Fin.

Well, this Global Project Development course has finally come to an end. I have learned so much from the observations of the people in my community, Marlo Heights, in and through this class. Before I talk about what I'm leaving this course with, I want to share how our project with the bridge went!
Anna, Lucille, and I went to paint the bridge on Wednesday morning. We were excited to paint the Boggy Creek bridge. Lucille was very resourceful and used cardboard boxes to cut out large stencils of the design I made on Paint. While Lucille and I were tracing the stencils, a resident came by to discourage us from completing our project. After that incident, Lucille and I were very disheartened and a lot less excited to paint. We called Anna to make sure she didn't buy the red paint we had originally planned for the railing. Instead, Anna painted the railings a soft tone of gray that really completed the natural/neutral look of the design. After talking with Dr. Gilbert, we decided to only paint the design on one side of the bridge and leave the other one alone to give the community time to respond to the design. Later, the police came on account of the resident's complaint. After they understood that we were not painting graffiti and had permission to paint, they allowed us to continue. As we continued to paint, we began to feel excited again as the design looked great! After 4 to 5 hours, we felt a great deal of pride in the work that we have done for the Marlo Heights bridge. We really hope that the clean, painted bridge will also provide a sense of unity for the residents in their pride for their community.

Finished product:

This is the design that we had originally planned to paint on the opposite side of the bridge:

Hopefully, the next semester's Marlo Heights project team can paint something like this for them if the community likes it so far.

As for my reflections of the course overall, I feel that I have gained new (or improved emerging) skills, valuable knowledge, and self-confidence. I feel that I have improved my verbal eloquence through the weekly blogs, communicating our needs to businesses, and presenting our project to our class. I have learned so much about the gentrification that different parts of Austin are facing and come to better understand the various stages and types of gentrification. Through this new knowledge, improved skills, and self-confidence, I feel that I have a deeper insight about and feel more passionate for at-risk populations. I have really enjoyed this course and will miss it!

Cold and Wet Winter...

Unfortunately, this whole weekend has completely rained out our plans to clean and paint the bridge. Though I love the cold weather that welcomes the winter season, the cold rain has completely crushed our hopes to paint the bridge this weekend. The flyers that Mercy prepared and that I printed became useless since the date of the event had to be postponed. Currently, our team is discussing the next possible day for us to carry on with our project. Since we want to complete the project before the Thanksgiving weekend, we believed Tuesday would be our best bet. We've been waiting out this rain, and checking the forecast every day. Unfortunately, this rain is very persistent. We could try to take our chances with the 10% rain during the late afternoon Tuesday.

Honestly, I think that Wednesday is a better day to paint since there will be a 0% chance of rain by then. I hope that my project members will still be here in Austin on Wednesday. I just hope to hear back from my project members soon to assuage my anxiety about completing this project. If we paint on Wednesday, we'll probably clean the bridge on Tuesday. Please stay clear and sunny on Wednesday!

Painting the Bridge Progess

Before class on Monday, my team and I came across a lot of problems. As I have mentioned in my last post about our progress, Ellen and I were attempting to find organizations or businesses to donate paints and brushes for this project to no avail. Secondly, a team member came up with 6 different designs in the past two weeks, but we couldn't agree on one design to use. We were unable to compromise as well. The flyer for the event still was incomplete, but the event is drawing near. The residents need to hear about it soon. With all that in mind, each one of us were anxiety ridden. During class on Monday, my team and I finally got a lead on where we could get paint and brushes/rollers for free for painting the Marlo Heights bridge. Amory informed us about Austin's Household Hazardous Waste Disposal service. We heard about it last week, and Ellen and I made numerous phone calls. We've left messages, but they didn't get back to us for a week. They did finally get back to Ellen on Tuesday, I believe. In any case, Amory suggested that we could just drive to their location and assures that we would be able to get paints from them. We also will be supplied brushes and rollers from Amory. Thank goodness! We also finally agreed on a bridge design which I came up with the base design from looking at someone's t-shirt. Then, my team members suggested adding trees to the design. The final design that we were all in agreement for looks like this:

I think that this design is great for Marlo Heights, because it has a good representation of their unique neighborhood. Each house is different from another, and they aren't all equally distanced from each other. Marlo Heights also has many shrubbery, so the trees in the design helps represent that. I think we'll have the name "Marlo Heights" written somewhere on the skyline as well. Plus, we got the flyers for the event finished, with Spanish translation on the back as well. We felt so much more relieved and excited for the day we paint the bridge to come. Then, Anna, Ellen, Lucille, and I went to the Household Hazardous Waste Disposal service to check out the paints they offer. Fortunately, they had a bountiful amount of free paint to offer. They had various shades of brown or tan made up from interior and exterior paints that people donated. The staff assured us that the mixed paint should still work on concrete outdoors, since they had sheds that were painted by their mixed paint. The paint on the sheds lasted at least 8 years! Thus, we decided to stick with their paint and got 3 3.5 gallons of a darker shade of tan and 2 3.5 gallons of a lighter shade of tan. On Friday, we'll purchase one bucket, from Home Depot, of a different color paint to write "Marlo Heights" and possibly paint the rail. Hopefully, Home Depot will also let us borrow or rent a tarp to make sure we don't get paint all over the sidewalk when we paint the bridge. All we have left now is to hope and pray for sunny, dry weather this weekend! Please, don't rain! We are really pumped up about painting this bridge!

Marlo Heights

3 of my team members for the Service Learning Project were able to go out to the Marlo Heights Adopt-a-Creek event and the Pecan Springs meeting this past weekend. Unfortunately, I was unable to go. Definitely take a look at their blogs to see how those events went though. From reading their blogs, I can see that they were able to observe many things about the community. This past week, I was delegated to contact Home Depot and Lowes for obtaining donations for painting the bridge which we have just learned is private property. The Home Depot representative informs me that they used to donate the physical products, but they no longer offer that service. Now, they would only be able to give us coupons for the products (paints and brushes) we desire as long as we have the 501(c)(03), which we do. The coupons are $25 increments which can be picked up at and redeemed at the store by showing the 501(c)(03). The Lowes representative that manages the donations would not be available until Wednesday, so I spoke with other customer service and HR representatives. They inform me that they could not promise anything or answer many of my questions, but they were able to tell me that they would usually need the request at least a month in advance. Lowes would be able to offer physical donations of the paints and brushes if they still have money leftover, which only the Lowes donation representative has the information for. The representatives I did get to speak to predict that we would not be able to get a donation though, since we only have one to two weeks until we would need the products. I'll have to discuss this issue with my team members today, but I predict that we will end up working with Home Depot to obtain the paints and brushes for the project.

CRAFT Model

The 5 stages of the CRAFT Model from the "Beginner's Guide to Community-Based Arts":

Contact - "Cultivate trust, mutual understanding and commitment as a foundation for your creative partnership." Building relationships through consistent interaction and open communication with the residents where they feel that they can trust that we are trying to help them face the issues, like gentrification, their community is experiencing and not trying to kick them out of their homes.
Research - "Gather information about the people, places and issues you are working with." Talking with the residents to understand their background as an individual and how it fits with the rest of the community in order to understand the circumstances surrounding the issues that the community face. Other ways to gain more understanding of the community are conducting interviews and attending their meetings.
Action - "Produce a new work of art that benefits the community." The creation of some form of art, which can range from a painting to a garden to community horseshoe game, can unify the community as a whole, incorporating the diversity of the individuals in the community.
Feedback - "Spark reflection, dialogue and organizing to spread the impact of the new work." Having open communication with the community to hear the voice of the community. Thus, we can have a better understanding of their interests and desires for their community as well as if they enjoyed the Action stage.
Teaching - "Pass on skills to sustain the impact." The information and projects that we learn can be passed on to other groups of people within the community so that they can continue providing desired change to their own community.

For Marlo Heights, we were able to gain some good information about the community as a whole from the previous social work students that worked with Marlo Heights. We were also able to gain basic information about some of the residents as individuals from Professor Gilbert since she personally knows them. One of the best ways we were able to research and gather information about the people and places was the National Night Out. We had the opportunity to interact with a good handful of the residents and come to understand their background  as an individual and how they fit in the community of Marlo Heights. Talking with them helps us develop listening skills to understand their needs and interests for the community. Another way that we would need to gain more information would be attending the Pecan Springs meetings. Three of our team were able to make it to the Pecan Springs meeting last Saturday where they came to realize more of the community's interests. We also will need the mapping project of Marlo Heights to provide more understanding of the places and issues of their community.

Gentrification

From reading "Austin, Texas: The East Austin Neighborhood," "The Empty Stairs," and "PBS Flag Wars: Gentrification," I found three interesting points about gentrification. The minorities in Austin are so easily manipulated by the rich and racial majorities. Before the current issue of gentrification, the minorities were forced into East Austin in the first place. I wasn't surprised that they had the power over the utilities offered, but I was surprised that they could manage to force the minorities' churches' relocation. Since the families who were forced into East Austin didn't relocate, the East Austin communities remain occupied by predominantly minorities Despite forcing the minorities into East Austin in the first place, the  minorities are once again being forced out of East Austin now. Also, The PBS article referred to the communities facing gentrification as "victim[s] of its own success." By thinking of gentrification in this way, it really puts the oppression into perspective. As the community simply worked to decrease the crime rate and other ways to beautify and improve itself, the community is also bringing on its own demise of rising property values and higher property taxes. To become more of a unified community is also to demolish that community. It's no wonder that there are many communities in East Austin which are wary of non-residents who try to help them improve their neighborhood.  Despite the attempts to solve the negative consequences of gentrification, the government, residents, and corporations are still struggling to find a reasonable balance for everyone involved to benefit. There are many affordable housing projects and other acts created for the sake of the residents facing gentrification, yet there also are still many issues regarding gentrification. From reading "Johannesburg in photos: On the block of Gentrification," I understand that the problem of gentrification is not a unique problem to the United States; gentrification is prevalent internationally. I think one of the photos that I found the most peculiar is the one showing two young boys with BB guns as a man takes a photo of them. The caption explains that "security is high in the area and people feel comfortable flashing their phones and cameras despite the area being in town, often being considered dangerous." This aspect of Johannesburg's gentrification is much different from the gentrification in Austin. In Austin, the residents facing gentrification resent the Austin police for ignoring the community. It seems that in Johannesburg, there is high involvement of the police for high security. I didn't expect that the gentrification in Johannesburg to be as distinct as the gentrification in the United States. Another difference lies in how the poverty-stricken communities arrived to the location of their current issue of gentrification. The Austin poverty-stricken communities were forced into East Austin area, whereas the poverty-stricken communities of Johannesburg took over the CBD area after the "white flight." The most important difference lies in the attitude toward the gentrification. Despite their economic differences, the wealthy and the impoverished will interact in Johannesburg unlike in East Austin.

Impressed By Levins Morales' Arts

In the book "Beginner's Guide to Community-Based Arts" by Keith Knight, Mat Schwarzman, and many others, the story that struck me as really interesting and impactful was Ricardo Levins Morales' story. According to the book, Ricardo Levins Morales is a union artist and known as a "Visual Griot." What struck me as interesting in this story was Levins Morales' openness to the pervasive thoughts and opinions he came across. Not only was he open to listening to views different from his own, but he was bold and taking risks to travel with strangers and ask them about their lives. To top it all off, he takes all that information and portrays it through his art. He would have to pay attention to not only the objective facts of the information he receives but also the tone and attitude of the one sharing. It's great that he is able to take drawing, something he's passionate about, and influence the world to make changes for what he believes in. He could easily be keeping the information he receives and his art he creates to himself, but he tries to do something with it. He continues to share that information.