Verde Smoke

Yep, I’m starting a travel blog…even though I’m not planning to travel very far now that I’ve made it to Bangalore…so maybe it’s just a Bangalore blog.

You’re cordially invited to watch MIT@Lawrence’s youth celebration event, hosted in the 2nd floor conference room of the MIT Museum (265 Massachusetts Avenue) on May 9th, 2008. This event featured both presentations by student workshop participants and and free ice cream!

More info at http://architecture.mit.edu/class/cityscope/

[Week 10 04/09/08: WARNING: Excessive alarm clock metaphor to follow…]

I set the wake-up time on my campaign to a leisurely half-past Lawrence, because I made a conscious choice to ground my efforts in graduate school in a community where some people believe time stopped when all the mills closed. I lay my head on my pillow, full of hope that after the fall semester’s work, I’d be attune to the rhythm of change in that place. Then I sought out a stable/successful youth empowerment organization and a group of young constituents and leaders. I again thought I could easily step into the rhythm of their existing programs and add some capacity to take community change a step further than individual advancement. I set some personal milestones to complete a campaign, unknowingly trying to mimic the style of Gersick’s described as proactive, temporal pacing strategy.

I’m the writing TA for this semester’s CityScope class and we’ve just returned from a trip to Peru during spring break. Here’s the blurb on the class from the syllabus:

“CityScope is a combination undergraduate course and Masters in City Planning graduate practicum that focuses on a series of topics, using social and political science, engineering and technical tools, architectural design and other fields and methods. We focused on one city in particular, the coastal town of Tambo de Mora (TdM). Today, TdM is host to a toxic mix of some of the worst problems of a post-disaster urban zone. Suffering from a natural, human, political and social tragedy, the city’s future continues to be haunted by the tremendous earthquake damage of August 2007.

I’ve been accepted into the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives internship program in India for this summer! I’ll be working with my former instructor (from the MIT Media Lab IDEAS Institute) Geetha Narayanan with the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology on community radio projects. Below is the slide I just submitted as a profile.

[Week 4: 03/12/08] Why is my strategy like a Tootsie-Pop? My reflections this week will be both around my project’s strategy [candy shell] and my own “meta” strategy to work with these youth [chocolaty center]. Thus, I have two organizing statements: (1) On the surface, I’m organizing a leadership team of YouthBuild Lawrence youth to stop the pollution of community spaces but really I’m (2) starting with a small group of youth in Lawrence to raise their voices and call for change in their community.

[Week 3 03/05/08]: He hesitated, then asked me why I was there. After thirty straight minutes of almost continuous talking about himself, in my last one-on-one of the day, this 22 year old lifelong Lawrence resident, father, and would be jack-of-all-trades, looked straight in my eyes and turned the tables on me completely.

[Week 2 02/27/08] People have asked me why I care so much and why I volunteer to lead so often.

[WARNING: Yes, I’m journaling for a class again. I’m not sure if these self reflective experiences find me or I find them. Nevertheless, I’m writing weekly reflection papers about a hands-on project I’m doing as part of Marshall Ganz’s “Organizing: People, Power and Change” class at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.