After some introductions from each of our members, we got right to work with presentations from REV and BIC.  REV presented previous and current work, including Nanny Van and El Bibliobandido, both of which served as inspiration for how the careful intertwining of art, technology, design, and social change can lead to incredible success.  Natalicia Tracy, executive director of BIC, followed, and she explained to us how BIC arrived at its involvement in the Massachusetts movement for domestic worker rights.

Naturally, after so much inspiration, the team had many questions.  We decided to write them all down on post-it notes, and place them on a wall :

– Are we working on one project? Or several related projects?

– What are the most immediate steps to make?

– How do NuLawLab/MIT/domestic workers play a role in the design progress?

– Where is there the most room for creativity?

While going through each question, we were able to clarify our goals both in concrete product form and in an idealogical sense.

As a collaboration we wanted to mimic the success of domestic worker hotline in New York, which created characters and used voice recordings to educate workers on their new rights.   The process in New York went a little like this:

In a /very/ simplified nutshell

Domestic workers (DWs) worked with REV to create “episodes” based on the new Bill of Rights (B.O.R.).  After some collaborative and iterative redacting, the audio pieces were recorded and the logic tree for the hotline was designed.  At MIT, the technology was finally implemented into a hotline!

As a collaborative group we wanted to work on a similar product that would work towards a few main goals:

• advancing domestic worker health and safety by both gathering and providing relevant information
• engourage base-building and membership mobilizing
• creating a detailed and malleable framework capable of producing and sustaining future projects elsewhere in the country
• to galvanize new audiences and accelerate the growing movement for workers’ rights in MA and elsewhere

Among the ideas thrown around during this meeting were:

1. A Boston-based hotline that would help to spread safety information given to BIC by OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration)
2. A “Guide to Culturally-Relevant Spread of Information”
3. Video clips to accompany OSHA safety guidelines
4. An interactive SMS component

Of course, time did not let us fully develop each idea but I’m sure that with such a diverse group, they will solidify, consolidate, and strengthen organically over the coming weeks!

DA Questionnaire

If anyone has suggestions, questions or general comments, please reply!

This week on Monday night, the Zumix Team conducted a design/brainstorm workshop with the youth DJs at their monthly meeting. We felt that this workshop was very important as part of the collaborative process because we wanted the DJs to be able to give input on the potential projects since they are the ones most involved with the radio program at Zumix. We hoped to use this opportunity to not only to brainstorm but also to engage the DJs so that they will be more excited about the project.

The workshop had a great turnout, with 10 people attending, not including the Zumix team. The DJs who attended ranged from 4th graders to high school juniors. After a few minutes of quick introductions, we presented the ideas that we had thought of prior: storytelling booth, old fashioned radio playhouse, general marketing/publicity things. After we presented, we opened it up to the kids to have them give input. They were generally favorable of the ideas and gave ideas for publicity schemes such as giving away free guitar picks or getting sponsors from the local network. After the ideation phase, we broke up everyone into groups of 3-4 and had each group draw what they want the project to look like. They came up with the following creative ideas!

Group 1:

This group combined the storybooth and old fashioned into one idea where there is a storybooth with a radio inside. They thought about putting the contraption in very visible places such as the state center or in front of the T station so that it can attract many people. People who come up to the booth would be able to share stories using the microphone. There could also be remote broadcast and music playing.

Group 2:

The second group came up with a bunch of ideas for marketing and publicity strategies for Zumix radio. These include putting Zumix in bigger news outlets such as the Boston Herald and in the local TV station in the community and having Zumix movie nights. They also came up with ideas for publicity materials such as passing out keychains and creating a promotional DVD to hand out to different organizations and networks.

Group 3:

The third group thought of a box of Zumix idea that, as one DJ put it, “kind of like a jack in the box but without the thing popping out.” It is a box shaped storytelling booth. When people go inside, they would be able to see their reflection, to emphasize that they are telling their own stories. They can also choose what song to listen to as they tell their story. The 4 outside walls of the box will be decorated with an artist statement, directions, mission statement, and hand prints. There can also be speakers outside for playing music to attract visitors.

At the end of the drawing activities, everyone was very excited to get started on the projects. There was talk to maybe combine the three main ideas into one project, but we would need to more research on how feasible that would be. A big concern that we have is portability. The next steps are to decide on a final project and make plans to implement it.

Our MOU is found here.

Our MOU can be found here!

After much discussion, we decided: the story was powerful, and the message was clear; what was not clear was the overarching narrative that CLVU wanted to reiterate – that the housing crisis is not over, and the cycle of housing bubbles and crises would continue until housing is de-commodified. This is our overall project goal: to find a narrative and a project that would combine the different campaigns CLVU is working on: 1) an anti-investor campaign – many of the foreclosed properties are being bought up en masse by investors looking to sell the houses when land values rise so they can turn a profit, 2) fighting gentrification in Boston neighborhoods, and 3) a law to assert the rights of tenant to stay in their homes even if the property is foreclosed on. Although the campaigns seem only tangentially related to each other in that they deal with housing, they are all under-girded by the idea that housing is not a commodity, that people need places to live, and housing being on the speculative market causes problems for working class and low income people.

The goal of our meeting on Thursday was to leave with an agreed upon project idea, but coming up with a project to “combat the cultural narrative that the housing crisis is over” and link the work of CLVU was harder than you’d think! The task is daunting: shifting cultural narratives – both how to come up with new narratives that are broad enough to capture the core ideas of what we are fight for, and how to communicate it in a way that actually challenges the dominant narrative. And it is the task faced by every social justice group fighting for better policies and practices for people.  Terry and I used tools from the Center for Story-based Strategy to facilitate a conversation within our group about dominant narratives and cultural narratives.

We needed to link the campaigns that CL/VU is working on through one cultural narrative that is powerful enough to combat the idea that the housing crisis is over. In the They Say/We Say activity, we brainstormed narratives, assumptions, and ideas that people in power, and the status quo believe, such as market forces always work, there is no one to blame for this crisis, and people who go into foreclosure are irresponsible. We then brainstormed ideas and narratives that we believe and want to assert through our work, for example: housing is a human right, market is a human construct that can change, and people are more important than profits.

Because CLVU is currently running these campaigns, we did an activity called Points of Intervention (POI) to see how we could tie in action around the assumptions and dominant narratives to CLVU’s current actions. POI calls out four points that organized action usually happens at: the point of destruction (eviction blockade), consumption (housing auction), decision (housing court), or production (factory).

These points are usually where the problem is most visible or where the impact of the problem is most felt. It makes logical sense for actions to happen at these points – any passerbyer who sees an action at one of these points should be able to make reasonable sense of why the action is happening. There are also points of assumption – not physical places, but spaces where the narrative that keeps policies in place are not working. The Center for Story Based Strategy asserts that actions must also target points of assumption by pointing out what is invisible, reframing the debate, and create the space for alternatives. We had a lengthy discussion about the way Occupy Wall Street was able to do this.

With these brainstorms, we then attempted to synthesize our ideas by pulling out common themes as well as identifying “fissures” in the dominant narrative – areas where the narrative is weak or contradictory: for example; the dominant narrative is that market forces provide the best distribution of resources, yet it is actually the social safety need that makes market capitalism bearable for most people.

We revisited our logic model from class on Tuesday in order to start brainstorming potential outputs. Video, vines, and social media all came up as potential avenues to get the message across.

My group still has a lot of thinking to do before we decide on a course of action. Importantly, Mike is going to take our ideas back to CLVU’s organizing team. Ideally, these conversations happen together – the organizing strategy is pulled together with the narrative framework already in place. Otherwise, you get powerful pieces like Communities in Peril that amplify individual stories of actions, but don’t advance a new cultural narrative or challenge the dominant narrative that keeps communities struggling for housing and basic needs. Furthermore, without concrete, organized actions to support it, a narrative runs the risk of being ineffective and difficult to advance.

I am hopeful that we can come up with something good. Using tools to facilitate the conversation was productive and fun so I think we will continue to pull from the Center for Story Based Strategy and Terry’s newly forming civic hack lab “Intelligent Mischief” for tools and processes to have conversations like these. The major challenges we have are how to create a strategy that is culturally appropriate, that has buy in from CLVU’s organizers and membership base, that also has the cultural and strategic capacity to force a conversation about current housing policies and the ideas and ideologies that keep those policies in place – and do it all this semester – no big deal.

A student from the Zumix team in Codesign studio participates in a values-driven brainstorm workshop.

Project Updates

This week all the student teams visited their community partners.  We spent the first half of class sharing updates and providing feedback about the four collaborative project: Zumix, the Urbano Project, REV/ The Brazilian Immigrants Center (BIC), and City Life / Vida Urbana.

• The Zumix team is designing a brainstorm session for their project with young DJs in East Boston.
• The Urbano Project team will continue to discuss how they can extend the organization’s theme “Emancipated City” to a larger audience in Boston through an interactive medium.
• The REV/BIC team is building a phone system using VOIP Drupal that will explain domestic worker rights to those who call into the platform.
• The City Life / Vida Urbana team aims to overturn the dominant narrative that states the foreclosure crisis is over, and demonstrate that people are still losing their homes.

Reading Discussion

Next, the class discussed Futurelab’s report, Designing for Social Justice.   Futurelab is based in the United Kingdom and through research, school development, and workshops, is committed to developing creative and innovative approaches to education, teaching, and learning. This article begins by reviewing the frameworks of John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Friedrich Hayek, and Donald Schon to show how policy-makers and philosophers understand social justice.  From there, it discusses user-centered design processes and outcomes, and the implications for social justice.  Students shared their reflections about the reading.

“Design is not just a matter of producing a result, but reproducing certain values…and in the long term, the process and outcome are equally important,” said one student.  Another responded by describing his personal experience, “I have been in a lot of organizations where too much emphasis is on the process and people burn out and leave and there is no relevant product.  There’s a tension between social justice, design, and approaches that are more corporate and top-down.  There is something to learn from both sides.”  In general, there are two main arguments about why you make design processes participatory:

1. You get a better product when you engage the users and a large number of people. How else do you gather requirements and test usability?
2. The value-driven argument is that the knowledge of all people is important and the process is more egalitarian.

The professor urged students to think critically about the outcomes of participation in their own team projects. “Sometimes process and outcome are not related.” Really good processes can yield terrible products and sometimes closed, top-down processes can produce amazing products.  He explained that for the codesign studio, it is important for everyone to think about each stage of the design process and who is engaged at every step.  There are the staffs of the community organizations and then there’s the “community members” themselves.  What is the flow, process, and intention in each step of the process?

Values-Driven Brainstorm Workshop

After discussing the reading, teaching assistants Willow and Becky led an amazing workshop about values-driven design and showed the class how to uncover personal values. Everyone formed groups of two and followed the below directions.

• Share something you’ve worked on that you had some role in designing.  Ask each other the following questions:
• What did you envision as success for that project?
• Imagine that it WAS a success. What is happening in the world then? How are people living, what is the quality of life?
• Drill to one word.  That’s the value you were working from and the value you represent.

Below is a wordle of the values that our class embodies.

Then each student team and their community partners came together to think about the Inputs, Outputs, Outcomes, and Impact of their proposed projects.  An input refers to what each team has such as people, materials, space, and assets and an output is the idea, concept, project, action or product that the team will create. An outcome is a momentary shift and impact is a lasting change.

The City Life / Vida Urbana team discusses inputs, outputs, outcomes, and impact.

The result of the Urbano Project team’s brainstorm.

Thanks!

On Sunday, our team met at Piers Park in East Boston to check out the Move to the Beat 5K run, which ZUMIX has organized for the last four years to raise funds for its music and creative technology programming. Lucia, our ZUMIX point-person, estimated that somewhere between 300-400 people took part in the race and/or musical festivities that young people from ZUMIX performed for the crowd. The weather was great, the surroundings beautiful, and the atmosphere lively. People were laughing, snapping photos of each other in the costumes they wore for the race, enjoying the music, and showing love for ZUMIX and their neighbors and friends.

Lucia and Rayza, a 9th-grade ZUMIX Radio DJ, walked us up the street just a few blocks to the beautifully converted firehouse that ZUMIX calls home. There we were given a tour of the incredible facility within. ZUMIX has spaces for kids to learn and practice all kinds of musical instruments, from piano to drumline to horns to beats. They have a state-of-the-art production studio where program participants can record their music and learn to work the tech. The radio station is tucked away down in the basement, where there’s a board, a monitor, and a collection of mics for live interviews. On the walls of the classrooms and corridors, there are huge bright paintings of artists like Bob Dylan and Miles Davis. There are also group agreements from the music and production classes, written out in a young student’s handwriting. The space effuses their mission to build strong people and communities through art and creative expression.

After the tour, we sat down to discuss ideas, objectives, and potential projects for our co-design team. We’ll be focusing on the radio arm of ZUMIX’s operations; Lucia, the radio coordinator, has the following objectives:

• Get more young people involved in ZUMIX Radio

• Let folks in the East Boston community know about all of the local programming, produced by and for their neighbors, that ZUMIX Radio streams online daily

• Integrate ZUMIX Radio with the other activities and programming that happens at the larger ZUMIX organization (eg. students taking technical production courses could record students

These will serve as overarching, directional goals. Some ideas we came up with to help us achieve these objectives include:

• Portable old-fashioned radio

• Portable sound booth

The old-fashioned radio could serve as a physical reminder of ZUMIX Radio on the second floor (where a lot of the music and tech classes happen, the administrative folks have their desks, and there’s a common hangout and kitchen space). It would be hooked up to a laptop that streams ZUMIX Radio, but the volume and other features are controlled by old-timey knobs and dials. It should be interactive so that kids are attracted to it; the whole point is to get them interested in and excited about radio.

The Portable Sound Booth could be used to collect and share stories from East Boston with East Boston and beyond. Lucia explained that the neighborhood is changing: gentrification is setting in, the outcome of the casino debate will have serious ramifications, and the large immigrant population has unique concerns that need to be addressed. The sound booth might be a way for residents to share their stories about the past and their hopes for the future. We should also remember to make it FUN! Kids, families, whomever…people can be silly, creative…whatever they like! We discussed building on an existing relationship that ZUMIX Radio has with an East Boston High media class as a way to reach out to young people and bring the booth to them. There are also a number of community organizations, churches, and public squares and parks where we could bring the booth to people. As you can imagine, we want to make sure the booth is as portable, appealing, and useful as possible. It should be light, have both private and public spaces, be able to both record and play audio, and should be visually captivating.

Potentially, the old-fashioned radio and the story booth could be combined. We think we’ll be able to reach out the Media Lab and other MIT sources to find some of the tools we’ll need for both of these projects. But in order to move forward with these ideas in the immediate future, our next steps include:

• Asking Sasha about our budget!

• Doing research on what others have done around story booths (portability, hardware, software, etc)

If you have questions, suggestions, or ideas, please leave a comment!

• Intelligent Mischief: http://intelligentmischief.com/2013/08/09/meet-intelligent-mischief/ (Terry Marshall)
• Design Studio 4 Social Intervention: http://ds4si.org/ (Ken Bailey)
• Vida Urbana / City Life: http://clvu.org/ (Mike Leyba)
• Spare Change News: http://sparechangenews.net/ (Vincent Flanagan; Aditi will present on behalf of Vincent)
• REV-:  http://www.studiorev.org (Marisa Jahn and Anjum Asharia; Rodrigo will present on behalf of Marisa and Anjum)
• Brazilian Immigrant Center: http://www.braziliancenter.org (Lenita Carmo and Danielle Villela)
• The Urbano Project: http://www.urbanoproject.org/ (Stella McGregor and Risa Horn)
• ZUMIX: http://www.zumix.org/ (Lucia Duncan)

Intelligent Mischief: http://intelligentmischief.com/2013/08/09/meet-intelligent-mischief/ (Terry Marshall)
Intelligent Mischief (IM) started up in June as a hacklab for creative civic engagement.  Terry has 15 years experience in labor, youth, community organizing around various issues. IM is a place he created to house crazy ideas and move organizing forward.

Terry grew up in Boston and his family is from Barbados. He was an organizer at SEIU 1199, involved in the national health care struggle, now known as Obamacare.  Terry noticed that young people weren’t involved in the campaign and that campaigners were not talking to young people in their own language.  He and his team came up with an idea to open mic events mixing hip hop, spoken word, personal stories, and music, focused on access to health care. IM took this project on a city-wide tour, in part after seeing the Tea Party town halls. They asked “what would our community’s Town Halls look like?” He shows a 6 minute video about this work: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VR7Yn-CzBI?

IM is about mashing up culture and politics. They are currently being housed by the Future Boston Alliance (http://www.futureboston.com/). In November and December they are going to partner with Future Boston Alliance to run a series of panels and a creative hackathon around ‘reimagining blackness’ in light of Trayvon Martin’s murder, the Zimmerman verdict, and Stand Your Ground laws, as well as the mobilizations by Dream Defenders. The goal is to have a hackathon, but with less reliance on programmers, and more of a focus on bringing in community members and artists.

Q&A
Q: Can you talk about what that hackathon might look like?
A: The main two kind of programs we have are “What Ifs,” which are pop-up art interventions, and “creative hacks.” We want to incorporate technology, and also promote social entrepreneurship in the black community. Also, a hackathon might produce a cultural strategy. IM is part of the Center for Story Based Strategy, which uses narrative for social change. For example, at a previous event, we produced a mock boxing match to address questions around the Financial Crisis – “America vs Bank of America” – and that was our ‘app’ or solution.

Q: Is the collaborative idea about designing what the hackathon will look like, or just takes place at the event?
A: The collaboration is in designing the hackathon.

Q: Have you considered calling it something other than “hackathon”? Sometimes coders go to events that turn out to have corporate sponsors, a competition, and prizes, and end up unhappy because it’s not what they think of as hacking.
A: I usually use the term creative hacks.

Design Studio 4 Social Intervention: http://ds4si.org/ (Ken Bailey)
Next, Ken Bailey from DS4SI presents. They are a creativity lab for the social change sector. Ken was a fellow at the Center for Reflective Practice before it became CoLab (Community Innovator’s Lab). Together with Lori Lobenstine they wondered why there’s no space for research and development focused on civil society rather than the market, and decided to make one. Ken shows a slide about “Productive Fictions“: this is a way to get people inside the social sector to imagine new ways to approach social problems. They use imaginative fiction to get people think differently and imagine new possibilities. We have to imagine possible futures in order to create the world we want to create.

One productive fiction they came up with, was the Public Kitchen: http://ds4si.org/public-kitchen/. It engaged over 500 residents. If a kitchen was public like a library, what would that mean for our lives? What would that mean for what we spend on food? The first one was in Upham’s Corner, for 10 days. They had lots of partners and participants. They’re hoping to do another round this November.

Another project was Making Planning Processes Public (http://ds4si.org/blog/2013/4/9/making-planning-processes-public-in-uphams-corner.html), also happened in Upham’s Corner.  They took the planning processes and planning initiatives that are typically only discussed in community meetings and translated the information and brought it into a gallery space. They created a hub in a neighborhood to help people learn about what was going on in their backyard. They worked with artist Philippe Lejeune for this project. They’re trying to up their game around the aesthetic of social change. Ken says it’s important to give people a positive experience of the things you’re trying to communicate.

The next initiative, StreetLab: Upham’s (http://futureboston.com/about/our-pov/street-lab-uphams), is inviting residents, artists and makers to transform small public spaces in and around Upham’s Corner.

Ken explains that ds4si works all over, not just in Upham’s. They travel to facilitate workshops and spaces elsewhere.

Co-Design Class Challenges:
ds4si.org: making their site more interactive, in parallel with their creativity labs and social interventions. They’re a creativity lab for the social change sector, but their website isn’t very dynamic, they feel.
Democracy Time: can we create an app or social media tool that would capture the changing face of democracy – civil society breaking up and there is no central hub where we know we can get information for what it means to have a healthy society.
Other: they’re open to discussing other ideas people in the class have

Sasha: DS4SI was a partner with the CoDesign Studio last semester. What did you learn from the experience?
Ken: That studio helped creating Making Planning Processes Public. It gave people a way to think more about the complicated nature of advocating for certain things. The project was an interactive simulation of possible scenarios. We wish we had the data from the project (we didn’t receive that), and this time we’d like to see something all the way through.
Sasha: One of the things we will do early in the course, is develop MOUs to make sure everyone knows what project completion actually looks likes. How do you develop a process where everyone is clear about what is going to happen?

Vida Urbana / City Life: http://clvu.org/ (Mike Leyba)

Mike shows a video overview of their work: http://vimeo.com/74722901, and see http://vimeo.com/clvu/videos/all.

City Life/Vida Urbana is a 40-year-old bilingual, community organization whose mission is to fight for racial, social and economic justice and gender equality by building working class power through direct action, coalition building, education and advocacy. The video shows City Life organizing mobilizations at Bank of America around the housing foreclosure crisis.

Next he narrates this Prezi: http://prezi.com/dypu4p0h3eij/city-lifevida-urbana/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

They have a very specific focus, which is housing displacement. Housing displacement comes through a variety of means – gentrification, predatory lending. Their focus is where do people live, where should they live, and who’s moving in. They focus on tenant organizing.

Mike provides some history about the organization, from 1973, when Vida Urbana formed and supported Tenant Associations to preserve affordability, improve building conditions and resist displacement. Tenant Associations are about collective bargaining by renters. They’ve won 99 year affordability contracts, where the rent can only be raised 2% a year for 99 years. In 2007, they worked with tenants and homeowners facing foreclosure and eviction to stay in their homes after foreclosure, a method termed “sword and sheath” that has been replicated across the nation.

In 2013, they started an investor campaign: due to the foreclosure crisis, most foreclosure purchases were by speculators and management companies.
Challenge: Going against popular narrative that the housing foreclosure crisis is over.

Their approach:
– Housing is a human right
– Solidarity across, race, class, age and gender
– Desire to create long-term systemic change
– Overcoming systemic oppression
– Speaking one’s truth through a narrative framework

The project – we employ a collaborative approach in everything we do and are looking to work with students who want to advance social, economic and racial justice and gender equality.

Their Project: to address the cultural narrative that the housing and foreclosure crisis is over.  They propose various potential angles: Popular education, Media education, Institutional angle, Movement angle

Institutional angle: What tools can be deployed to change the narrative?
Movement angle: What tools needed to unite?
We have the voices, but how do we unite them?

They hold over 1100 cases in their database at one time and work a lot with Mass Housing Partnership. They try to tell the stories in a different way. Mike describes an eviction defense they conducted last week, a theatrical event where people chain themselves to the door to keep from being evicted. This generates visibility, media coverage, and pressure on the banks.

Q: Do you work mostly in East Boston or all over:
A: East Boston is quickly gentrifying. There’s an East Boston Tenant Association. There are also associations in various neighborhoods. There’s a Brockton tenant association that just started up.

There are encouraging stories there too. Antonio was a former rapper, three years ago he was facing foreclosure and now he’s still in his house, and he works on our staff. He made an album called “Bank Attack” that came out of protest songs.

Q: Are you working on any of the angles you mentioned in particular, or likely to?
A: Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac currently own half the mortgages. The FAHA is above them (link?). There have been multiple studies that show that it’s better for the community, taxpayers, to renegotiate the loans. Your taxes are paying for the eviction of working peopple, instead of renegotiation. They’re trying to get deMarco replaced, but it’s hard to get on the agenda with Syria front and center

Spare Change News: http://sparechangenews.net/ (Vincent Flanagan)

Aditi presents on behalf of Vincent Flanagan. Spare Change News (http://sparechangenews.net) comes out of the homeless empowerment project; they were founded in 1992 and have a twofold mission: to build skills and also create a livelihood for homeless folks. The stories are written by homeless people and allies.

Vendors buy the paper for 25c and sell it for a dollar. Since 1992, 3,000 people have earned money from the paper.

The second goal is to change the perception of homeless people in the area.
Other newspapers like this have been started elsewhere, the original founder also started a similar paper in Seattle.  Stories in the paper focus on the question, “How can we get people to think differently about homeless people?”

For the project, some of the challenges that Spare Change News would like to address:

• How can their ideas reach a greater audience, especially people under the age of 25?
• Through an informal survey, they found that 40-60% of people who buy the paper aren’t reading the stories or learning about the causes – how can we change that?
• They’re part of the North American Street Newspaper network, and also an international network, but would like to know more about how to leverage those networks.

Q: Do they help the homeless people sell papers to a company or an organization weekly rather than having to sell it daily?
A: The paper is published twice a week and they want the homeless person to sell the paper, it’s their way of making money. They have trainings to sell and are training vendors to talk about the stories.

There has been a collaboration in the past between Spare Change News and the Center for Civic Media, maybe 5-6 years ago, focused on building connections between vendors and the people buying the papers. Vendors, selling papers, included stickers with their papers with QR codes to link to individual vendor’s page or profile on SpareChangeNews.net so they could learn more about their individual story and build knowledge of vendors.

REV-: http://www.studiorev.org (Marisa Jahn and Anjum Asharia)

Rodrigo presents on behalf of Rev- a media/arts/design studio based in NYC.

_Message from REV-/Marisa “Hi Co-Design Studio! We are really excited for the opportunity to collaborate with you this semester. Students who are self-motivated; excited to collaborate; and interested in the way that art can impact social justice work would be a great fit for our team. Thanks for inviting us to pitch, and hope to work w/ you soon!”

_Followed by this brief video (approx. 1:30 min) of Marisa explaining New Day New Standard https://vimeo.com/72039615
As explained in the handout, we are seeking to produce a NDNS for Massachusetts, whose Bill of Rights is about to pass, granting the state’s 100,000 nannies, housekeepers, and careworkers basic rights like overtime pay, days of rest, etc.

_Followed by this similarly brief preview video (approx. 1:30 min) of Project NannyVan, a roving public art project accelerating the movement for domestic workers’ rights. https://vimeo.com/74250301
(Note that this is the debut of the ‘Nanthem’!!! (the nanny anthem)).

The MA hotline we produce in this class will be one of several tools that the NannyVan will share with parents and the broader public.  Rodrigo continues, Marisa is involved with the Nu Law Lab at Northeastern. The idea is that students in this class would partner with BIC, Nu Law Lab, and Rev- to work on the current campaign and advocacy around passing the Domestic Bill of Rights in Massachusetts. Students in this project will be expected to join some Wednesday evening meetings at BIC, together with the NuLawLab students.

Q: Are all the domestic workers female?
A: No, not all of them, but this project is focusing on nannies, which do tend to be mostly females.

Brazilian Immigrant Center: http://www.braziliancenter.org (Lenita Carmo and Danielle Villela)

BIC is located in Allston and has chapters in a few other places. Their mission is to empower and support their community around the issues of education, workers’ rights, and immigration. They have ESL classes, OSHA trainings, a domestic worker policy clinic, and an immigration clinic for people who are victims of Secure Communities. Natalicia, our ED, went to NYC in 2010 and brought this movement for a Domestic Worker’s Bill of Rights back to MA brining four organizations together to join the Massachusetts Coalition of Domestic Workers.

With the support of the National Domestic Worker Alliance, they are organizing for the MA Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. Danielle explains that they want domestic workers to be visible to the world – it’s a job that nobody sees.

She also says “Our most important job will be after this law passes.” This is because they will have to educate people and assist. We have 2 research projects around this:
1. with OSHA around health and safety
2. in partnership with UMass boston and the sociological initiative foundation, they are researching domestic worker conditions.

They also have an exhibition in partnership with Mario Quiroz (http://marioquiroz.com/), to make domestic workers more visible. They have exhibitions in Quincy, Somerville, Hyannis. They have pictures of people of different ages, races, and type of domestic work, with a little about each person.

There’s no law protecting domestic workers so the BIC has a mediation clinic that helps to resolve disputes between domestic workers and their employers.

OSHA – Occupation, Safety and Health Administation (https://www.osha.gov) – is a government agency that can go to any workplace to monitor health and safety conditions. But, they can’t go to workplaces for domestic workers, because these are private residences. So, BIC is doing a survey of workers about the conditions of work, including chemical agents people use, safety, etc. Most workers do not have training or knowledge about the products they use. We also have OSHA training for people who work in construction, and there is also someone from the OSHA staff that will be working on this project.

Q: Are you trying to collect data? What type?
A: Yes, what kinds of products workers are using, how their job is all day — what are they doing during the day. One is about health and safety, the other questions are around — are they being paid, in cash.
We want to know type of product they use – like do they use windex and how long are they exposed to the product. This project is a partnership with UMass Boston. We plan to present this research in November.

The Urbano Project: http://www.urbanoproject.org/ (Stella McGregor and Risa Horn)

Stella is the founder and artistic director of Urbano and Risa is the Education Coordinator. Urbano is a youth arts organization located in Jamaica Plain in a 3000 sq. ft. brewery building. They work with professional artists and high school youth that address social justice issues. The work is all project-based and each year there is a theme.

They’re in their fifth year of operations; Stella is an artist and architect. Urbano began as an artist-run organization in the late 1980s, to explore the role that art can play in creating social change. This led her to integrate education as part of her artistic practice.

They have several groups: curatorial, performance, visual arts tracks. The public art for social change collective invited mexican artist Pedro Reyes to bring his project Palas por Pistolas (Shovels for Guns). He gathered handguns, melted them down, and created shovels. The shovels were used to plant trees in memory of victims of gun violence. The project culminated with a group pilgrimage to plant a tree in Stonybrook Park.

In 2011, they started focusing projects around a specific theme, and their theme was disobedience. They created a project called “The Freedom Trail on Trial” together with Gedeminas Urbonas (a professor and artist at MIT: http://act.mit.edu/people/professors/gediminas-urbonas/), around the Archive of Disobedience that his group was constructing. They did installations along the freedom trail raising questions of disobedience.

In 2013, the theme was manifestations of inclusions and exclusions in the landscape. It was a data visualization project using statistics around access to transport and they created sculptures around that data and went out into the public to education people about it.

This year, we’re working on the Emancipated City, reimagining Boston is a project to imagine what it means to be free. All year they will be doing collaborative installations in public spaces. The goal is to create models of a reimagined Boston and spark public conversation.

This summer in Dudley square they did a project with a vertical garden, to address issues of food justice and environmental racism. They also brought the piece to their space in Jamaica Plain – they usually have a culminating event there.

Teens did a performative piece that included elements of data visualization. People put red or blue dots onto performers’ bodies in agreement or disagreement with statements like “as a man, I should earn more than a woman,” “as an African-American, I have a better chance of going to jail than going to college” and “as a lesbian, I’ve earned my place in hell.”

Teens dressed up like Trayvon Martin and went out into Copley Square and when someone treated them badly they would give them a flier.
They are trying to reclaim a place of being important and capable.

Inspiration: bankofimagination.com
Interested in interactive and inclusive multimedia projects / participatory media.
See also: www.thewildernessdowntown.com; www.wechoosethemoon.org

Q: How do you actually want to collaborate with the class?
A: We want to make our web interface more interactive and participatory the same way that our projects are. We’d like to make sure that the community outside and people from elsewhere in the world could think about possibilities for what an emancipated city could look like, could look at the projects the students and artists are doing in real-time. That’s a possibility.

Q: So you’re looking for students with technical (programming) skills?
Or there could be other ways. We’re looking to get to the next level in terms of visibility. Our teens are exploring topics and issues and are also looking at how to be effective activitists and organizers.

ZUMIX: http://www.zumix.org/ (Lucia Duncan)

Lucia is the radio coordinator at Zumix. It is in East Boston by the Maverick T Stop. It was founded by Madeleine Steczynski in response to a wave of youth violence in East Boston. It started out as a music and youth development program and continues to do that. We moved to a renovated fire station on Sumner Street and have a beautiful space that plays a critical role in East Boston. It’s really the only arts and culture space in the area. Their mission is to empower youth to make music to have a positive impact on their lives and communities.

There are a range of solo and ensemble classes, performance, production, and there’s a radio station. The radio station started in 1995 as an AM broadcast (1630 AM) and you could hear it for two blocks. They are now applying for a low-power FM license (http://www.prometheusradio.org/Apply_LPFM_License). They stream 24 hours, have youth shows – mostly live shows – in the evening and adult community shows in the morning and daytime hours. They have training for DJs, audio storytelling, etc. We post these on our blogs and on PRX.

They’ve just begun podcasting shows with a member of BIC’s show, National Domestic Radio (https://www.facebook.com/nationaldomesticradio). It’s a monthly show by and for domestic workers.

Some challenges Zumix is facing:

• Getting visibility and listenership (even within the building, and the broader community)
• It’s a streaming station in a community that might not have as much internet access as other communities
• They have limited youth involvement in the station beyond doing their shows. Some students are traveling from other parts of the city. We could work on communication with youth about getting involved in the station.
• There’s only one staff person working on the radio station, so they are always looking for volunteers and interns.
• Youth are not as tuned into radio as they were in the past, so we have a challenge — is radio dead, how do we think about communicating and designing ways to connect an old technology to new ways of listening to keep it meaningful and connected to youth. Lucia teaches at East Boston high and when she plays radio stories, students always ask “where’s the picture?” We don’t listen to radio. They don’t think that radio is dead, but know that they need to think about communicating and designing ways to connect to new forms of listening.

There are two design/build projects that might be fun:

• One would be a space in the upstairs of their building where people often hang out. They’ve thought of building a computer housed in a fun looking old fashioned radio player. A wind up solar powered radio on her desk was great, kids would come and wind it up to listen.
• Another is a mobile sound booth where they could record stories in the community, go around East Boston, a neighborhood that’s rapidly changing. There are a lot of issues being discussed – like a casino being built, a lot of development is happening.
• Other projects could be to design marketing materials for the station, and getting youth involved in that to engage them.
• Another idea is experimenting with tools for communicating with and engaging with youth and adult DJs — we communicate via facebook and email already
• Lucia says, “I’d love to hear other ideas also.”

Q: Do you have computers on site for youth to use if they wanted to create their own marketing materials?
A: We have two laptops that are roaming and a multimedia lab, which often is free.

Q: How are you funded?
A: Through grants mostly. We get grants for collaboration with schools in East Boston. This could be something to look at if people were interested in it.

Community Radio in the US getting access to licenses has been a long drawn-out battle, the current expansion of LPFM licenses is a unique opportunity.

Q: With the design-build project, would we be meeting with the youth?
A: For this semester, Zumix meets monthly with the DJs and that could be increased if the group was interested in working on the design.

Q: Where did the idea for the storybooth come from? Is there support for it from the DJ community?
A: We think there could be interest, but we haven’t actually talked to DJs about it.

At MIT, I am a second year Master’s student at Comparative Media Studies and a research assistant in the Center For Civic Media. My main interests are data journalism and the future of press in modern democratic societies.

I love literature and philosophy… especially when they are found together. Like Albert Camus, I believe “a novel is nothing but philosophy expressed in images.” An amateur photographer, I am fond of images in whatever form they take: there is little more beautiful than a hike through the rainforest woven through with shallow but crystalline rivers.

I was born in New York City, where we lived in Washington Heights until I was six. After that, I was transplanted to Jersey, where I would sit in front of the window for hours, looking for people. Once, I spotted someone and started to scream with joy and exclaimed, “MOM! COME QUICK! THERE ARE PEOPLE HERE LIKE IN NEW YORK!” My grandfather always used to say, “people need people,” and I couldn’t live in a place where I couldn’t easily interact with people. Needless to say, I always missed city living and after I graduated from the University of Michigan, I headed straight back.

In New York, I first worked for a legal services non-profit as a legal advocate, representing low- and no-income New Yorkers on issues tied to their ongoing receipt of public assistance, Medicaid, food stamps, and housing subsidies. Then, I worked for a non-profit supportive housing developer, coordinating the rent-up process for their newest building in Brownsville, Brooklyn. In the middle of it all, I went to Turkey on a Fulbright Fellowship, teaching English at a university in a rural town and getting plump for Thanksgiving — it was gravy! (chuckle? I think I may be cringing)

I am currently a second year student in the city planning program at MIT and my interests lie at the nexus of housing and economic development. I am excited to take this course and work with community organizations in the Boston area to help them develop narratives around issues that are important to them through different forms of media!