Changing the Face of Science, One Neighborhood at a Time

I've blogged here before about the idea of community science workshops where neighborhood kids and families could go mess around, build rockets, and so forth. Earlier today my friend Gabrielle Lyon took the idea a few steps farther in an op-ed piece on the Huffington Post. Gabe is the co-founder of Project Exploration, which expands access to science by
connecting minority youth and girls with scientists and creating opportunities for youth to explore scientific problems alongside them. Project Exploration is one of Elev8 Chicago's extended-day providers. Their Sisters4Science program is going great guns with middle school girls at Reavis Elementary and Perspectives Calumet Middle School. For a taste of what they are all about, read the article here.

Sold-Out Neighborhood Tours Deliver the Goods

It seemed like a good idea, that neighborhood groups should get involved in the Burnham Centennial's Bold Plans Big Dreams program and put on tours of their often-unseen communities.

And it was. On Saturday, May 16, six neighborhoods led sold-out bus and walking tours in South Chicago, Bronzeville, Pilsen, Albany Park, Auburn Gresham and West Ridge. Reports are flowing in and it appears that both participants and tour guides had a ball. Here's some of the commentary:

Indian snacks -- Dorothie Shah reports that the West Ridge tour spent more than an hour in small groups, walking into shops along Devon Avenue and chatting with the owners or sales clerks. They sampled jalebis and other snacks at Royal Sweets, met the owner of the Sahil Sari shop and talked with Mafat Patel, founder of the Patel retail and wholesale food empire.

Pilsen culture – Tour leader Alex Morales focused on the neighborhood's history of activism and organizing but also pointed out the local attractions, and considered it a sign of success that people wished there had been time to get inside the National Museum of Mexican Art and spend some time shopping and eating on 18th Street. He wants them coming back (and spending money when they do).

Bronzeville development – This tour attracted guests from Canada, the south suburbs, the University of Chicago and the Field Museum, and "all were amazed by the amount and quality of development" in the area, says Bernita Johnson Gabriel of Quad Communities Development Corp. Even better, "all said they would recommend the tour to others."

South Chicago discoveries – The way Jackie Samuel tells it, visitors to the former steel mill district were absolutely charmed by the tour guides and the unexpected sites along the way, including the spectacular view from St. Michael's Church, the local gardens and the big ore walls at the former U.S. Steel site.

It wasn't obvious to Samuel and others, when the training and hard work of developing these tours got started a few months ago, just what the benefits might be, especially since most of these neighborhoods have a lot of rough edges and unfinished business.

The first training session, in fact, was on a day when three youth were gunned downed in broad daylight in South Chicago. "I left the meeting so happy and then this senseless act of violence just hit our hearts so deeply," Samuel recounts. "I questioned if we were doing the right thing by showcasing the community. (But) I realized that so much hard work has been put in place over the past 10 years that I could not let a group of thugs steal our communities' thunder. When we started doing the research it clearly pointed out that we have a story to tell, with all of our lumps and bumps."

Download brochures and maps for each tour here.

Photos are of the Pilsen and West Ridge practice tours, by Vince Michael.

Bridging the School-Community Gap

On the surface, it seems like schools and communities ought to be natural partners. Neighborhood schools are filled with kids who walk just a few blocks every day, often escorted by their parents. They are big public spaces, often next to parks that are filled with locals at night and on the weekends. Yet schools constantly say they don't see their parents enough, and neighborhood folks say schools are often aloof from the local goings-on.

I've recently come across a couple of different strategies for trying to bridge the divide. The photo above was taken in February at Reavis Elementary's Family Art Night. This school year Reavis has been hosting family events every couple of months or so, inviting parents to join their children in activities or letting parents get a taste of their children's after-school activities through a "showcase." It's been a big hit--administrators say they've never seen so many parents show up for a school-related event. In December, about 200 of them showed up in a blizzard to see their kids perform in the end-of-semester showcase. This is one of many new things happening at Reavis since it became part of Elev8 Chicago.

Another tack is being taken in Pilsen. Last week, about 40 principals, parent and community leaders and university representatives headed out to Itasca for an overnight planning retreat. They began the process of drawing up a five-year plan for education in Pilsen, which should help ease the transitions from one stage of education to another (like pre-K to K-12 and K-12 to college), reduce the high school dropout rate and improve adult education and job training. This group, known as the Pilsen Education Task Force, grew out of a Principals' Table that brought local school leaders together to discuss common issues.

The Reavis strategy has successfully brought formerly absent parents through the school doors, but have yet to engage them in deeper levels of partnership; in Pilsen, they've brought stakeholders together from a variety of levels, but acknowledge that parents are still under-represented.

What are other neighborhoods and schools are doing to build bridges? How's it going? Now that Reavis is getting parents inside the building, what's the next step? Should more neighborhoods be creating task forces like the one in Pilsen, or are there other ways to go here?

Neighborhoods, Social Capital and Schools

Principal Michael Johnson of Reavis Elementary, shown here with some 6th-graders, is working hard to create cohesion among his staff and build bridges between his school and its neighborhood. According to research discussed at the kickoff of this year's School Policy Luncheon series, he's on the right track.

The Consortium on Chicago School Research says that trust within schools is "the heat in the oven" that accelerates school improvement and ultimately academic gains for kids. Further, according to their regular surveys, trust between principals, teachers and parents has been slowly rising systemwide. "These might not be dramatic changes, but they are changes in the right direction," researcher Penny Bender Sebring told a capacity crowd at the Union League Club on Wednesday.

What may be getting less attention as policymakers focus more narrowly on the classroom is the importance of trust beyond school walls, or social capital. Social capital comes in two flavors: bonding, which helps people within the same community relate to each other and solve internal problems; and bridging, which helps people network across communities to get resources and information they couldn't access otherwise.

Consortium researchers classified Chicago's public elementary schools into seven different categories. The "truly disadvantaged" were those in African-American neighborhoods with a median income below $20,000 per year. It won't surprise anyone that very few schools in those neighborhoods had the kinds of internal supports, including trust, that lead to student success. It also won't surprise anyone that even fewer schools in neighborhoods with high incidences of child abuse and neglect had the internal climate to help children succeed. Meanwhile, mediocre schools in high-social-capital neighborhoods can coast a bit internally and their students still make gains.

However, this fact might surprise you: Chicago's "truly disadvantaged" schools are producing better-than-expected academic gains for their students given the low social capital around them. This could mean it's time to look at how to support and connect to the neighborhood outside the school.

That's exactly what Michael Johnson is doing right now at Reavis, with the help of Elev8, a new initiative supported by New York-based Atlantic Philanthropies and a group of Chicago funders. For more about Elev8, see this story from Catalyst Chicago.

As noted researcher Charles Payne put it on Wednesday, "Social capital matters. Social capital is differentially distributed by race. The impact of social capital is greatest for the neediest kids."

Payne also had a couple of cautionary words for Chicago Public Schools leadership. Two hot topics around town are the district's efforts to turn around low-performing schools by replacing principals and entire faculties in one fell swoop and the rapid replication of a select group of charter schools. Though Payne applauded the sense of urgency around school improvement that fuels both these strategies, he cautioned that they do collateral damage to social capital where it is sorely needed.

"We need to respect the desire to get good fast," yet also "beware that doing this may destroy the trust that makes good things good."

For example, he had heard of a turnaround school where "some kids came back boiling mad. Every teacher they knew was gone. It was not their school. How do we do this in a way that minimizes damage to social capital in a place where social capital is already limited?"

Meanwhile, he's encouraged by the strong relationships building at Urban Prep–"that's something special going on"–and worried that a push for them to open new campuses too soon may endanger the trust that has been built there. "Now, doggone! These relationships have been developed with great trust and care over time. You spread those relationships over three campuses? How do you do that? I hope people are staying up at night worrying about that."

In urban school reform, the challenge has always been to "balance urgency with complexity. The least well understood part of complexity has been the power of social capital."

Let's hope Michael Johnson and other practitioners can shed light on this by their example.

Taking Science to the Streets

These young men from Reavis Elementary spent their summer learning to make model amusement park rides, among other interesting activities. It was an engaging way to learn something about engineering and maybe a little physics, too.

Putting science activities into after-school and summer programs is a growing trend. Test pressures on elementary schools have focused teachers very narrowly on reading and math. Chicago high schools are strapped for the time to do real lab work. Last year, After School Matters piloted a science37 program in two high schools, Lindblom and Foreman, and is looking for more school partners.

Last week, Chicago hosted the first national conference on science outside school hours. Lots of museum educators were there, from Chicago and around the country. One thread of the discussion was how to reach the people who don't come to museums.

One idea from elsewhere that struck me as applicable here in Chicago was the community science workshops being run in different parts of California. How would you like your neighborhood to have a sciencemobile like Fresno's? It's a mobile lab with tools, materials and 10 Internet workstations that travels around the city giving people a chance to make cool things and learn the science behind them. In 2007, the sciencemobile served 50,000 people.

Fresno, Watsonville, Oakland and other California communities also have dedicated spaces with materials, tools and smart staff to help kids and families build projects of their own design. Part of what makes them special is they're located in the neighborhoods where the people are. Many are run through park districts and have line-item funding in city budgets. For more on how community science workshops operate, see this article.

These community science workshops got their start almost 20 years ago in one man's garage in San Francisco's Mission District. After expanding across California, in 2001 the National Science Foundation awarded a grant to help them scale up across the country. You can now find community science workshops in Boston, Houston, Miami, Newark, New Orleans and Washington, DC.

I think Chicago could use some, too. Don't you?

Tribune: Three new farmers markets to open

Englewood's Growing Home opened a farm stand last year.
Photo by Juan Francisco Hernandez.

New farmers markets will increase access to fresh produce this summer in Englewood, Woodlawn and the Quad Communities, according to a page-one story in this morning's Chicago Tribune. Each of the markets was envisioned by the communities during their quality-of-life planning processes back in 2005 and each will play a specific role that goes beyond improved food access.

The Woodlawn market at the Experimental Station, 61st and Blackstone, will boost that location as a nucleus of community life. There's already a youth bicycling program there, an artists' studio, a community garden and a very successful youth violin program at Carnegie School next door. Arvin Strange of NCP/Woodlawn says the market will increase activity there on Saturday mornings, when 30 youngsters and their parents come for violin training. That market starts May 17. The Experimental Station will hold a fundraiser for the market on April 4.

In Quad Communities, the market is part of the Cottage Grove Restoration Initiative and will be a hybrid market that sells prepared food, antiques and music, plus fresh produce like bananas and citrus that aren't grown on a local farm, but aren't widely available in nearby stores. Again, bringing people out and building community life is at least as important as the produce. That market runs Sundays at 4400 S. Cottage Grove starting June 1. A recent survey by Quad Communities Development Corporation found "overwhelming" support for a local farmers market.

The Englewood market will run Thursdays at 6452 S. Ashland starting June 19. The twist here is that some of the produce will come from the two-year-old urban farm run nearby by Growing Home, which uses farming and related work to provide training and job opportunities for hard-to-employ individuals. A leader on this effort is Orrin Williams of Growing Home, who was named a "community hero," at last week's Getting It Done conference.

All the markets will also use Electronic Benefit Transfer machines so that residents can use their LINK (food stamp) cards, a program that was pioneered last year at the Logan Square farmers market.

Extended bus schedule fills critical gap

Photo by Eric Young Smith

What does public transit have to do with community development? Quite a lot, as several NCP quality-of-life plans call for improvements such as new el stations in West Haven (at Western on the Green Line and Madison/United Center on the Pink) and transit-oriented development around stations in Englewood and East Garfield.

The first group to notch a victory on this front is Quad Communities Development Corporation (QCDC), which in late 2004 co-hosted a community workshop (along with Work Welfare and Families and CTA chair Carole Brown) to discuss local transit needs.

A bunch of ideas got kicked around, from a child-care shuttle to a car-ownership program, but the solution that stuck was simply to plug a gap in local bus service.

Until this week, the #43 bus stopped running at 7 p.m. on weekdays, which meant second-shift workers couldn't transfer to or from the Red or Green Line stations, which are a mile or more west of the neighborhood. Now the bus runs every 20 minutes until just after midnight, thanks to a $150,000 grant from the Mayor's Office of Workforce Development, matched by a similar amount from the Regional Transportation Authority.

"This will serve the whole community," said Bernita Johnson-Gabriel, QCDC's executive director, noting that hundreds of new units of housing have been built near 43rd Street, with more to come. It will benefit businesses as well, because four of the first loans from the $12 million Cottage Grove Restoration Initiative Fund will rehabilitate retail spaces on 43rd Street (shown at right) and on the 4200 block of Cottage Grove.

The CTA press release also announced new weekend trains on the Yellow Line and extended hours on the #69 Grand bus serving Navy Pier and the West Side.

The #43 bus is among the 20 routes that will offer Bus Tracker service, which allows riders to check arrival times via the internet. See CTA Tattler article.

New site pitches West Haven retail space

The thing about the digital revolution is that new things keep coming every day, and while that isn't always comfortable, I am often pleasantly surprised by some ingenious new application of new-media tools to serve community development goals.

For instance, I was elated the other day when I clicked through on a link sent to me by Mike Quinlan, program manager for the West Haven Revitalization Initiative. He had just launched the new West Haven Now web site for the Near West Side Community Development Corporation, and on that site I found property listings and photos for retail spaces along West Madison Street and Western Avenue, an area that has changed almost completely since I worked on the neighborhood's first quality-of-life plan in 2000.

The site showed me how the 2400 block of West Madison (photo above) is filling in with new condo-over-store buildings, and gave me the heads up that the Sweet Dreams Cafe will be opening soon in the historic "skyscraper" on the northwest corner of Madison and Western (photo right).

Other new buildings are at 28 S. Western, 115-125 S. Western, 2000 West Warren and elsewhere. These areas were once known for the Rockwell Gardens and Henry Horner Homes public housing developments, both of which are being redeveloped as mixed-income communities.

The West Haven site is the second I've seen that is very consciously trying to attract retailers to once-forgotten corners of the inner city. The other is the Quad Communities Development Corporation site, whose directory section is filled with hundreds of listings of existing businesses as well as available commercial properties, complete with photos. The group has already lined up more than $80 million in new development along the Cottage Grove corridor, and just announced a $12 million loan program to spruce up existing properties.