It is difficult to imagine a more diverse group than ours. Law, design, community organizing, development, storytelling… Our large team gathers all expertises! As my colleague Christian said in a previous post, we do not have one partner. We have four: Brazilian Immigrant Center, REV-, The NuLawLab at Northeastern University, and TerraVoz.

Naturally, it is awesome to count on such a rich set of skills. Nevertheless, it is an enormous challenge to coordinate all efforts. I am sure Marisa feels sometimes that she is herding cats. So far, I tell you, she has been successful!

Our project proposal has also helped us to figure out our roles in this project. On Saturday, we received useful advice from Sasha/Codesign team to improve our proposal. One of the suggestions was to assign more specific tasks to each member. Thus, we can have a clearer idea of everybody’s responsibilities. An ongoing updated version of our project proposal can be found here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VlispRgeNGESqzbXjL8ZKjjKr32oMi3CMM3rlDwZO6s/edit#

Another advice was the need of bringing all community partners together to discuss the design of our hotline. In fact, we have been talking a lot about this topic in our meetings. This drawing (by Marisa), for instance, illustrates the concept of “audio postcard” that we invented and that will be used in our project:

We also got inspiration from New Day New Standard Logic Tree:

We already have a rough draft of our voice tree:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1xpXNy5MA1s4su7pMO8gUB50BI8hfbXYTh9XB1f5qSl4/edit

It is one of the outcomes from our first project iteration. However, we know that it is not good yet. We need more meetings with our community partners to discuss it (and improve it).

Another outcome from this first iteration was a group of characters and stories that are going to be used to convey our messages on safety and environmental issues to housecleaners. Marisa and Anjum organized an amazing collaborative storytelling session! First, we had to invent characters for the stories. The idea was: the funnier, the better. We drew our ideas and presented them to the group. After that, we began to create stories… with the characters that other members of the group invented. At first, such approach seemed a bit chaotic… but after some time the convergence of ideas was astonishing!

Finally, we started a research on safety, health, historical and legal issues related to domestic house cleaners in Massachusetts and elsewhere. That research inspired many discussions in our meetings and will provide the theoretical background for the messages we are going to convey.