Community Engagement

Our City Year team room.
Set for "Annie, Jr" in the school auditorium.
Youth Mentorship with City Year New York

During the 2016-2017 school year, I served as an AmeriCorps member with City Year New York, coaching and mentoring students at a middle school in the Soundview community of the Bronx. Guided by City Year’s mission to support all students in reaching high school on track and on time, I partnered during the school day with an 8th-grade English Language arts teacher, tutoring students in their coursework and mentoring students to achieve their attendance and social-emotional learning goals. After school, I led a 6th-grade book club using ExpandED Schools curriculum, and co-facilitated club programming in leadership, STEM, and the arts as a part of School’s Out NYC. With twelve AmeriCorps members, our team practiced effective communication and mutual respect to lead engaging programming and provide our students with the best possible opportunities.
 
At the end of the year, we produced “Annie, Jr.” for an audience of students, families, and guests. This was the first musical ever produced at our school, and a definite highlight of the year. Two team members and I co-directed the show alongside a music teacher and our SONYC Manager.  We began by engaging our students in theater games and dramatic exploration, developed original staging and choreography, and sourced costumes, props and set pieces for a fully realized production. Invited first-grade classes were able to join us for our final performance and a “meet-and-greet” with the middle-school cast members. Our young cast members approached the production with creativity, maturity, and joy.
A poetry workshop I organized at the Lansing STEM Academy. Photo by Kelsey Block.
"Letters and Love Poems" workshop for adults at Edgewood Village Apartments.
Education and Outreach with the RCAH Center for Poetry

At Michigan State University, I spent two years as an outreach intern and education coordinator for the RCAH Center for Poetry, an organization dedicated to creating "an awareness of the place and power of poetry in our everyday lives." I created this booklet for the RCAH Center for Poetry’s first annual conference for educators and writers: “Exploring Our Own Amazement: Learning the Language of Poetry.” It includes a variety of activities for teachers to help students explore poetry and build enthusiasm and imagination. Based on creative writing workshops and activities I led for youth and adults at Edgewood Village Apartments, Whitehills Elementary School, Red Cedar Elementary School, and the Lansing STEM Academy, it covers a variety of topics and themes. Over the last two years, I have planned and led twelve workshop sessions and events for community members. For the booklet, I revised my original lesson plans, as well as researching, integrating and sourcing additional ideas from visiting writers and online. The booklet was included in folders distributed to everyone in attendance at the conference, and will be added as a resource on the RCAH Center for Poetry website.  I also presented my work as education coordinator as part of a panel during the conference.

For my work at Edgewood Village, I won the 2015 MSUFCU RCAH Dean's Choice Award for Innovations in Civic Engagement.

In 2014, while working at the Center for Poetry, I created a Wordpress blog called "The April Project" for National Poetry Month. Each day, I posted an excerpt of a poem that is meaningful to me, as well as a short new poem I wrote that day. Paying attention to inspiring details helped me experience each day more fully, and I enjoyed sharing new poems with others who might enjoy them.

Updating community calendars, facilitating events with visiting writers, participating in community council meetings and communicating via email were also important parts of my work with the Center for Poetry.
One of my interviewees in Santa Rosa, a professional seamstress.
With members of CUNA, the new agricultural cooperative.
Challenges and Opportunities for Women 
in Santa Rosa/Cartagena, Costa Rica

While studying abroad during summer 2013 on the program, “Ethics in Tourism and Sustainable Development,” an ongoing partnership between the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities and rural communities in Costa Rica, I conducted research in Spanish with residents of Santa Rosa/Cartagena, Limón Province. My host community was in the process of establishing a new, locally run agricultural cooperative, Asociación Pro-mujeres Cultivando la Naturaleza, which would incorporate rural community tourism. Their current focus was on developing additional ways of increasing employment and educational opportunities for local residents. 


Each member of our student group focused on a different research area, all centered around the community's goals. By interviewing community members, I researched issues and challenges facing women in the community, mainly access to education and employment; I then wrote a report detailing what I’d learned and making potential recommendations. Sections of our reports were compiled by our professors, translated and sent back to our host communities. As a part of the experience, a small group of colleagues and I taught daily English classes to elementary school students and adults in Santa Rosa.

Here you can view part of a collection of poems I wrote about my experiences.
Reading of the script in development, December 2012. Photo by Ian Siporin.
The cast of "Urbandale: A Place, A People, A Story," February 2013.
Urbandale: A Place, A People, A Story

From 2012-2013, I was part of the collaborative playwriting production “Urbandale: A Place, A People, A Story,” funded by the Michigan Humanities Council. Through this project, I was both a scriptwriter and an actor (playing the part of Julie, a photographer). Our collaboration began in Fall 2012, where members of my class on “The Art of Storytelling and Placemaking” learned elements of storytelling and developed our script. Working with interview transcripts and recordings, and learning about local history, we wrote about the issues and complexities of living in Lansing’s Urbandale neighborhood, within the Red Cedar River’s 100-year floodplain. While showing the challenges of life there, we also tried to express the joy many Urbandale residents have found in their community, and show the potential for further community action. During the writing process, I was an intern at the Urbandale Farm through the Lansing Urban Farm Project, which helped me get to know the neighborhood.

After we completed our script, director Paul Bourne cast our play and we held rehearsals, performing in February 2013: both in the RCAH Theater at Michigan State University, and at Foster Community Center in Lansing, where some residents of Urbandale were in attendance. As a cast member, I learned a great deal about how a dramatic production comes together, and it was wonderful to see the script we’d written take shape onstage. The experience helped me realize how creative writing can be applied to social activism; we hoped our play would inspire others to connect meaningfully with their neighbors and communities. You can view our play program here.


Intercultural Aides and other students at a meeting of the Multi-Racial Unity Living Experience program.
Community Organizations

I have learned significantly from several additional experiences with community organizations. This fall, I was an Intercultural Aide at Michigan State University, where I worked to ensure cultural inclusion for all students in my residence hall, and created opportunities for diverse groups across campus to bond over social, cultural and service events. For the past four summers, I’ve worked as residential camp staff in West Kingston, Rhode Island with Girl Scouts of Southeastern New England. My work has included activity planning and facilitation of large groups, ensuring campers’ well-being from day to day, building a community of friendship and fun, and encouraging girls’ independence. Here you can view a short article I wrote for the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities about my experiences working at camp. Also, I have volunteered at the Listening Ear Crisis Intervention Center in Lansing, MI, through which I developed skills in crisis intervention, empathy and active listening.