I interviewed Lydia, one of the students at Zumix who is currently working on a project to highlight voices of the East Boston community in a discussion about gentrification and displacement in that neighborhood. She and a group of her peers, which she refers to as the “street team” interview people off the street about gentrification, and they collect information and stories about how gentrification is affecting communities and families in East Boston. The students also help educate those they interview about ways to resist gentrification, including distributing information about organizational meetings against displacement and resources for legal help.

Lydia says the project has helped her realize just how much the issues of gentrification and displacement have affected the people she knows personally in her life, and says that often times the people she speaks are also surprised to hear about friends and family who may be facing the same thing, and about the resources that are available to them.

Next steps for Lydia entail sifting through the interviews she has conducted, looking for “golden nuggets”, or clips of audio that will help her and her peers build a story to tell about gentrification in East Boston, and putting them together to be played on the Zumix radio!