagers do not value the library as a cool place to be. By the time the children are of age to walk by themselves to the library, most of them have lost the desire to do so. These characteristics of the neighborhood made it a good candidate for the dual missions of the Ideas Box announced by LWB and DreamYard: extending the reach of the public library and addressing the summer learning gap. In addition to these goals, the research team also wondered about a larger dilemma often faced by people studying humanitarian aid and governance. How to be supportive and critical at the same time? We found the mission of the Ideas Box noble, but we wanted to be alert to possible problems and shortcomings. The solution we adopted was to hold judgment and rely as much as possible on field data. For example, would the inhabitants of Morris Heights in the Bronx welcome the Ideas Box or, to the contrary, would they frown upon the possible comparison of their neighborhood to a refugee camp? This question illustrates the antagonistic relation often observed between humanitarian workers and recipients (Fassin 2012). Would the inhabitants adopt the Ideas Box as a new community place or would they use it as customers? In other words, would the Ideas Box bring information and culture to under-served and vulnerable communities independently of their own will, or would it become a place where needs can be defined together with the target population? (Barnett 2013) These questions raise the problems of the criterion used to evaluate humanitarian action. The organization and its donors should not be the only ones to define goals. The pilot project in the Bronx was an occasion to see if goals could be elaborated together with a local community. We observed the interplay between these two poles as participant observers as close to the action as can be.
Research Team and Methods To evaluate this experiment in the Bronx, LWB partnered with Stéphane Tonnelat, a CNRS researcher at the CIRHUS Center at New York University. Stéphane worked with Madeline Ochi, Matthew Enders-Silberman and Juan David Hurtado, all undergraduate students going into their senior year at Tufts University. They were enrolled as volunteers by LWB to keep a record of the activities while they were working with the Ideas Box. The research was
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approved by the Institutional Review Boards at NYU and at Tufts University. To protect the identity of people encountered during the research, all the names of the participants have been changed. Only the names of heads of organization and workers who have agreed and of elected officials are unchanged. Two volunteers, Madeline and Matthew, worked at the Ideas Box during the whole summer. Juan David joined them on August 4 until September 5. Stéphane was present on the site before the arrival of the Box and during the first week of operation. He returned to the Ideas Box on August 20 until September 5. Since not all of the research team was present at all times, we tried to keep a record of attendance and activities with standard forms that the workers had to fill in on the go. We used log sheets for total attendance, sign in sheets for different activities, and activity sheets aimed at describing specific activities and recording the impressions of both facilitator and participants (see documents and reflections on method in annex). In addition to these forms, the team also conducted interviews with staff and participants using a questionnaire as guideline. The questionnaire evolved along the summer as new locations were explored. Finally, the volunteers and the researcher conducted participant observation and wrote field notes. Unfortunately, the task of collecting data often proved too demanding for the volunteers. They were often overwhelmed by the activities and did not have the time to keep records. As a result, the data is not complete. Pictures helped make up for some of the gaps, but there are still a few days for which information is missing or incomplete. This limitation points at the challenge of combining day-to-day evaluation with work. However, the method elaborated this summer could now be used more efficiently for subsequent deployments of the Ideas Box. See the annex for more on method.
3- The Ideas Box Team: volunteers and teaching artists Four LWB volunteer interns, undergraduate students at Tufts University and Duke University, operated the Ideas Box. Four DreamYard paid interns sporadically helped them, when their other duties at the park allowed. For the first three days, a French volunteer, Pauline, who had already worked with the Box in Paris acted as “chargé de box” (head of the box) and showed the LWB interns the ropes. She notably taught them that taking all four boxes out was
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too much to handle for a team of four workers. As a result, for most of the summer, the team only took out two boxes at a time. By the end of the summer, the workers packed all the necessary materials in the orange box in order to be more mobile. In August, one LWB intern left and was replaced by another. Two librarians from the nearby branch came one afternoon per week to do outreach for the library and organize some activities using contents from the orange box or brought their own materials. For three weeks in August, DreamYard hired a teaching artist to work specifically with the Ideas Box. Another teaching artist was hired by LWB for the last week, until September 5. Finally, Allister Chang, director of LWB came to help at several occasions during the summer, notably at the fairs where the box had been invited. Stéphane Tonnelat, also volunteered at the Ideas Box the first week of September to replace a volunteer who had to go back to college. For most of the time period, the team was therefore constituted of three LWB volunteers, helped by a teaching artist for about half of the time and supplemented by the DreamYard interns. The turn over in staff as well as the unclear work responsibilities of the DreamYard interns was somewhat problematic. The volunteer who had assumed a leadership position at the beginning, left after a week. The teaching artist who arrived in August was asked to take a leadership role but felt uncomfortable with this mission as she joined a team who knew both the context and the material better than her. As a result, the Ideas Box workers at times felt they lacked directions.
4- Variations in Attendance and Locations Over the summer, the Ideas Box mostly attracted children between the ages of six and twelve. Teenagers were conspicuously missing as well as adults, even though more of them got involved towards the end of the summer. The main activities were games ranging from play-doh to lego, to chess to educational video games on tablets and computers. Minecraft and Code combat, an online game aimed at teaching players how to code computer language were pretty popular. Arts and crafts activities like tie-dye, make your own book, painting and more were also popular. Book reading by authors or by the staff encountered little success as the children’s attention quickly wore off. Finally, towards the end of the summer, resume building became an
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important activity for adults. The diagram below shows the daily attendance at the Ideas Box. Overall, the workers at the box welcomed about 900 visits in 38 afternoons. 700 were by children and 200 by adults. About a dozen children became regulars accounting for many recurring visits.
Figure 1: Daily attendance at the Ideas Box. The Bronx, summer 2015.
The daily attendance graph above shows important variations that deserve an explanation. The first variable is whether the Ideas Box welcomed a summer camp or not. Most of the peaks in attendance are due to a captive audience brought to Hayden Lord Park by an institution. Three separate camps visited the box. They were invited by the DreamYard organization, who wanted to expose more children to the Box following a drop in attendance at the park at the end of July. Another peak is visible at the opening ceremony and a few days immediately following. The ceremony brought a lot of unusual people to the park and drew the attention of local residents. Press coverage of the opening by local television and newspapers also brought new
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visitors2. However, this novelty effect wore off gradually after a week. By August 1st, the attendance at the Ideas Box in Hayden Lord Park had dwindled to a few regular children (more on this below – see section on Hayden Lord Park). At least two factors explain this trend. First press coverage, initially abundant, was not sustained. Second, the park, without much shade or a sprinkler, did not offer much respite from the sun and high temperatures. In addition, it was located on a low traffic street off the main neighborhood boulevard and only had short opening hours (1pm to 6 pm Tuesday to Saturday). To summarize, low press coverage and low accessibility conspired to keep the number of visitors low. This lack of visitors pushed the volunteers to seek new locations. Beginning in August, they decided to go to the local public park taking two boxes, and then only one box (and sometimes none). Galileo Park is located near the main thoroughfare, next to the local elementary and middle schools and on the way to the nearest subway station (#4 train). It offers abundant shade and sprinklers. Finally, it is open 24 hours a day, making it the most accessible green space in the area. Except for school visits, which still took place at Hayden Lord Park, the graph shows an average of 15 children and a few adults per daily two hours session at Galileo Park between August 1 and August 22. These children were in general less supervised by adults than at Hayden Lord Park. By mid-August, the volunteers at the Ideas Box also decided to experiment with a third location, the sidewalk in front of a large laundromat on the main neighborhood boulevard. This new location brought an additional public to the Box. Adults, who had so far only been remotely involved through their children or their students, started participating in games and resume building workshops. This trend can be seen in the red curve of adult attendance. This is also due to accessibility. On the sidewalk, the volunteers were able to pique the interest of adults and children waiting for their laundry or simply passing by. These people would have not discovered the Box if it had remained inside the parks. To summarize, attendance at the Ideas Box during the summer was influenced by at least three variables: media coverage, accessibility of the location (location, opening hours, amenities), and visits by captive public audiences. Other factors probably had an impact on the attendance but they were not tested. For example, the Ideas Box was only open from 1:30 pm to about 5:30 pm. This four-hour segment 2
The following news channels and newspapers published or aired short reports: NY1, DNAinfo, Bronx Times, BronxNet Television, News12 and the Wall Street Journal.
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was convenient for non-working parents, but was probably not as suitable for working parents whose children stay at home during the day or are left unsupervised. In fact, the staff often had the impression that more people were coming out to the park or to the sidewalk when it was time to close. Unfortunately, the team was unable to try a later schedule because the storage area for the box was located in Hayden Lord Park, which closed everyday at 6 pm, and once a week at 7 pm. This underlines the need for a storage place directly accessible by the workers independently of the opening hours of another place. Another factor was the lack of planning and published location schedule starting in August. Parents would regularly ask where we would be and when they could come back but the team was often unable to give a precise answer. The families in the Bronx have complex schedules typical of the urban world and they need to be able to count on a stable schedule in order to return to the Ideas Box. Finally, the Ideas Box may not have stayed long enough in the neighborhood for the residents to trust the organization and the volunteers and for the community to adopt the Ideas Box.
5- Hayden Lord Park: addressing the summer learning gap with regulars Hayden Lord Park, a small private park in the Morris Heights neighborhood is the first location where the Ideas Box was deployed. It was also the storage place for the box every night, in a ground floor room adjacent to the park. The activities at this first location captivated the attention of local children living in the immediate vicinity and made them into regulars who greatly benefited from the Ideas Box. However, attendance at Hayden Lord Park did not pick up and even dwindled to a trickle. This chapter explores the benefits brought to these children and the reasons behind this disaffection before drawing conclusions for future deployments of the box in a similar context.
A Quiet Haven in the Neighborhood Hayden Lord Park sits on Andrews Avenue South, a little trafficked street one block behind the busier Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, the artery of the neighborhood (also named University Avenue). Nested between two six-floor residential buildings owned and managed by
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Bronx Pro, it opens onto the street through a unique gate over which many videos cameras stand guard. This security apparatus is a testimony to the troubled past of the area. Before 2010, the two buildings and the park were the property of NYCHA, the city’s social housing authority. They were in poor condition and only half of the apartments were inhabited. During the summer, several old timers recalled that the ground floors used to be drug dens. In the park, a basketball court attracted noisy young men. With subsidies from the Housing Department, Bronx Pro, a for-profit developer bought and renovated the properties. By contract they had to reserve a proportion of the apartments to section 8 tenants and demand affordable rents for the rest. At first, Bronx Pro wanted to build over the park, but the city code did not allow this. Part of the same lot as the building, the park made up for the high density of the complex by keeping the Floor Area Ratio (FAR) below the allowed maximum. The land had to remain empty. Bronx Pro decided to renovate the park with the help of DreamYard. They offered to fund the renovation and name the park after the son of Tim Lord, DreamYard’s co-director, who died at a young age of Tay-Sachs disease, a rare genetic disorder. Touched by this offer, Tim Lord agreed to work on the new park with interns funded by Bronx Pro over several summers. Inspired by the design of Antoni Gaudi, the famous Catalan architect and landscape designer, the team renovated the park using a lot of mosaics on the walls and benches. They replaced the basketball court with flowers and a vegetable garden and set up a playground wood castle structure for children ten and under. The first summer, in 2013, the park became a backyard to the buildings on either side, open to Bronx-Pro residents only. But nearby residents complained and the next summer, the park was for the first time accessible to the public. For legal reasons however, the lawyer at Bronx Pro designed a waiver of liability that all the new parents coming to the park had to sign for their children. Beyond questions of safety and responsibility, both Bronx Pro and DreamYard were worried that the previous park occupants would return. They designed the park for young children and their parents and made sure that it was managed and watched by a manager at all times or closed and under video surveillance. This history explains why many residents of the area did not know about the park or thought that it was closed or not open to them. Today, Hayden Lord Park looks like a haven of calm and beauty in an otherwise very drab area.
The Ideas Box in the Bronx
Figure 2: Hayden Lord Park in June 2015, before the arrival of the Ideas Box.
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Inauguration Day: Overview of the Partnership July 15, 2015 was the Ideas Box inauguration day at Hayden Lord Park. For this occasion, the main partners had been invited to present the reasons why they had decided to support the initiative and what they expected to happen over the course of the summer. One set of unopened boxes was set at the entrance to the park and another opened under a white tent in a corner. A small kiosk against the back wall displayed the orange box with books aligned in neat shelves. Next to it, the invited speakers took turns at the microphone in front of an audience made up of the staff, local librarians, journalists and a class of 25 children and their teachers from a local middle school camp. A few visitors from the neighborhood were unsure if they were invited or not. The day was hot and muggy and a thunderstorm menaced. A stylish African-American man distributed welcome ice pops out of a small cart. He had been invited to the park for the day, leaving his usual spot by the High Line in Manhattan, to visit an area not often in the spotlight. Jesica Blandon, a young woman intern at DreamYard and slam poet, opened the ceremony. She expressed her enthusiasm at working with the Ideas Box to bring together artistic creativity and literacy by reciting a poem she had composed for the occasion.
When I tell my mom that I’m bringing my brother to the park so He can think inside the box Her face is sour patched lemon twisted with confusion
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She, like so many, have been fooled into believing that the box isn't her friend That the park isn't a place to learn She doesn't know that this box is a wonderland That inside are the tools to change the future That it’s a classroom Where the urgency of reading is encouraged But ten year old Mathew [from 1665 Andrews] is convinced that This box is a transformer who came to share a story with us This box can turn this park into a movie theater Comes with 5 cameras so that we could get our Spike Lee on Can invite Toni and Gwendolyn to kick rhymes while the kids play in the grass It's education reformed and neatly packed into a box Fantastical but don't bet caught up in its novelty This is a dream waiting to be planted in our children Where Langston himself could teach about ones that are differed The opportunity for them to be raised in the sun Taught that learning is always fun But most importantly Necessary (Slam poet Jesica Blandon, DreamYard intern for the summer) Tim Lord, one of the two executive directors of DreamYard, moderated the ceremony. He started by thanking all the partners present that day. The list of organizations involved is complex and denotes the web of ties between the non-profit, for profit and public sector, and the encounter between local and global scales of operations. Tim Lord notably thanked the director of Bronx Pro, the owner of the park standing in the audience. He also briefly mentioned Sustainable South Bronx (SSB), the non-profit in charge of its management. Finally, he evoked the summer learning gap and mentioned that the box should help with this issue. The next speaker, the city’s public attorney, Leticia James, the first woman of color to hold a city wide elected position in NYC’s history, praised the role of libraries in lifting the prospect of poor children of color. She also declared her hopes that the Ideas Box would help reduce the learning gap in the South Bronx. The public advocate had recently defended and helped pass a bill in the
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City Council that for the first time in decades raised the operating budget of the New York Public Library (NYPL). The next speaker, Anthony (Tony) Marx, president of the NYPL, praised that raise and described the Ideas Box as an initiative to extend the reach of the library outside of its walls. Finally, Alex Soros, director of the Soros Foundation, and Patrick Weil, director of Bibliothèque sans Frontières, explained how the Ideas Box was a success in refugee camps around the world and that they were happy to see that it could also have a mission in urban neighborhoods. Patrick Weil announced that a fundraising campaign had been launched by Libraries without Borders to “keep the Box in the Bronx”, which drew a round of applause.3 Finally, the ceremony was closed by Karen Delacruz, a summer intern at DreamYard, a university student, and long time resident of the neighborhood. Karen voiced the expectations of the interns who were impatient to see what the box could do for local children, giving them a chance to receive an education that they did not have when she was growing up.
Figure 3: Public advocate Letitia James (left) and NYPL director Tony Marx shaking hand with Alex Soros (right).
Overall, the opening ceremony informs two aspects of the Ideas Box summer experiment. First it shows the partnership in which the Box fits and second, it gives information about the ambitions of each partner. The diagram below shows the partnerships. It highlights the web of relations built around Hayden Lord Park in which the Ideas Box took place. Gaining access to the park was for LWB 3
The campaign was launched on the website IndyGogo on that day. The pledges at the end of the summer amounted to $561 out of the $30,000 necessary for the purchase of the Box.
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not only an opportunity to reach out to children and families in the neighborhood, but also settling in a location charged with history and submitted to a number of rules and constraints of which the workers were initially unaware, but which proved to have a significant influence on the activities of the Ideas Box and the attendance.
Figure 4: Chart of the institutional partnerships organized around the Ideas Box at Hayden Lord Park.
Working with regulars: an extension of home for the family During the opening ceremony for the Ideas Box in Hayden Lord Park, residents from the surrounding buildings came to see the Box and hear from the presenters about the activities that
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were coming to the park. In her opening speech, Letitia James expressed her vision of the Ideas Box as a dynamic interactive learning center, saying, “libraries are the great equalizer: I want interactive libraries - no more shushing!” LWB founder, Patrick Weil, reinforced Letitia James’ message, saying, “the content of the box will be changed by the creativity of the kids.” That day, the volunteers met several of the children who they would soon become well acquainted with as regulars at the park and the Ideas Box. At the arts and crafts table, children and adults were writing their goals and hopes for the summer. A nine-year-old girl named Briana, who came to the park by herself, dreamt of “helping kids learn reading.” She was extremely outgoing, and the news stations took advantage of her enthusiasm to interview her about the park and the Ideas Box. She was eager to speak about school, the summer, and some of her favorite books, including Junie B. Jones. The Ideas Box as an Extension of Home: a New Mentoring Environment Out of the many children who attended the opening, Briana was one of the most devoted attendees. She showed up by herself faithfully almost every day, and despite occasional complaints about the activity of the day, she would always participate. Her mother worked during the day until late and she was staying with her nanny and her one-year-old sister at home. Through an informal agreement with the park manager, the nanny let Briana go to the park by herself. It helped that her apartment, right across the street, had a window on the park where from she could be called. She was involved in one of the most successful workshops from the point of view of the LWB volunteers, an introduction to documentary film led by three professional filmmakers, who were working on a documentary about the Ideas Box and Libraries Without Borders. They ran a 3-day film workshop, starting on July 28, when attendance had dwindled. The first day, they showed examples of documentaries and led a brainstorming session with the kids to find a topic for a participatory documentary.
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Figure 5: Documentary film workshop at the Ideas Box in Hayden Lord Park.
During brainstorming for the group’s collaborative documentary, the topic turned to bullying: the five participating kids felt strongly about this subject. Briana shared with Madeline a brief anecdote about a girl who was bullied at school because of her weight. It struck her because despite her loud and confident personality, Briana at times complained of being left out of the group of girls who occasionally came to the park. Also, when discussing her school experience, she would tell inconsistent stories that led the team to believe she had some trouble with teachers or academic learning. She would also tell stories that were difficult to believe: like her mother working in a famous doll store in Manhattan or her recent trip to France with her aunt. Briana struggled with some insecurities and her loud personality and bending of the truth seemed to boost her esteem. Hopefully, the Ideas Box addressed some of these insecurities by engaging her in activities with books, filmmaking, and other educational activities where she was not judged and did not need to pretend. The team formed a group that she could always be a part
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of, a different element to the previous atmosphere at the park where she faced rejection from other kids. She often asked for a Libraries Without Borders shirt, so she could be an official member of the team. She also would beg the staff to take her along whenever the Ideas Box moved to different locations outside the park, but her nanny did not allow it. Throughout the summer Briana was involved in many activities. She compared this “fun” summer with the “boring” previous ones at the park and was quite disappointed when the Ideas Box moved. For her, and another handful of children with windows on the park, the Ideas Box was an unexpected bounty. It offered interesting activities while at the same time satisfying the constraints set on her movements by her family. This example shows the difficulty for some children to take advantage of summer programs, when they are not immediately accessible. In this case, the Ideas Box became an extension of her home. Improving Family Dynamics: Helping the Older Sibling One of the children who participated in the film session was Frank, a 13-year-old boy who was a regular at the park, with his two younger brothers and older sister. They lived in one of the adjacent buildings and only had to come down the stairs. As one of the oldest at the park, he had a lot of influence over the younger kids. During the brainstorming session, he played an important role by contributing to the discussion in a thoughtful manner that the other younger children emulated. When the group chose bullying as the topic for the documentary, he suggested interviewing adults “because bullying was more serious then.” He also asked, “are we talking about cyber-bullying?” which raised more interesting points related to how bullying differs in different generations. When one boy asked “how can we stop bullying?” Frank explored the question further, asking, “when you are bullied do you engage or do you ignore it?” His thoughtful questions and active participation in the group allowed the younger participants to seriously discuss an issue they all found important. Even if they themselves affirmed they had not been bullied, many of them shared stories of other children at school or siblings being bullied. Viewing the film, when many children wanted to talk or comment, Frank remained quiet and focused. His attitude led many of the kids to concentrate more on the film and save their comments until the end. The fairly consistent attendance of Frank and his siblings allowed us to gain more insight into the influence of the Ideas Box on family dynamics and how their thoughts on the box evolved over the two-month period.
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The older sister (about 17 years old) who had been a little critical at the outset, asking if “these activities are paid by the outrageous rent we pay here”, realized that she could trust her brother to take care of his younger siblings as he showed responsibility and leadership. Frank cited the film workshop as one of his favorite activities of the summer, with the Black Lives Matter workshop, the Family Fun Day, and the music video activity. The film workshop gave him and his brothers experience in asking questions about relevant issues in their life and taught them to switch to the role of interviewee to respond thoughtfully to these questions. It also gave them practical experience using video cameras and speaking in front of a camera. Like the games and activities with the microphone and audio-video equipment, the video cameras were a way to give children the chance to envision future careers that involve public speaking. Frank told us that the Ideas Box activities improved his confidence speaking in groups. As he was usually the oldest kid at the park and therefore had some authority or influence over the other kids, this response was surprising. But, on the last day, he explained how speaking during the activities, pitching ideas or participating in brainstorming, boosted his confidence to speak in class for the upcoming school year. “[The Ideas Box] will affect how I do in school. Well, in school I don’t really raise my hand...I’m kind of shy. But at the Ideas Box you get experience talking sharing your ideas. So now in school I might be more comfortable talking.” In addition to Briana and Frank, a handful of other kids regularly came to the park. Most of them were under ten and lived in the surrounding Bronx Pro-owned buildings.
One
interesting result of having such a young population at the park was that these children often came with older siblings. This was a unique result, and gave us a little more insight into the structure of families in the area. One fifteen-year-old teenage girl, Kendra, who took care of her younger brother and sister, came to the park regularly. She was an extremely responsible caregiver, and kept a close eye on her brother, who suffered from developmental disabilities. Kendra’s family is originally from Nigeria, but she was born in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx. Many of her relatives from Nigeria now live in parts of NY as well, including her grandmother who lived with the family before the apartment became too crowded. Her mother works at a big hotel in Manhattan and her father works the night shift at a computer company in New Jersey. Her parents also recently had another son, so they are both extremely busy. Kendra, therefore, has a lot of responsibility taking care of the other younger siblings, and has not had
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much free time to ever participate in an after-school program. During the summer in particular, Kendra is the primary caretaker during the day. Until the Ideas Box came to the park, she would mostly stay at home because watching her brother is a demanding task. However, the activities offered at the Ideas Box, combined with the safety of the park, made her decide to visit more often. She brought her siblings down and supervised them as they partook in the activities. This position quickly transformed her into a volunteer helping the Ideas Box volunteers. This experience transformed the summer experience for Kendra and her family. The previous year, Kendra stayed at home with her siblings. She used to be frustrated by their demands. They would scream and disturb the quiet that her father needed to sleep during the day. This summer however, the Ideas Box brought Kendra and her siblings down to the park, which gave her parents more quiet time at home and comforted them that their children were busy. It also helped Kendra reflect on her care-taking skills. As she observed that some children were attracted to reading while other preferred games, it made her realize that all the children are different. Notably, she realized that her sister did not have the same interests as her, which made their relation easier. “I am so much better with my sister. Instead of arguing with her, I know how to listen to her. Before, sometimes she would get very angry. Now, I say if you do your homework first, then you can have it. I give her choice. It helped me become a better older sister.” At the end of the summer, Kendra reflected on how she did not have “her little shaky voice” anymore when talking to other people. The workers at LWB recognized the help she provided and wrote her a letter so she could validate her time with the Ideas Box as community service hours. Kendra’s goal is to work in neuroscience in order to help children with mental disabilities like her brother.
The Drop in Attendance: Weather and Institutional Partnership After the first week in the park following the opening ceremony on July 15, attendance began to decline. A variety of factors may have contributed to this drop, including the turnover in park staff, the hot weather, and the novelty of the box wearing off. The summer heat for example was a decisive factor tied to issues of park management. The lack of shade and the concrete ground transformed the park into a heat trap in between the
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tall residential buildings. The bright light also made the screens of tablets difficult to see, rendering them practically useless. Only the four chrome book laptops could be used. At the end of July, despite multiple heat waves and complaints from parents, the park manager had not added sprinklers or a permanent water fountain. This inaction was partly due to a lack of communication between the partners in charge of the park. There were other effects of this lack of exchange of information. For example, the initial park manager, who had been working at the park since the previous fall, had developed close relationships with families in the housing blocks surrounding the park. As a working mother who sometimes brought along her daughters to the park, she bonded with other mothers. Many of them in the community trusted her to keep an eye on their children while she was running the park and indeed, she was skilled at watching children while tending the garden and grounds. In June, she had also started to give away vegetables from the lush garden: tomatoes, collard greens, kohlrabi and more. Some of the mothers would send her the picture of dishes they cooked at home and exchange recipes. However, on July 18, she left the position of Park Manager with only a day’s notice to undergo back surgery and was unable to return to her position. Her unexpected departure left the team without a privileged community contact. Her successor was in her 20s and did not live in the area. Unsure of her tenure and position at the park, she was not interested in bonding with mothers in the community or playing with the children. She focused most of her efforts on gardening and directed the DreamYard interns under her responsibility to do the same. The interns however resented her orders. She lacked authority and they were not motivated to work under her. They took longer and longer lunch breaks in the middle of the afternoon, which made cooperation difficult. The administrative staff at DreamYard had to intervene and allocate duties. As a result, most of the park workers’ efforts were driven away from collaborating with the Ideas Box volunteers. After an altercation between the new park manager and a father who had been speaking inappropriately to several women at the park, Sustainable South Bronx moved her to another position. A young man took the new managerial position for the last two weeks of the summer before the park’s closure. By then however the LWB volunteers had decided to move to different locations. This rotation of park managers definitely influenced how community members interacted with park staff and added to the confusion of leadership and management responsibilities among the three organizations at the park: LWB, DreamYard, and Sustainable South Bronx.
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The second constraint in the operations of the Ideas Box was caused by the structure of the partnership. In the park, the workers responded to three different employers (LWB, DreamYard, and SSB) who did not have the same goals, as illustrated in the table below. In particular, even though the DreamYard interns had been hired specifically to work with the Ideas Box, they were supposed to take their orders from the park manager, who was more concerned with gardening and other manual tasks than with manning the Ideas Box. As a result, the organization that had the least interest in the missions of the Ideas Box, Sustainable South Bronx (SSB), had a determining influence on its workforce. Goals
LWB
DreamYard
NYPL
X
X
Bronx Pro
SSB
Testing the box in an X urban context Addressing the summer X learning gap Offering activities for X
X
X
X
X
families in HL Park Managing HL park Extending
library X
X
X
services Fundraising to keep the X box in the Bronx Goals of the institutions involved in the functioning of the Ideas Box in Hayden Lord Park A telling example of the consequences of this organization occurred when Kendra’s family asked to have her niece’s birthday party at the park. Even though Kendra was a helpful volunteer, the park manager, backed by her hierarchy, refused to give the authorization, arguing that it was a private event. The LWB volunteers however saw it more as an occasion to bring Kendra’s family down to the Park and to the Ideas Box and thus reach out more widely to adults and teenagers in the neighborhood. The refusal had the opposite effect and deterred the community from becoming more involved in the Ideas Box and even more so, in the running of
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the park. Both of them appeared as services provided to the community by organizations detached from it. Another telling example relates to the effect of this institutional setting on the workers themselves. One of the DreamYard interns was more specifically assigned to work with the Ideas Box. A student in Journalism at a Community College in New York City, he was expected to run participatory journalism workshops and publish an Ideas Box newsletter. Although he was very excited about his mission, he felt that his loyalties were due to his coworkers, who had gradually been removed from working with the Ideas Box via directions from the park manager and the DreamYard supervisor to tend the garden and clean the park. As a result he withdrew from the Ideas Box team and by mid-July, the divorce between the DreamYard interns and the LWB interns was complete. Admittedly, this divide might also have originated in the class differences between the LWB interns and the DY workers. The latter are all second-generation immigrants from working-class Spanish-speaking families, born and bred in Harlem or the Bronx, whereas the former are all students at elite universities outside of New York. This situation however is not entirely due to a mismatch in institutional partnerships. One of the reasons why the DreamYard interns drifted away from the Box was the lack of leadership at the Ideas Box to whom they could have looked up to. There were several changes to the LWB staff throughout the summer. After the first week, the experienced volunteer from BSF left. In addition to running the Ideas Box in Paris in May and June 2015, she had worked several years as the director of an after-school program. This combination of childhood education and Ideas Box experience naturally pushed her to take an unquestioned leadership role. Children, interns, and volunteers all looked up to her as a fun and knowledgeable educator and colleague. After her departure, the running of the Ideas Box was split between the three LWB park volunteers and the DY interns. As all the workers were in the same age range and shared the same lack of experience, management decisions were proposed by the volunteers and overseen by the Executive Director of LWB.
Working with summer camps: balancing fun and work In order to make up for the dwindling attendance at Hayden Lord Park, the administrators at DreamYard organized visits by summer camps they had been working with at other locations. Over the summer, four different camps visited the box. The first one was a group brought
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specifically for inauguration day. Two other schools each came once on July 28 and August 18. Finally, one organization visited three times between August 6 and August 14. Each of these visits brought 30 to 40 children aged six to ten years old. The class was chaperoned by educators, usually young adults or older teenagers working for the summer. These visits were an occasion for the volunteers to work with larger groups and for the teaching artist Kelsey Van Ert, who started to work on August 4, to devise collective and openended projects. The Ode to the Bronx Kelsey Van Ert is a teaching artist educated at the University of Wisconsin where she graduated with a major in sociology. With a white mother and a black father from Puerto Rico, she identifies with several ethnic groups and enjoys the less segregated atmosphere of New York City compared to her hometown in Minnesota where she was discriminated against. A poet, singer and break-dancer, she feels comfortable in the Bronx where she enjoys the urban culture. An easygoing manner, a wide smile and definitely young urban demeanor and clothing made the children comfortable around her. Hired by DreamYard for three weeks in August to manage the Ideas Box, she felt uneasy giving orders and decided to lead by organizing activities that others could join in. This did not inspire the DreamYard workers to join the activities at the Ideas Box, but it did help the LWB volunteers find direction in their pedagogy. The “Ode to the Bronx” was a project that she designed to welcome drop-in participants who would not necessarily come back to the Ideas Box. The concept was to make the children write, draw or paint about their relationship to the Bronx. She started the project with the regulars at Hayden Lord Park, but when a large class of children visited early August, she took the opportunity to enroll them as well: The first day, [the regulars] sat down and we talked about an ode or a dedication, using fancy words. We brainstormed to find them and then write sentences with them. With the big group, the Davidson center, we just rolled out the Kraft paper and told them that we needed their help. Where are they from? What are their favorite memory? They don’t even realize they are practicing writing. What stands out: it’s a very strong community. A lot of arts and community activism.
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A reflection by volunteer Madeline Ochi about that day gives a bit more detail about the activities. The first day the group came on Thursday August 6, there were 34 kids who stayed with us from 1:30-4pm. They also had around 7 high school volunteers and 1 main facilitator. When they arrived we did not realize how to accommodate such a large and rowdy group, so we had some difficulty splitting them into groups. Also, each of our activities can accommodate a different size (we cannot have as many kids at the laptop station because we only have four devices), which contributed to the difficulty. I had a group of around 8 or 9 kids lined up at the butcher paper to contribute ideas and drawing about the Bronx for Kelsey's Ode to the Bronx project. A DreamYard intern was supposed to help me facilitate at this time, but when I looked for her, she had left for a lunch break. One of the high school counselors with the group stepped up to try to help, but it was difficult to explain the activity to her due to the impatience of the kids. I appreciated her showing interest in the project and group though, because most of the other high school counselors even detracted from the effectiveness of our activities by goofing off in front of the kids, which made it even more difficult to try to refocus the group. She helped hold the whiteboard while I wrote down answers from the kids about the things they love about the Bronx. That brainstorm seemed to give the kids a good starting point for their drawing. Most of them seemed interested and I really like what they produced: they drew delis, sports items, gardens, and other items that represented aspects of their life in the Bronx. A couple of kids really enjoyed drawing and spent the whole time working without prompts. One boy drew himself in a work outfit standing in a garden, and wrote above his picture "I love the Bronx; Bronx is my life; This is a flower in the Bronx garden; Bronx is my world and my job." He spent a lot of time on details. Other kids had trouble picking something to draw, and often copied the kid next to them. I think that was good though, because they ended up creating different takes on the same thing, and while drawing, they talked about why they liked that specific
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part of the Bronx. Many kids drew either pizzas or pools, but they all had different details. Even if they had a short attention span, they managed to complete the activity while rarely getting up. They often asked about going to the playground next to us, where a group of 4 or 5 kids from their group were playing after leaving their respective station. Asking them to talk about their drawing seemed to help when they were losing focus, because they would start detailing why they chose that subject and how it related to their daily life (going to the pool everyday with their siblings). In general, arts and crafts have been more manageable to run with kids who are less patient or focused. At the end of the day, the teaching artist collected and photographed the children’s work, and by the end of her three week contract, she assembled a three minute slide-show with music that she posted on you tube: “An Ode to the Bronx”4. She played it on the television mounted in the blue box for the children in Hayden Lord Park and they were thrilled to see their work displayed.
Figure 6: Image excerpt from An Ode to the Bronx
4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBIpAqQc8qU
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This project was successful in engaging children both over time, for the regulars, and on a one-time basis for others, in a collective project. The children practiced writing while having fun and some of them were able to see the final result. Evaluating the impact of such an activity is difficult, but at least the Ideas Box helped them think about their neighborhood and write something about it, an activity they would not have done otherwise. Working with groups: an educational challenge The class visit and the Ode to the Bronx project raised a few interesting questions regarding the goals of the Ideas Box and its results. First, large groups like the summer camp visits engage children who are already involved in educational activities during the summer. The workshop at the Box is certainly a plus to their daily routine, but it may not be very relevant to the goal of addressing the achievement gap which mostly affects children not enrolled in camps. This is however subject to discussion as some of these summer camps may not be very challenging for the children. The camp counselors, mostly in their upper teens, did not seem very involved in making sure that their group would participate to the best of its ability. These young adults, however, did take an interest in a MIT scratch workshop that introduced them to computer coding. Second, the management of rather large groups of children proved to be a challenge for the Box volunteers, not trained in classroom management techniques. The reflection below written by volunteer Matthew Silberman brings up some of the frustrations and questions raised by this visit. I remember thinking that the group was completely out of control and tried to respond to that with as much enthusiasm and energy as possible, essentially becoming a caricature of myself for the day. It worked in the sense that the kids definitely liked me and were excited to be in my group. I remember multiple kids coming up to me and telling me “you’re really funny” and “you’re kind of like a cartoon character.” Although it worked for the day, I’m unsure how that style of facilitation would translate in the long term. Would they never take me seriously when we hopefully moved on from Legos to more advanced activities? Or is gaining their trust and attention the most important aspect of a first facilitation and one can deal with the rest later? These are just questions to ponder that I’m
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sure more experienced teachers will have a much better understanding of than I do. The simplicity of the Legos also refers to a frustration that had been building for me for quite some time. It is true that Legos went fairly well, but that is only if we measure success by kids not running away from the activity, as only a handful actually built something creative. I understand the idea that engaging the community center in any activity is supposed to be beneficial due to the wide achievement and engagement gap, yet one activity on one day where the kids are so wild running from one activity to the next (I’m unsure if even they knew what was going on,) might not be so great. We’ve already touched on this, but I’ll write it out again. We know drawing and Legos can occupy kids, but I wanted more. Anyone can oversee a Legos or drawing workshop, so I was questioning what we as a team (and me in particular) and the program itself were bringing to the community and if it was even possible to do something more than those little activities with the group at hand. In this reflection, Matthew raises a question central to the Ideas Box’s mission. What should the balance between playing and learning be? In order to get the children focused, activities must be appealing. However, learning usually requires a cognitive effort, which is not easily incorporated into fun activities. As a result, the Box workers often had the feeling that they were just keeping the children busy playing rather than teaching them something, which in turn pushed them to question their role, especially as volunteers driven by a mission. Matthew hints at a possible answer to the question by referring to “experienced teachers”. Kelsey, the only one with teaching experience observed the frustration of the volunteers struggling to get the attention of the children and, at the end of the day, offered them a quick training in group management techniques. This event points at one of the main findings and recommendations stemming out of this summer experiment in the Bronx: in order to capture the attention of children in an urban context, the Ideas Box facilitators should be skilled in teaching techniques aimed at nurturing the interests of children and challenging them to learn.
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6- Galileo Park: Adapting the Ideas Box to the Urban Context On August 1st, the team chose to take the Ideas Box from Hayden Lord Park to Galileo Park, a public NYC Park. A number of factors contributed to this decision. The primary reason was the downward shift in attendance at Hayden Lord Park. For over a week people had stopped coming to the park, leaving the team to sit idly by with the Box materials for long periods of time. A secondary reason was the team’s deteriorating relationship. Despite continued insistence from the LWB volunteers, the DY interns and the Park Manager focused the vast majority of their time and energy toward maintaining the garden. This division caused frustration and mistrust between all parties involved. The move to Galileo Park showed the importance of the Ideas Box location. It helped reach out to a different population and clarified the roles of workers at the Ideas Box.
Location, location! The power of accessibility and comfort The team knew it needed to move the Box to a more populated area where the Box could reach more users. After a few days of exploring the surrounding area for potential destinations, it settled on Galileo Park for several reasons: 1) It was only three blocks away, so the team could roll the Ideas Box there in a reasonable amount of time. 2) There were no stairs at the entrance, so there was no need to lift the modules. 3) It was very popular. Galileo Park was highly visible, at the corner of two busy streets. It had sprinklers, which kids love, and a lot of natural shade from the trees and the surrounding buildings, which gave visitors a break from the hot sun during the summer months. Finally, it was open all day (and night), a notable contrast to the reduced schedule at Hayden Lord Park. Entering the main entrance of Galileo Park, at the corner of Macombs Boulevard and 176th street, one walks over granite plates with important dates in Galileo’s life inscribed on the pavement every few yards. The park was open in 1999 and dedicated to this well-known scientist as an invitation to children to explore the natural environment around them. Two rows of benches line the main alleyway on either side, usually filled with parents, guardians, older siblings, and grandparents. Farther past these benches, a set of steps leads up to a circular concrete platform. To the left before this stage, an alley passes by four large concrete sprinklers spraying a fine mist on kids running around. Past the sprinklers, swing sets are usually filled with smaller kids pushed by their guardians. Following the swings, another entrance leads out to 176th
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street. To the right of the stage, another path follows a jungle gym also usually filled with kids, surrounded by another large set of benches where guardians sit. At the end of the path, a third entrance opens out onto Macombs Boulevard. The foliage of numerous adult trees shades the entire park, making it a respite from the heat during the summer. Thanks to these qualities, Galileo Park is always busy.
Unsupervised Children The visitors at Galileo Park differed from the Hayden Lord Park patrons. The main difference was in the attendance. Mostly, Galileo Park was filled with dozens of children and their guardians. Teenagers also made appearances in the park, often on their way to the basketball courts behind the school on the other side of 176th street. A large proportion of visitors, estimated at about 1/3rd (especially guardians) only spoke Spanish. Finally, there were more adults coming to the park alone to hang out or meet friends. Sometimes, they were visibly intoxicated with alcohol or other substances. Many kids playing in Galileo Park seemed to have no supervision. As we have seen earlier, there were cases in Hayden Lord Park when kids would visit without a guardian. However, many times, older siblings or parents would be watching from the adjacent buildings’ windows. And even if no family members observed from a distance, many parents had trusted the park manager to watch their kids while they left to go work or attend other business. At Galileo Park, however, there was no park manager to watch over the kids. In addition, the large number of visitors and the partition in many spaces made it difficult to supervise children. In the end, Galileo Park was busier and less controlled than Hayden Lord Park. Guards were absent and the gates never closed. These characteristics gave it a different atmosphere that made some parents at Hayden Lord Park describe it as a dangerous place they would not visit. The Ideas Box team did not experience the same feeling, and felt welcome in this open space. Kevin, a eight-year-old boy, for example, went to Galileo Park without adult supervision. He lived nearby, but came and went as he pleased. Unsupervised children present a much higher risk of intellectual idleness during the summer months and after-school hours. For this reason, moving to Galileo Park was probably a decision that brought the Ideas Box closer to its original mission of addressing the achievement gap. Unfortunately, our team was not able to gather much data on this new population as the LWB workers were busy with the activities and the researcher
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was absent during this time period. But other interesting findings stem from the experience of the workers with the Ideas Box in this new environment. The first one is about the design of the Ideas Box. It needs to be better adapted to the urban context. The second one is about the skills versus the materials that the Ideas Box brings with it. In Parks, where a welcoming space already exists, the draw of the Box lays more in the activities offered than in the space. As a result, the skills of the facilitators in capturing children’s interest are primordial.
The limits of the Ideas Box design in the urban environment The team believed it would be easy to move the modules back and forth within a reasonable time frame. But after a few visits, this belief proved incorrect. The process of taking the modules out of the storage unit, rolling them from Hayden Lord Park to Galileo Park, and setting up the activities at Galileo took approximately 45 minutes. Since the storage room was accessible between 1:00 pm and 6:00 pm, this meant that the Ideas Box could be open at Galileo Park from 2 pm to 5 pm at the most. In reality, it was most of the time only open from 2:30 to 4:00 pm. For the first visit, five facilitators brought two modules to the park. But their heavy weight and small wheels made moving difficult, especially on poorly paved streets. After that day, the team realized that they could provide similar programming with only one module, thus avoiding the chore of moving two boxes. However, the boxes are not easy to open and close quickly before going out. They are latched closed on site and rolled back to storage. As a consequence, the workers began to transport the materials needed for the day in bags and left the Boxes in storage. This was not an ideal solution because the back storage area was poorly organized without any shelving. The Ideas Boxes were stored in the back room, next to broken tiles and cement bags for the ongoing wall mosaic project at the park, and all sorts of random materials. To maneuver equipment and materials out of storage each day, many items had to be shifted and placed in different areas, making it difficult to locate the supplies. Even after organizing and labeling the back room, various materials, such as scissors, glue, chargers for laptops, and extension cords would once again get misplaced and lost. This experience shows that the Ideas Box, designed for stable locations in refugee camps, is not well adapted to the urban environment. It needs to be lighter and more mobile and also needs to open easily in order to stock it with materials for the day before rolling it out. In order to
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answer these problems, LWB acquired a set of lightweight cardboard furniture giving the team an occasion to test new material configurations.
Accessing the box by decorating it One of the most fruitful days at Galileo Park occurred on August 19. That Wednesday afternoon, the team consisted of the three LWB volunteers, one DY intern, the teaching artist, and a volunteer artist, who suggested organizing a painting workshop. LWB had acquired a set of cardboard, lightweight portable furniture called Chairigami. The team decided to paint it, providing the community with a fun activity and an opportunity for participants to take ownership of the Box in some way. With this plan in mind, the team rolled and carried the materials to Galileo. The Chairigami furniture was much lighter than the boxes and after that day, it became staple equipment. Painting the Chairigami had the immediate effect of drawing children and adults to the Ideas Box. The cardboard furniture intrigued the kids, as they were mesmerized with how something so light could be so strong and sturdy. Kids and adults took paintbrushes and began to paint over the cardboard. One theme kept on coming up throughout the day. People talked about how they didn’t think they were artistic and were slightly embarrassed about their artwork. For example, Kiana insisted on multiple occasions that she was a bad artist, but she persisted in her efforts. Although no one directly taught her how to improve her painting skills, the fact that everyone else kept on painting regardless of their ability fostered a space of acceptance. In this sense, the lack of formal instruction may have attracted a larger following than if the visiting artist leading the workshop had attempted to comment on the work. Users came and went as the afternoon progressed. Many children painted for a half hour, left to go play in the park, and came back for another half hour of painting. They didn’t become territorial about their own contributions. By the end of the day, there must have been five different coats of paint, each adding to the finished product. This activity perfectly lent itself to collaboration between different age groups. Older users helped younger users with mixing the paint and getting started. During subsequent visits, children would sometimes recognize their painting on the cardboard furniture. The team believes it gave them a proprietary feeling that helped them get more comfortable with the Ideas Box and its workers.
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“I trick them into writing”: Teaching Skills Versus Creating a Space Another significant event at Galileo Park showed the Ideas Box team that a lot could be done just by enhancing the existing environment with the right activity. In this case, the team did not bring a box, but only a microphone on a stand, an amplifier, a whiteboard, a Chairigami table, paper, crayons and foldable stools. These simple props helped the teaching artist take advantage of the concrete stage at the center of the park and turn it into a creative writing and poetry reading workshop space. “ Hi, I am Kelsey and I am a teaching artist. What is your name?” About fifteen children, mostly Black and Latino, between 5 and 10 years old are sitting on the foldable stools set up by the staff in front of the stage area. One boy says his name. “Great, who are you?” Kelsey points at another kid, and then another while Matt repeats the names out loud so everybody can hear. After that round of introduction, Kelsey explains how they are going to write poems and read them on stage into the microphone. “There won’t be any difficult words, because you are going to tell them yourselves.” She pauses. “To begin with, I wanna know some nice words.” “All right!” says one of the caretakers. The kids are almost all part of her group and she is very happy that they have been enrolled in this impromptu activity. “Do you have nice words?” The children utter words and Kelsey writes them on the white board: nice, intelligent. One kid says "self-sufficient" and Matt looks at him surprised. “A simple word indeed”, he quips. Responsible, creative...more words add up on the board. Then Kelsey takes a yellow sheet of paper and with a marker, she writes a poem and reads it at the microphone. The children are silent: "I am Kelsey I am smart I am brave I make my dreams come true
The Ideas Box in the Bronx
because I am determined." The caretakers and staff applaud. She then gives the sheet to Matthew who holds it up above the whiteboard. She tells the kids that they can copy her poem by picking the words they like on the board. The kids seem to like that. They all get a sheet of colored paper and a pen and start working. There are obviously huge differences in writing ability among them. Some are due to age while others are harder to explain. Some of them may be immigrants or second-generation immigrants whose parents do not speak English. One girl about eight years old asks for help. She tells me that she wants to write in an African language that I have never heard of. I suggest that she writes her poem in English and then translate it. That seems like a good solution to her. So I tell her to start writing "I am". She has a hard time with the pen and it is not easy to read. I then tell her to choose a word that she likes on the board. She picks “responsible" and starts writing it down, but she does not have enough room to finish the word on the page. Juan David is working with two kids and takes a more proactive approach than me, which seems to be working better. He tells them the letters one by one. After about 10 to 15 minutes of writing, Kelsey asks if anybody wants to read his or her poem. A DreamYard intern volunteers. He starts by saying “One Mic!” and Kelsey instructs the children to answer “One voice”. They repeat this little routine until everybody listens. He then reads his poem at the mic with theatrical gestures. "Who's next?" An eight-year-old Hispanic girl steps up. My name is Carrie, I am American I am self sufficient I am smart But I am not rude The audience claps and yells loudly: Yeah! Bravo! Little by little almost all the kids go up to the mic. Some of them are timid others not. The interns adjust the height of the mic and help them read by whispering the words. One caretaker reads about how she loves the kids.
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This activity took about one hour. The children had fun, while also thinking about words, writing them and reading them out loud in front of a public. They wrote a poem of self-praise that drew applause from their caretakers, their peers and strangers. “I trick kids into writing”, says Kelsey. This example shows that the success of a pedagogical mission relies heavily on the teaching skills of the workers at the Ideas Box. These skills help them get the attention of children and stimulate their intellect while at the same time providing a rewarding experience. This example also shows that finding the right balance between fun and work entails a challenging activity with an attainable and rewarding experience at the end. In this case, the microphone and amplifier played the role of making the reward visible and within reach. In facts, the kids were not “tricked” into writing, they were motivated enough by this rewarding experience to engage in the challenging task of writing a poem and reading it in front of an audience. Even if the team only visited the park a few times, hindering its ability to make a longterm impact, this experience confirmed some of the observations stemming from the previous location, at Hayden Lord Park, and brought a new an important finding regarding the design of the Ideas Box itself. Galileo Park was already an active space with regular visitors before the Ideas Box arrived. The space itself could be characterized as lively with children shouting, running, and playing. The Ideas Box was used to enrich the space by bringing a range of rewarding educational activities. For further deployments of the Ideas Box in urban contexts, it is important to understand that parks are places that already have a function, which make them a destination. The Ideas Box served the purpose of enhancing the space in an educational sense. It helped harness the energy that had previously been going into physical games, and pulled it toward artistic expression, computer coding, and board games. To this aim, teaching skills are a precious and indispensable competence that workers at the Box need to master. This finding was reinforced by the usage of the modules as visits continued. At first, the team brought two modules, then one, and in some instances none. It could provide the same programming without the bulky modules of the Box, only by taking advantage of the existing place and its patrons. The stage and the benches in Galileo Park gave the Ideas Box team the necessary structure to welcome the activities. These findings put an added emphasis on the Ideas Box staff. LWB should focus on hiring staff members that have pedagogical skills and the team should have clear educational
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goals that the workers could use as a focus. Such a focus should lead LWB to look for people who can transfer a kid’s energy from a playground setting to an educational setting. To borrow from the previous vignette, the Ideas Box needs facilitators who can “trick” kids into learning.
7 - Creating a community space on the sidewalk: the Laundromat In Galileo Park and Hayden Lord Park, the Ideas Box did not have to create a specific destination. The participants were composed of people who were already at the park. At the Golden Laundromat, the team discovered the potential for the Box to create a new educational and recreational space out of a busy sidewalk. There, the Box reached children, teenagers and adults at the same time. It proved to be a welcome environment for families. Besides offering educative activities for children, the Ideas Box was used to create and update resumes for adults. In fact, the location in a busy public space even allowed the Box workers to meet people involved in community organizing in the neighborhood, a phenomenon that did not happen in either of the parks. Despite hindering foot traffic, the set up, never criticized by pedestrians, was welcome by residents. Surprisingly the police never showed up to ask about the Ideas Box’s presence on the sidewalk. In short, the volunteers were able to use the Ideas Box to create a temporary space for the community in a space of passage. This shows the potential of the Box to enhance the quality of public spaces in neighborhoods and to meet people in the community.
Choosing a Location to Reach Adults and Children Following the drop in attendance at Hayden Lord Park and the subsequent visits to Galileo Park, the LWB team considered potential uses for the Box among the adult population in order to explore the needs that the Ideas Box could help then address. It considered setting up the Ideas Box outside the local subway station, but this was too challenging. The trip to the subway station included a long flight of stairs and it would have required a great amount of effort to take the Box up and down. Additionally, the location seemed unsafe to some of the workers, who considered it risky to take a set of electronics there. This quick observation raises the question of the familiarity of the Ideas Box workers with the area they are brought to work in. After several discussions the team decided that a popular laundromat in the area might be a good choice: it presented a combination of easy access from the storage and busy pedestrian
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traffic. In addition, laundromats attract an interesting sample of the surrounding population for the Ideas Box, mostly made of people who live in buildings that do not have laundry rooms. The rents are usually lower in these apartments and setting up there gave the Ideas Box a better chance of reaching the most disadvantaged population of the neighborhood. Additionally, the proportion of adults at the laundromat would be higher than at Galileo Park or Hayden Lord Park. The team would be able to experiment with adult oriented activities such as computer coding lessons, resume building, and job hunting. Also, the laundromat would provide the Ideas Box with a flow of people with a little time on their hands as they wait for their clothes to wash and dry. The Golden Laundromat, on University Avenue, one block from Hayden Lord Park was an ideal location. The sidewalk was large and busy with traffic. The manager agreed to let the Ideas Box set up in front of the store provided the team secured authorization from her employer, the owner of the laundromat. A couple of days later, he approved the Ideas Box’s presence, saying it would be a good service for the community. This welcoming attitude was shared with the pharmacy next door, which let the team workers make copies (in black and white) of the fliers announcing the Ideas Box presence for free.
Crea tu Résumé.
Create your Résumé
Aprende programación. Learn Coding Aprende Digitación Learn Typing Trae a tus niños para que se diviertan con nuestra actividades educativas.
Lugar: Golden Laundromat 1615 Dr Martin Luther King Jr Blvd. Bronx, NY
Ven y Aprende! Martes y Miércoles Agosto 25-26 Martes-Sábado Septiembre 1-5. 1:30pm - 4:30pm
Bring your kids to enjoy our educational games.
Come and Learn! Place: Golden Laundromat 1615 Dr Martin Luther King Jr Blvd. Bronx, NY
Tuesday and Wednesday Aug 25-26 Tuesday-Saturday Sept 1-5. 1:30pm - 4:30pm
Figure 7: fliers conceived by volunteer Juan David Hurtado for the Ideas Box by the laundromat
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Building a welcoming space for the whole family The Golden Laundromat is located at 1615 Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, the main artery of the neighborhood. Fairly large, about 10 meters wide by 15 meters deep, it holds around 36 washing machines and as many driers. Between 15 and 30 people were inside the Laundromat at any one time during the visits. The sidewalk in front of the store is pretty large, with a walking area about three yards wide and a lane, about two yards wide, for trees, flower beds, benches and lamp posts. The standard kit brought to the sidewalk generally included the orange box module with a few books (mainly comic books and magazines), board games (chess, checkers, dominos and Connect-4), four chromebooks, and art supplies; a cardboard Chairigami table and two chairs; about ten folding X-stools; and a whiteboard. The team usually set up on the sidewalk to the side of the laundromat’s door and across from it, leaving a narrow pedestrian passage in-between. One of the covers of the orange module surrounded by two or three chairs was used as a stand to display the comic books and magazines. The main structure of the orange module, surrounded by four chairs, was used as a table for the chromebooks or board games. The Chairigami table and chairs would be used either for art activities or board games. One volunteer would write the games and activities running for the day on a white board and chalk a hopscotch game on the concrete ground.
Figure 8: sketch of the set up at the Laundromat by Juan David Hurtado.
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Figure 9: The ideas Box in front of the laundromat on University Avenue, Morris Heights, The Bronx NYC, September 2015
The Ideas Box set up on this sidewalk for ten afternoons. The first two times were a week apart. By the end of the summer, the team decided to have a more steady presence there and the Box came 7 days in the last two weeks until September 5, establishing an almost daily presence announced with fliers distributed on-site.
Make Your Own Book: Another Way of Making Children Write “Make Your Book” was an open access workshop, led by Francisca Benitez, the teaching artist hired from Wednesday September 2 to Saturday September 5 by LWB for the Ideas Box’s last week. Fran had fifteen years of experience working as a teaching artist for NYCHA, the city’s social housing management authority. Unfortunately, NYCHA had recently cut her job because of budgetary restrictions. A native of Chili used to working with poor communities, she was able to connect with children and families who spoke Spanish. She had noticed how the Ideas Box workers had given up on reading books to the children and so she decided to help them make their own book. She prepared booklets with blank pages and colored
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covers and sat at the cardboard table with markers and crayons hailing children and parents passing by. On the first day of the workshop, the team had set up the box and the stands so as to make a funnel on the sidewalk. This slowed down traffic to a trickle and helped engage conversation. When their children told them they wanted to write a book, most parents agreed to stop for a little while. Jonas wrote about how he fought a dragon with his father. Boubakar, six years old, wrote about Batman, Julio, eight years old, about the friendship between a fish and a boy and Cassandra, six years old, wrote about her family running away from a dragon and finally finding a safe house. Her story, which we did not have the time or skills to probe, was eerily similar to the common fate of many tenants in run-down buildings, constantly avoiding dangerous hazards, such as fire or flooding. In short, this activity brought great engagement from the children. Ulysses, a ten-year-old boy and Leo, his younger brother by one year, visited several days and became regulars. They were first attracted by the comic books displayed on the table, which they read avidly. Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman were great successes. While they were reading, the volunteers engaged them and drew them to the code learning game, codecombat, which they already knew. Ulysses explained that he spent a lot of time at home playing video games and watching TV because he would be punished if he stayed out. His mother had lost an arm in a car accident and did not go out much. The next day, the two brothers returned. After testing the solidity of a cardboard stool, they helped Fran start a large collective painting, then showed the team their latest hip-hop dance moves. Impressed, the teaching artist decided to show them videos on a laptop to expose them to contemporary dance. The following day they both worked with Fran and wrote a story about their dance crew and how they competed against a rival team and won.
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The younger brother, in 4th grade, was better at writing than his sibling. This made the task even more difficult for Ulysses, a 5th grader. Writing was not easy for him and that made him angry. He had difficulty with finding the right words and fitting them on the page. His spelling and grammar were a bit random, revealing that he was probably struggling with English at school. But he did not give up and completed a story in which he conveyed his passion and hope more intensely than his brother. No doubt he would have not written a word during the summer if he had not come across the Ideas Box.
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Figure 10: Ulysses's book "Lelmentrics”
The success of this activity led by a professional teaching artist confirms a finding that had already been observed at Galileo Park. In order to attract the attention and pique the interest of children, educative activities have to be both rewarding and challenging. This combination in turn demands professional skills in childhood education that the volunteers did not have, but that the teaching artists brought to the Ideas Box.
Chess: a Social Equalizer and a Great Teaching Tool The game of chess was another great activity to attract children and even teenagers. It carries the same combination of challenge and reward as the “make your book workshop,” but in a specific way that makes it particularly attractive. The game is popular in this African-American and Latino community. It is thought of as requiring a type of intelligence independent from the formal education one can get at school. One can be a great chess player and not have a high
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school diploma or even a job. Conversely, one can be educated and not be a good chess player. For this reason, class or ethnic differences cannot help to predict the outcome of a game and players measure up against one another independently of social status. This local equalization of differences made it easier for the volunteers to attract players. On the sidewalk by the laundromat, the team would always try to have a game ready. The set was not very heavy and the pieces were often blown off the board by the wind, pointing to the need for a heavier set or a magnetic board. Both adults and children were attracted. However, the game is not easy to understand, especially for young children who have a hard time visualizing movements on the board. The first attempts at teaching chess were often frustrating, as the children would lose attention due to the complexity of the moves. One day however, the team discovered that one way to teach chess is to start by playing pawn games, using only the pawns on the board and then progressively introduce new pieces. The children were immediately taken. They felt they could play chess and understand some of its strategy. They could even play pawn games against one another and improve game after game. Chess was also a way to attract teenagers, who otherwise would simply ignore the Ideas Box. A sign of street smarts, it appealed to them and they were interested in learning more. The combination of challenge and reward worked for them too. For adults who did not know the game, the pawn game was a great way to progressively learn a game that they always thought was out of reach for them. This example also highlights the need to train the staff to use the materials for teaching purposes.
Reaching Adults: Games, Conversation, Resumes and Surveys The sidewalk by the laundromat was the only location where the Ideas Box workers were able to draw adults into the activities. Many were attracted by the games, others were interested in resume building, or brought there by their children. On Tuesday August 25th, Juan David was able to interact with a couple of women in their fifties from the Dominican Republic who sat down to play Connect-4. They had to learn the game and then started playing with Juan David. After the first time, they played twenty more games against each other. They mentioned that this activity helped them de-stress and wind down from their daily routine. As Juan David was facilitating the game and learning about these
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women, Matt and Madeline were talking to people walking down the street. Marco had a headlight restoration business and he wanted to create fliers to promote it. At first, he was thinking about drawing the fliers with a Sharpie marker, but Juan David helped him create something more visually appealing on the computer. He was very excited and thankful for the design. He explained that he was married to a woman who had two children, a ten year old and a fourteen year old and that he wanted to be a good stepfather for them. When the design was ready, JD walked with Marco to print it at the storage room in the park where the printer was. While walking, he explained that he used to be involved in drug dealing and had spent several years in jail. He now wanted to make an honest living and be a good role model for his new family. He thanked the team repeatedly and he called his wife to tell her about the flier and she texted back with more thanks. She was a dental assistant and he mentioned that she was the one supporting the family. This example, as in the case of Angela in the opening vignette of this report, shows how the volunteers at the Ideas Box were able to give renewed energy to an adult looking to improve his family situation. Without the Ideas Box’s resources, he may have postponed his efforts, which explained why his partner was so happy about this new flier On Tuesday, September 1st, the team spent the first part of the day without access to laptops because the batteries were empty. The workers at the laundromat agreed to charge them in their office space and almost immediately afterwards Stéphane recruited Ken who wanted to update his resume to apply for a job as a truck driver. He ran to go get it from his apartment located on the block (in a Bronx Pro building). Matthew helped him make changes by adding his last job, his newly acquired truck driver’s license and made it look more professional. They also worked on a cover letter. Matthew used google docs for both files, and although he shared the document with Ken’s yahoo email, he had trouble accessing it, so he just exported it as a pdf to his email address. He would be able to print it, but he would not be able to edit his new resume. This technical limitation made the team realize that in addition to resume building, many adults had trouble with simple word processing tasks. Because this was one of the first resumes that the team worked on, it took most of the afternoon for one Box worker to complete it. If resume building was to become a main activity at the box, it would have to be better organized, by having templates ready and by mastering the quirks of editing within google apps. In any case, Ken, was extremely grateful. By September 5, the team had worked on about ten resumes. This number is much lower than the number of people who affirmed they would come back to work on their resumes, but did
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not. Indeed, despite the overwhelmingly positive reaction to this offer, only a few actually took advantage of it. This discrepancy raises an interesting question: why did people not seize an opportunity they found relevant to their needs? One reason is that they in fact did not think that having a new resume would actually help them. Another, suggested by the librarians, is that people are too ashamed to admit they need help. This points at larger structural factors that make it difficult for the people in the neighborhood to find decent employment. Another reason, which a few people suggested, is that they did not trust the team with their private information. Finally, they simply may not have found the time to come back. We believe that working more closely with communities may be a solution to these problems. These examples expose the potential usage of the Box as a tool to help the adult population improve their economic situation. Given the correlation between family income and children’s achievements at school, it is possible that with an adequate amount of time, technology, and human resources, a semi-permanent Ideas Box program in the area could have a long-term impact in reducing the achievement gap in the neighborhood and improving the professional prospects of children. The limited time at the Golden Laundromat and difficulties in measuring progress make it difficult to test this hypothesis. However, the Ideas Box workers were approached by several community organizations that saw a potential direct benefit to having the Ideas Box in their community.
Meeting the Community: Creating a Welcoming Space on the Sidewalk The Ideas Box on the sidewalk was a situation very different from the two parks it had visited before. It took place in a place of pedestrian traffic where people had no specific reason to stop, except on their way to someplace else. The workers therefore had to think of ways to create a venue that would incite passers-by to stop and people at the Laundromat to come out during their wait. It had to be inviting but also not too demanding that people would be afraid of not being able to leave. One of the first findings was that people need a place to sit down, if they are to stay at the Ideas Box. The team thus organized the dozen X-chairs in several areas around the Chairigami table, around the orange box and by the low tables formed by the boxes’ shells. The Chairigami stools looked sturdier than the thin X stools which some people may have hesitated to use.
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Most of the time, it was the activities designed for the children that drew people in. Children do no worry whether an activity is free or if it will take much of their time. However, it would have been probably more efficient to make it obvious that the activities were always free. This was evident for the volunteers, but not for the passers-by. Simple games, like play-doh or connect four, or creative workshops are good activities to draw children in, and sometimes adults. They are also a good way to establish contact before engaging the children into more challenging tasks or getting to know their parents and involving them in the activities as well. Another characteristic of the Ideas Box may have contributed even more to drawing people in: the apparent difficulty of the workers in attracting users. A few times, adults took pity on the team and decided to help with recruiting users. A woman barged into the laundromat and yelled that people should take advantage of the great activities being offered outside. The Ideas Box workers’ lack of knowledge about the neighborhood and its population was a weakness that made the Ideas Box less threatening and pushed some of the residents to help. On the other hand, the lack of knowledge about resume making, job searching and pedagogy was a definite weakness that probably fed into the lack of trust in the effectiveness and genuine nature of the operation. One man in particular became quite attached to the Ideas Box and the team. Salomon was a resident in the large social housing nearby and recently retired because of health issues. A former “PR” for the tenants’ association of his housing complex, he had been alerted to the presence of the Ideas Box by the president of the association who had walked by the day before. This African-American woman in her sixties had been sitting on the bench nearby to observe the activities, when Madeline engaged her in a conversation. She explained that she had been living at the Sedgwick Houses for forty years, since 1967 (actually forty-eight years!). She remembered the time when the local branch of the library was located in the housing complex. It moved to the corner of 176th Street and University Avenue in the 1980’s because of flooding problems. This explains why it is called the Sedgwick branch. Since then, the residents of the 784 apartments don’t have a library close by. She then asked if the team would mind coming to her housing complex and she left with a dozen fliers. Salomon came the following day and almost everyday afterwards until the end. He noticed how many people would walk by without stopping and decided to help by hailing them and inviting them to talk, and participate in the activities. By the last two weeks at the laundromat, Stéphane gave him an orange NYPL t-shirt that made him look a part of the team.
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He took to the role seriously and engaged more people, played chess with them and encouraged them to get their resumes fixed. Thanks to him, the Ideas Box workers felt more accepted in the neighborhood and less shy about addressing passers-by. Most of the stools at the Ideas box were constantly occupied by a mix of adults chatting about the neighborhood and local issues and children abuzz with activities. Resume building started to pick up and more adults discussed their career plans. Some of the parents that we had already met at Hayden Lord Park but did not take part in the activities finally started participating. This gave the workers the feeling that they had finally established a recognized space for everybody in the neighborhood.
Building Relationships for Future Projects Salomon was also interested in bringing the Ideas Box to his housing complex. He was in contact with the president of the tenants’ association and assured us that the Box could have a great impact there. “So many people are idle and not even looking for a job”, he said. “With the organization we will help you work with them to fix their resume and get the children into creative and learning activities.” Salomon was perseverant and the idea of setting-up the Box at the Sedgwick Houses became a possibility. The president of the tenants’ association got in contact with the head of LWB by phone and on September 11, she came with two other members to the presentation given by Patrick Weil, Allister Chang and Stéphane Tonnelat at the French Cultural Services of the Embassy in New York to celebrate the end of the pilot experiment in the Bronx. This encounter with a local grassroots organization came rather late in the summer, when the Ideas Box decided to set-up in a public space of passage with maximum visibility and accessibility. These conditions allowed the Ideas Box to identify an organized local community with precise needs, manpower and the will to work with the Ideas Box. As anecdotal as this may be, this encounter confirmed the Ideas Box workers’ belief that they were on the right track by trying to simultaneously address the needs of children and adults. It also showed that any qualitative measure of progress or impact would require a longer collaboration with a grassroots organization in tune with the community. In this regard, the experience in the Bronx was very much a pilot project with a result.
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8- Street Fairs: A Participative Multimedia Box During the summer, the Ideas Box was invited to three separate street fairs in the Bronx. The first one, on Saturday August 22, was a tech fair in a large Housing Complex. Since the Ideas Box had some activities programmed in the neighborhood, only one LWB volunteer, JD, and one DreamYard intern were to go. Unfortunately, the intern could not make it and JD ended up going alone. Since he did not have a truck, he had only brought along a couple laptops and a foldable Chairigami table. This allowed him to explore a new environment and meet many young people. On Thursday, August 27, The Ideas Box was invited to the Bronx Salsa Festival at Melrose Place. For this occasion, two volunteers, the director, and the researcher brought two boxes (orange and blue) and a Chairigami table in a rented van. They offered resume-building and code-learning activities, which attracted only a few people. They invited the public to write what music represented for them before taking a picture or making a short video interview. This activity was aimed at fitting the theme of the festival, but in reality, the team did not know much about the event. It was apparently organized by an organization intent on transforming the site of the venue into a public space and the nearby lot into a new commercial and residential development. The team tried unsuccessfully to interview the organizers in order to know more. The Ideas Box was therefore enrolled in an urban development agenda that it was unaware of and served as a fun activity to support it. This fair gave exposure to the Ideas Box, but at the cost of being utilized by local politics. The last fair, on August 29, was a lot more interesting. The Office of City Councilwoman Vanessa Gibson had invited the Ideas Box, through DreamYard contacts, to a community day for her constituents. The team had learned from the two previous experiences and decided to transform the Ideas Box into a local media and participative journalism workshop about the event. It also decided to deploy the Ideas Box in order to create a welcoming stand different from the tables usually lined up at these sorts of events, where different organizations sit behind a table with the public on the other side.
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Figure 11:creating an open space for children at the community day fair, August 27, 2015
The fair took place on a street adjacent to Jerome Avenue, where the elevated 4 train dominates the landscape. The team set-up the Ideas Box in a U-shape in order to open up a space for children to play in the middle. The main activity consisted of taking apart and putting back together the Chairigami stools, coloring and painting them. Their parents could sit on the X stools off to the side. This arrangement allowed the workers to recruit children and teenagers to participate in the journalism workshop. Madeline wrote questions in large letters on a pad (What is your name? What does your organization offer? Why is it important to the community?) and took the microphone and portable amplifier, while JD took a video camera. They enrolled two children, one to ask questions and the other to film, and started interviewing the people manning the stands. They successively interviewed representatives from the health insurance company sponsoring the event, from the NYPL stand and a few others. Meanwhile, at the stand, Stéphane and Allister were facilitating the activities and recruiting more participants for the workshop. After about 45 minutes of interviewing, JD started editing the movie with a fifteen-year-old
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teenager recruited at the stand. He showed her how to upload the data and they selected and cut sequences. Unfortunately, the fair closed at 3:00 pm, earlier than the team had anticipated and they did not have time to complete the movie. Before leaving however, Madeline and JD enrolled another boy to interview the councilwoman who eagerly participated.
Figure 12: participative journalism workshop at the community day fair, the Bronx, August 27, 2015.
With this third experience, the team was able to make a participative media event out of a day fair. This meant recruiting children and teenagers, training them at interviewing and filming and finally showing them how to edit video. Several limitations prevented this project from going to the end. First, the team was not trained in movie-making and social media distribution. Second, the schedule was difficult to manage and third, the team needed a better laptop computer than the chromebooks provided in the box. With a little more experience, this participative workshop could have produced a short journalistic report on the Community Day Fair, reported the points of view of diverse
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participants and distributed it on social media websites in order to give the event and the Ideas Box more visibility.
9- Working with the local branch of the New York Public Library The partnership with the New York Public Library lasted throughout the summer in all three locations. LWB contacted the NYPL administration in June. They reacted enthusiastically and decided to lend a collection of books to the Ideas Box. The books were chosen at the central library and shipped to the local branch on Sedgwick Avenue. 250 books were chosen according to instructions sent by DreamYard, who had polled its teenage classes. In addition, the local branch sent two librarians for a weekly one-hour workshop at the Ideas Box. Their main goal was to register more users and improve the image of the public library among children.
The local branch of the public library The local Sedgwick branch of the NYPL is located at the corner of University Avenue and 176th Street in a small building erected in the 1980s, only two short blocks from Hayden Lord Park, where the Ideas Box was stored. The name of the branch comes from its original location in the Sedgwick Houses, a social housing complex further south by the Cross Bronx Expressway. The building is a two-floor grey concrete structure with a small concrete yard to the side. Heavy metal fences make it look like a fortress. The branch is open Monday to Saturday, from 10:00 am until 5:00 or 6:00 pm.
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Figure 13: The Sedgwick branch of the NYPL at the corner of University Avenue and 176th street.
The courtyard is not often used. The concrete ground makes it dangerous for children and the staff cannot keep a close eye on them at all times. The fence was erected in 1998 in order to prevent young people from the neighborhood from throwing parties there. They were using the outlets to plug in their stereos, and according to the librarians, were leaving a “big mess” behind them. This unfortunate story reveals the difficulty the branch has in becoming a public space for the community.
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Figure 14: the fenced in yard of the local branch of the New York Public Library.
Inside, however, the atmosphere is more welcoming. The ground floor is dedicated to the children. It offers a nice collection of books both in English and Spanish for kids of all ages. At the end of the room, a small stage can welcome shows or other activities. On a regular weekday after school, twenty to thirty children can be found in this section, according to the librarians. They do their homework, wait for their parents to pick them up, read books and play games on the computers. The second floor is for adults and teenagers. It offers books, CDs and DVDs as well as ten desktop computers and 10 laptops. Adults visit mostly in the morning because they like the quietness. They usually leave when the teenagers arrive around 3:00 pm. They print resumes, job applications, housing applications and more. The staff helps them to find the right forms, but they are not allowed to help the patrons fill them in, because of confidentiality issues. The library also offers computer classes and resume classes. Many senior citizens come with their aides. Among all adults, the urban section is the most popular. “Hood books” about drugs, violence, gang life and more relate to people’s life issues and are quick reads.
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Teenagers are not very numerous. They usually stop visiting the library after they turn fifteen. As a result, about ten regulars, aged twelve to fifteen make up the bulk of teenage patrons. They mostly come to hang out together or to use the computers. Only a few are bookish.
Extending the reach of the public library When the Central Administration asked the local branch to work with LWB, they suggested that the staff visit the Ideas Box twice a week. But because they were short on personnel, the staff only agreed to one one-hour weekly visit on Wednesday afternoons from 1:00 pm. to 2:00 pm. Two librarians first came for the opening on July 15 and visited six more times until September 2nd. One session was cancelled due to a lack of sufficient staff at the branch. After the second session, the librarians realized they had to come later, around 1:30 or 2:00 p.m. in order to give the LWB volunteers time to open the box and for visitors to arrive.
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Figure 15: The orange box with books lent by the NYPL in Hayden Lord Park.
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The first four visits took place at Hayden Lord Park. The librarians were given the orange box that filled with books. But the children were not attracted to them, so instead they registered children for new library cards and offered some arts and crafts activities. As the sun was pounding hard on the park, the “make you own sun visor” activity was pretty successful. For practical and administrative reasons, the LWB team and the librarians were unable to lend the books held at the Ideas Box. As a result, only picture books could be read, as the other books were too long for children and adults to read in one afternoon. In addition, most of the collection was geared towards teenagers who were absent at the Ideas Box. A few days after the opening, the local branch lent another fifty picture books to the Box, which had better success. But overall, the book collection was too large. It also made the orange box very heavy to move around. When the team started going outside of Hayden Lord Park, they emptied the box of most of its books. As a result, the books rapidly disappeared from the offerings. They only returned during the last week in the form of magazines and comic books, which visitors were a lot most interested in. Instead of reading books, the librarians at Hayden Lord tried to recruit children for summer reading workshops held at the branch. They signed-up a few but we do not know if the children went. The next two sessions in August took place at Galileo Park. More children participated in game activities. About fifteen children made animal faces during the first session, and twenty participated in a “parachute activity” the following week.
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Figure 16: Parachute activity at Galileo Park. Picture by a librarian.
These playful activities may have improved the image of the library in children’s mind and encouraged them to visit the branch later on. Unfortunately, we were not able to get attendance numbers at the local branch to measure the impact of these activities. The last two sessions took place on the sidewalk by the Laundromat. The librarians offered Sippy cups and notebooks to passers by and attempted to register them for library cards. The lack of space on the sidewalk and the absence of a captive audience made it more difficult for them to offer activities.
Registering New Users and Returning Users: the Problem of Late Fines Over the summer, the librarians registered 29 new users. The LWB team also filled out a dozen registration forms that prospective patrons had to bring to the library in order to get a card. Unfortunately, we did not have a system to measure if they completed their registration. The volunteers wrote “Ideas Box” at the top of the form, but they did not do this right away and
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sometimes they forgot to. To be more efficient, the team asked if they could directly give a new library card to the applicant and bring the form to the local branch for registration into the system, as the librarians were doing during their weekly visit. The local staff at first agreed, but had to recant. Only official NYPL staff can distribute cards. This is a limitation of the partnership that could be addressed in future Ideas Box deployments. Remarkably, most of the people who registered for a new card had already had a library card before. They generally stopped using it because of late fees accumulated for never returned books. As the fines accrue, they gave up on library services all together. In addition, when the fines reach $15.00, the card is blocked, even for computer use. The outreach conducted by the two librarians at the Ideas Box helped them regain some of their users lost because of late fines. Because the librarians do not have a computer in front of them, the visitors do not have to disclose or to find out exactly how much they owe, which helped reestablish contact with lost patrons. When they get back to the office, the librarians locate the account and try to lower the fine to less than $15.00, or even cancel it, if it is a card held by a minor. Discussions outside of the library building thus allow for an easier relation with the patrons, partly rid of the guilt associated with having a delinquent account. More research needs to be conducted to estimate the proportion of people disenfranchised from library services because of late fines, but the people we encountered in the Morris Heights neighborhood led us to believe that the number must be quite high. Since these people will never return to the library to pay the fines, the outreach with a debt cancellation or reduction seems promising to extend library services. With the pilot program, the Ideas Box has thus identified a promising avenue for the NYPL to enlarge its base of users among the poorest strata of the population, precisely the one that can benefit the most from the educational and community support the library can provide.
Unintended Competition Between the Ideas Box and the Local Branch The choice of setting up the Ideas Box at Hayden Lord Park had the unintended effect of locating its operations, both in and outside the park, within a range of two blocks from the local Sedgwick Public Library branch. This proximity did make it easier for the librarians to visit or for the workers at the Ideas Box to explain to visitors where the branch was located. At the end of the summer however,
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interviews with the librarians revealed that this close distance also drew most of their young patrons out of the library and to the park where the Ideas Box was open. In their words, “This summer, our numbers dropped compared to previous years. We saw a lot of kids at the Box. It was a pretty slow summer. Last year we were super busy everyday, but this summer, I was shocked!” It hard to know whether the lack of patrons at the library was solely due to the Ideas Box or to other reasons, such as more free day camps offered by the city administration, headed by the new progressive Mayor, Bill de Blasio. However, the librarians did not present the competition between the Ideas Box and the local branch as inevitable. They saw it as a problem arising out of a lack of coordination between the NYPL and the Ideas Box. For them, The Ideas Box had two advantages over the branch that could help it reach more users: It could go closer to the people, and it could give them more individual attention, which is impossible at the library because of the lack of staff. The librarians also mentioned that coming to the Box helped them try out new activities that they do not have the time to explore at the branch. They learned to improvise activities with children and discovered several games that they could also offer at the library. Minecraft, for example is a very popular game on the computer that, with a little training, they could orient the children to in order to get them away from less educational games.
10 - Conclusion: Adapting the Ideas Box to the Urban Context by Working with Local Communities The Ideas Box experienced mixed success in the South Bronx neighborhood of Morris Heights during the summer 2015. It was welcome by the inhabitants, especially the children, but it did not become a community place. In this regard, it fulfilled only partially the goal of serving as an extension of the local branch of the New York Public Library (see the end of Part 1 for the summary of findings and recommendations). Despite this shortcoming, the pilot project shows promise for the Ideas Box in poor urban neighborhoods. It revealed the lack of free educational and creative activities for children and adults in the neighborhood. It also revealed the need for activities aimed at helping adults with their careers and prospects. In brief the Ideas Box helped illustrate the need for more library services in poor neighborhoods.
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This pilot project also showed the willingness of local institutions, public such as the public library, but also non-profits like DreamYard, in partnering with a humanitarian NGO like LWB. This partnership helped LWB define goals for the summer, such as addressing the summer learning gap, but it did not give the volunteers and staff of LWB access to a precise community of inhabitants to work with and a way to refine these goals and develop evaluation measures. This missed encounter is partly due to a lack of time, and partly to local circumstances that kept the Ideas Box from connecting more with the community, as the unforeseen departure of the first Park Manager at Hayden Lord Park illustrated. More importantly, the pilot experiment revealed that local institutions must not be confused with local grassroots organizations who are more in touch with the local communities that the Ideas Box is aiming to help. The experiment on the sidewalk in front of the laundromat however, showed that it is possible to meet the community and to imagine a possible collaboration with a grassroots organization like the tenants’ association of a social housing complex. This last point is the main finding for future evaluations of the Ideas Box in similar environments. Like any humanitarian organization, LWB responds to two very different clients. The first one is represented by the funders, governments and philanthropic organizations aimed at improving the situation of vulnerable populations. These organizations have universalistic goals, which they measure according to standardized evaluation procedures, most of the time of a quantitative nature (called “metrics” by the Gates Foundation Global Library Atlas). The second clients are the recipients of this help, in effect the children and adults of local communities affected by war, displacement, or in the South Bronx, poverty. In between these two poles, local public institutions, like the New York Public Library, and local non-profits, like DreamYard, and for-profit organizations, like Bronx Pro, also have their own goals and evaluation methods. This general structure, which the Ideas Box is a part of, makes it difficult to define goals and evaluate impact. For example, how can figures about educational progress be provided to the funders when the activities only lasted one summer and were broken up between three different locations? Conversely, how can qualitative progress be measured when the goals were not previously defined with the local community? Short of asking people how the Ideas Box helped them, which is time consuming and difficult to figure out for each single person, only a reflection with a local grassroots organization, rooted in the community, can help LWB define goals and devise measures to evaluate the impact of the Ideas Box. For example, working with the tenant’s
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association of the nearby social housing projects could have helped identify the children most at risk of falling behind and tailored activities to their taste and level. A follow up in the fall with the parents could have helped measure if the children do better at school than usual. This means that, thanks to the Ideas Box, the summer learning gap could have become a problem collectively addressed by the community, rather than a general goal set a priori. The challenge therefore for the Ideas Box in poor urban neighborhoods, but also in other contexts, is to strike a balance between the demands of funders, usually short-term and global, and the needs of communities, usually mid or long-term and specific. As summarized in the findings at the end of part one, we believe that this challenge can be answered by paying close attention to ways of reconciling global and local aims: local partnerships, skills and training, choice of locations and Ideas Box design. Partnership is the crucial one. LWB already goes to new sites with large institutional partners. Its challenge should therefore be to fine-tune its general goals to the needs of the local community.
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11 – References Alexander, Karl L., Doris R. Entwisle, and Linda Steffel Olson. 2007. “Lasting Consequences of the Summer Learning Gap.” American Sociological Review 72 (2): 167–80. doi:10.1177/000312240707200202. Barnett, Michael N. 2013. “Humanitarian Governance.” Annual Review of Political Science 16 (1): 379–98. doi:10.1146/annurev-polisci-012512-083711. Contreras, Randol. 2012. The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream. Univ of California Press. Davis, Asha, Celia Rice, Deanne Spagnolo, Josephine Struck, and Suzie Bull. 2015. “Exploring Pop-up Libraries in Practice.” The Australian Library Journal 64 (2): 94–104. doi:10.1080/00049670.2015.1011383. Decaillon, Laurie, Florian Le Bris, and Guillaume Signorino. 2014. “Ideas Box Burundi. Midterm Report. Initial Results and Perspectives.” Bibliothèques Sans Frontières. Eliasoph, Nina. 2011. Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare’s End: Civic Life after Welfare’s End. Princeton University Press. Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Univ of California Press. Giles, David. 2013. “Branches of Opportunity.” Center for an Urban Future. https://nycfuture.org/pdf/Branches_of_Opportunity.pdf. Katz, Cindi. 2004. Growing up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives. Univ Of Minnesota Press. Mattern, Shannon. 2012. “Little Libraries in the Urban Margins.” Places Journal, May. https://placesjournal.org/article/marginalia-little-libraries-in-the-urban-margins/. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” Cambridge, MA, London. Sampson, Robert J. 2012. Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. University of Chicago Press. Sharkey, Patrick. 2013. Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality. University of Chicago Press. Sharkey, Patrick, and Felix Elwert. 2011. “The Legacy of Disadvantage: Multigenerational Neighborhood Effects on Cognitive Ability.” AJS; American Journal of Sociology 116 (6): 1934. Weinberger, David. 2012. “Library as Platform.” Library Journal, September. http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/09/future-of-libraries/by-david-weinberger/.
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12- Methodological Annex In order to evaluate the activities of the Ideas Box in the Bronx during the summer, the main task consisted of collecting as much descriptive information as possible on the activities that took place and the participants. The team used data-sharing software called Evernote to post and share documents and observations at the end of each workday. Pictures of documents or activities were recorded with a cell phone and automatically uploaded to a collective digital notebook.
Counting Visitors The original design of the research was conceived for activities taking place at Hayden Lord Park where the Ideas Box was originally scheduled to spend the whole summer. Stéphane Tonnelat, in charge of the organization protocol, thought that the unique gate to the park would make it possible to count people coming in and sort them by age, gender, ethnicity and group size,. By looking at the demographic data provided by the American Community Survey at the census tract level, the counting data could have shown if the people visiting the park and the Ideas Box were representative of the neighborhood population in terms of gender, race and ethnicity, and age or if the Ideas Box, and the park, catered more to specific segments of the population. These numbers were also aimed at providing information on the variation in attendance, both in sheer numbers but also according to the categories mentioned above. In reality, counting people coming in at the gate proved unrealistic. It was done for the first four days after the opening of the box and then abandoned when Stéphane left for a month. The Park Manager, who had agreed to help with the counting, together with the DreamYard interns, left at the same time for medical reasons and did not return. The DreamYard interns lacked direction and the LWB volunteers were too busy at the Ideas Box stations to watch the gate. As a result we only have a precise documentation of the visitors for the first four days.
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Figure 17: Sheet #1 of the counting log for July 16.
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The log sheets use one line per person entering the park. For each person, it records the gender, the age group and the race/ethnicity. On the left side of the sheet, the person counting also uses a line to link people part of the same visiting group. The log sheets only list three ethnicities, which are dominant in the area. In reality, only two columns were used, only distinguishing African-Americans from Hispanics. Admittedly, this is a fuzzy distinction as many Hispanics from the Dominican Republic could be categorized as both Black and Latino. During these four days, Hayden Lord Park and the Ideas Box received a total of 269 visits. The table below details the different categories of people counted. Table 1: incoming visitors per day and category, July 16 to July 22.
Total Adults -‐-‐-‐ female -‐-‐-‐ male Children -‐-‐-‐ female -‐-‐-‐ male Teenagers Seniors Male Female African-‐ American Hispanic
July 16 113 45 37 8 60 32 34 4 42 73 61
July 17 59 19 17 2 35 32 20 5 22 37 30
July 18 53 17 11 7 31 15 17 2 1 26 27 29
July 22 44 10 9 1 32 16 16 1 1 17 27 27
Total 269 91 74 18 158 95 87 12 2 105 164 147
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The first observation about these numbers is the steady decrease in attendance over the course of these four days following the opening ceremony- from 113 visitors on the first day to 44 on the fourth day. This variation is discussed in the report. A second observation is the ratio of adults to children. At Hayden Lord Park, even though the guardians trusted the park manager to watch over their children, they also came to the park to keep on eye on them and to meet with other guardians. The ratio is 91/158, or about 1.7 children per adult. In addition, the breakdown of the adult population by gender shows 74 females for 18 males, or four women for one man. Overwhelmingly, the adults that came to the park were women accompanied on average by one
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or two children. On Saturday, July 18 there was a variation in the gender ratio. That day, there were 11 women for 7 men, or 3 women for 2 men. This difference with the rest of the week is explained by the fact that the men work outside of the home in larger proportion than the women and can only visit the park during the day on Saturdays when they are off. The breakdown of the child visitors by gender, as opposed to the adults, is pretty even. There is almost an equal number of girls and boys. Finally, the breakdown by ethnicity and race shows that both African-Americans and Hispanics are represented in the Park in proportions roughly comparable to the census data for the neighborhood. As mentioned before, the ratio here cannot be calculated precisely because of the difficulties in identifying the visitors’ ethnicity. After July 22, the team gave up counting visitors. It resorted to a much simpler method of taking a picture of the different areas of the park at 3:00 p.m. and again at 5:00 p.m., in order to get an estimate of the total number. This method is much more approximate, but it provided an estimate of the total audience.
Activity Sign-in Sheets In order to document the participation of visitors in the different activities offered by the Ideas Box workers, the research team devised sign-in sheets. They were designed to be taped to the activity table, and filled as people joined and left the table. As the participants were asked to provide their first name and age, these sign-in sheets were also designed to identify returnees and distinguish regulars from one-time visitors as well as identify children and guardians for a follow up interview. Unfortunately, the research team did not regularly use the sign in sheets. The data is therefore not very reliable. Some sheets were never filled in and others only partially. A better method is needed to keep track of the number and category of visitors at each station. This shortcoming speaks to the need for training the staff for evaluation purposes and coming up with systematic procedures to do so. Taping the sign-in sheet to the activity table before the start of an activity could in some cases help, but not when the activity does not take place at a table, or when the activity is unsupervised.
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Figure 18: Sign in sheets at the arts and crafts station at Galileo Park, August 12
Activity observation sheets Another method consisted of filling in activity observation sheets. This was a way to encourage the Ideas Box volunteers to document specific activities that they thought were particularly interesting. The sheets list the type of activity, its goals, the participants and the facilitator and their thoughts during and after the activity.
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This sheet (front and back) reports a book reading activity by the Ideas Box workers on July 24, 2015. It gathered 19 people, including one adult and one teenager to either listen to a story or read a book on their own. The comments illustrate the challenge already discussed in this report of balancing demanding and rewarding activities. Book reading was especially difficult for the volunteers who often had trouble keeping the children’s attention. In addition to giving basic information, the activity sheets helped trigger the memory of the workers when they needed to remember what happened when they were ready to write a reflection in their notebook.
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Structured Interviews for Adults Towards the end of the summer, the research team designed a questionnaire for adults at the laundromat location. The goal was to get to know the adults and their families and ask them about the needs that the Ideas Box could help them or their community with. This questionnaire was quite efficient in getting people to talk and getting them more involved in the activities. They were designed to ask questions both about the participation in the Ideas Box activities and about the participants themselves. The interview took about a half-hour to complete, which meant that one staff member had to devote her or his time entirely to the evaluation. Because the team didn’t start to use these questionnaires right away only eleven were filled out. This number is not high enough to be representative of the whole population of visitors, but it is a good panel of personal situations and it illustrates how the Ideas Box could help them. The questionnaire starts with simple un-intrusive questions and becomes a little more personal as it progresses. This design helps the interviewee get into the conversation and confide in the staff.
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Figure 19: A questionnaire filled at the Laundromat location.
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In the questionnaire above, filled out on September 5, the last day of the Ideas Box in the Bronx, by the Laundromat, the interviewer learned that Sarah (name changed) stopped by the Ideas Box by chance as she was walking by with her twin 8-year-old children. The workers lured the children into playing. The mom said that she was not going to stay for very long, but she changed her mind when she was offered a chair. She stayed for over two hours, until the Box had to close, so that her children could play. She read a cooking magazine, while they did painting, played chess and wrote their own book. Sarah was happy that her son and daughter were given a chance to be creative and that they had to put their mind to work. A 44-year-old single mom, she has lived her all life in the Bronx and worked in fashion and cosmetics. She lives alone with her children a few blocks down the street in social housing and is looking for work. As a certified Microsoft Office specialist, she does not need help with her resume. She even helps her friends fix their own resumes, and complains that they find jobs while she does not. Sarah is involved in her community, where she helps watch children and organizes cookouts on the grounds of her housing block. She is also involved in the local church. According to her, the two main problems in the neighborhood are unemployment and the lack of activities for children. “They get caught in small conflicts. Idle hands make for devil’s time”, she says, paraphrasing the bible. She goes to the library once in a while to print out papers and her children go with their school. Even though they did not go away during the summer, they had not been to the library. They have books at home, she says. Maybe she would take them more often if they had more fun activities for kids, like puppet shows. At the end of the interview, Sarah asked if Libraries Without Borders would be interested in bringing the Ideas Box to her church. There, the community could use it to help adults with their career and keep the children busy with interesting and creative activities. Interestingly, all the people interviewed shared the same diagnosis about their community: they need more free and safe interesting activities for the children, and they need help to address unemployment or under-employment in their community. Some of the interviewees visit the library on a regular basis but others do not.
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LOG of Incoming visitors Name of person who fills the form: For the time column, only write the time every half hour. Write a line on the left to link people who come in together. ONE PERSON PER LINE. Time Female Male Child Teen Young Adult Senior African Hispanic African Other adult American (write) Time Female Male Child Teen Young Adult Senior African Hispanic African Other adult American (write) Sheet Turn over…
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Female Male Child Teen Young Adult Senior African Hispanic African Other adult American (write) Female Male Child Teen Young Adult Senior African Hispanic African Other adult American (write)
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Questionnaire for participants at the Ideas Box by the laundromat To be conducted onsite by the PI.
Filled by:
Do not forget to tell the interviewee that all answers will be anonymous. The survey should take about 20 minutes. About the Area 1- How often do you come to this area? -- Daily -- several times a week-- on week-ends only -- once a week –- first time -- other: 2- How did you get here? Walk – car – bus – subway – taxi – bike –other: 3- How long are you staying today? 4- Who did you come with? 5 - What attracted you to the area? (laudromat, stroll, benches, IDEAS BOX, others…) About the Box 6. - What activity did you or your kid participate in today? Can you describe it? 7 – Who did you do it with? 8 – How did you like it? 9 – How could it be improved? 10 – Does this activity fulfill a need for you and the community? 11 – What other activity do you think should be offered? 12- Have you met people by coming to the Box? Who? 13 – Who would you recommend us to? 14 - Are you satisfied with the opening hours/days of the Box? If not, why not? 17- Do you think the Box should be set up elsewhere in the Bronx? Where? About the person: 18 – What is your name (first): 19- How old are you? 20 - What ethnicity do you identify yourself as?
Gender:
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21 - What cross street do you live at? 22- How long have you lived there? And in the Bronx? 23 - How many bedrooms is your apartment? 24 - What do you do for a living? (if a child or teen, what do your parents or guardians do for a living?) 25 - Regarding Education, what corresponds best to you: Some High School -- High School diploma -- Some College -- College diploma (which one?) 26 - How many people do you live with at home? 27 - Do you have Internet at home? 28 - Do you have Internet on your cell phone (a data plan)? 29 - What is your first language? 30 - Do you speak any other languages? (which ones) 30 - Have you or your children gone on vacation this summer? Where? 31 - What other places and activities in the city have you or your kids gone to this summer? 31 - Do you read books? 32- Do you have a library card? 33- Do you know where the nearest public library is? 34 – How often do you go to the public library? 34 – What do you do there? 35 –What do you think about the services offered at the library? 36 – What would make you or your kids go more often to the library? 33 – Do you go to parks in the area? Which ones? 34 – Do you know Hayden Lord Park on Andres Avenue? If yes, do you go there? 35 – How are you involved in your neighborhood community? 35 - What are the main problems in your community? 36 - Do you think that the box could help with these problems?
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