[ Update ]
By: Diane Adkins, Jassen Johnson and Janni Sorensen
The three of us (Diane, Jassen and Janni) participated in this year's COPC
conference in Pittsburgh and following is a brief report on the experience,
if you are particularly interested in any of the issues discussed please contact
us and we can provide further information.
Thursday morning was dominated by introductory sessions introducing staff at
the OUP etc, followed by a plenary session on past, present and future of the
COPC programs. Key issues in this plenary session included the fact that COPC
is a fragile program that does not always have a lot of policy support and there
is a need for increased funding to continue the good work. Another key issue
that would resurface in several sessions later in the conference was a clear
tension between the benefit for university versus community partners in the
COPC programs.
After lunch we had our first "active session" with an ESLARP presentation by
Diane and Jassen in a session titled, "The challenges of partnerships with institutions
of higher education: Strategies for community partners." We all chose to participate
in the sessions where one of us presented so the others could provide backup
information to the presenter. Unfortunately, this meant that we were not able
to report any of the outcome of other sessions that might have been of value
to the ESLARP community. Diane and Jassen framed this presentation around the
work of UP378 in the spring semester of 2001 followed by a discussion of the
implementation of programs from the developed planning document during fall
outreach weekends. There were many resident partners present in the audience
of this session and all were very impressed with the level of involvement that
the university had in neighborhood meetings and the fact that so many students
did not just come on one visit, but actually worked with the community over
the course of the semester. This lead to a discussion of the history of ESLARP
from a traditional research approach to empowerment planning and Action Research
and how this approach has benefited both students, faculty and residents of
East St. Louis. It was our impression that many of the partnerships still struggle
with the "expert university vs. residents in need of assistance" instead of
using a mutual benefit approach to the work. We were glad to offer our model
as a suggestion to improve relations. Diane became quite a celebrity following
this session; all community partners wanted to meet with her and get more input
on "how she got the university to do this kind of work with this approach."
We were challenged during the session to remember that some of the achievements
we described were small scale, and that we need to expand our vision towards
real economic development in the community. We acknowledged this challenge and
stated that residents and university will continue working with a similar approach
to achieve increasingly more difficult tasks.
Following this session was a working lunch with very inspirational speakers
on the issue of disparity in healthcare. After lunch we went on bus-tours of
the partnership communities of Pittsburgh. This was followed by a reception
with plenty of time for networking and there were many people who wanted to
know more about ESLARP based on our presentation earlier that day. The evening
was lots of fun on the "Three Rivers Tour" on the Gateway Clipper with dinner
and dancing (Initiated by Diane and soon joined by lots of students, faculty
and residents).
Friday morning Diane and Janni participated in a discussion session on "Leadership
and Capacity building." This session confirmed that neighborhoods all over the
country face similar problems of low participation and challenges of youth vs.
older/ new vs. longtime residents. Some useful strategies were discussed and
Diane will share these with NTAC staff and start using some of the ideas in
Lansdowne. Jassen participated in a session on "Environment." This session discussed
the issues confronting low-income communities in the path of gentrification
due to the redevelopment of environmentally challenged areas such as brownfields,
lead hazards, and ground contamination. Many of the environmental issues and
their remediation were relevant to East St. Louis, but the fear of gentrification,
as it relates to the redevelopment is not a topic of concern as of yet in East
St. Louis.
This was followed by a plenary discussion session on Race, Class and COPC. Much
of the discussion was on the continued disparity between the races that cannot
be explained by class and on the "American Apartheid" with continued residential
segregation. Very little of the discussion was directly related to COPC projects
experiences with problems stemming from Class/Race issues.
After Lunch was the time for Janni's panel participation, which was repeated
twice and therefore, took up the remainder of Friday afternoon (Jassen and Diane
sat in on both these as well). The title of this presentation was "Increasing
student participation: Including COPC activities in your curriculum"" Some key
questions that were discussed were:
· How do we prepare students to do work with resident partners
· What are the different levels of students participation in our projects
· How can we work around the challenges of fitting a semester's work with the
real life of residents in a community
· How can we ensure that residents truly benefit when working with students
· Challenges of institutionalization
It was clear from this discussion that ESLARP has a much longer and well-established
history of including student in the COPC work than any of the other participants
we heard from. Most student involvement seemed to be in the form of brief volunteer
experiences, tours of neighborhoods or individual internships. It was hard for
us to get any useful advice on how to improve ESLARP's work during this session
but we did provide ideas for others. People were impressed with our "Small grant
for new ESLARP faculty" and the fact that ESLARP was included in the job announcements
for positions in LA, Arch and DURP's latest hires. The description provided
of UP378's work also seemed to inspire many to think about using students in
classes in a much more involved way.
This was the end of the conference for the three ESLARP delegates. Please don't
hesitate to contact us for more information if some of this has sparked your
interest.
