Finally an update!

Hello all,

I apologize dearly for those who followed my progress actively over the summer and then probably wondered what happened over the fall. Rest assured the fellowship work continued, but being a full-time student again and going through senior fall I became pretty swamped with things to do, and unfortunately updating the blog fell off the to-do list. But so here's a brief synopsis of the last 4 months and what is still to come.

So the the general plan for sustainability of my summer work was to basically create a 10hr per week student leadership position within DREAM to replace my full-time role as community liaison over the summer. With all the computer networking infrastructure in place and kinks worked out, the crux of the work boiled down to leading the parent advisory board meetings, and facilitating the communication and contact information between student mentors and the families (i.e. making sure everyone has all the relevant phone numbers and e-mails). Since DREAM works with two separate housing communties, Northwoods and Hollow Drive, and because I obviously needed to recruit an underclassmen to be able to continue the role once I graduate, I decided that we would have two community liaisons, one for each community. The basic responsibilities of each peson were weekly meeting at each location and spending lots of time on e-mail following up with individual mentors.

As such, I recruited a sophomore Bill Gerath '11 to become the second community liaison, and we have been working together since the beginning of the fall. While in the fall it was more of a shadowing role, we are now at the point where we can each work directly with our respective communities for the winter term.

Speaking of the winter term, Bill and I have been meeting quite a bit over the first week of classes to establish our goals and expectations for the winter term. With a fresh group of 15 or so new frehsmen mentors that just joined the program, we want to engage them early this term to capture their enthusiam. Right now it looks like Bill's going to be organizing weekly dinners in the community and I'm going to be coordinating a homework club once a week. More to come on that later.

As far as the fellowship goes in the bigger picture, I've started talking with Jan Tarjan at Tucker and we are going to finalize a plan next week for how to compile a final presentation report of my experience with the fellowship, the learning outcomes I've achieved, the long-term change that will hopefully continue long down the road, etc.

I will plan to keep the blog udpated more frequently this winter, but as always feel free to send me comments or suggestions by e-mail at brian.bensch@dartmouth.edu.

Hope everyone is having a great start to 2009!

Brian

Wrapping up the summer!

Hello all,

Again I apologize for it being so long between updates. Things have been good but still busy, as I've been wrapping up my full-time portion of the fellowship over the last week or so. I've distributed and collected a bunch of end of summer surveys for the residents and am mostly finished inputting and analyzing them in excel. Doing so has definitely been a learning experience in terms of how to quantify social impact, as well as the logistics of data collection. In addition I've met with the other student & staff leaders in DREAM and put together a refined / defined leadership structure document outlining how the position of community liaison which I've created will interact with the co-chairs and other leadership positions, which until now had never really been defined. The document should help improve dream's overall efficiency by lessening the difficulties due to leadership transitions each term & everyone having different D-Plans.

In other news, the Dartmouth summer term has ended and school started this past week for the kids - which means things are now quiet in the morning, which is nice because it gives me a chance to talk more with parents without kids running around. I'm definitely looking forward to resuming in the fall because its much easier to talk about serious issues with parents when things are calm & quiet and you can have privacy.

As far as the weekly meetings and computer centers are, we had our last meeting of the summer last week and will resume in a few weeks (I'm leading DOC trip and have UGA training for the next few weeks). Our first meeting of fall will kick off with a budgeting & money management presentation by the Consumer Credit Counseling Service of VT/NH. And the computers are all set, have been working without issue for awhile, and the internet service is paid for for awhile. Also, on an unrelated note, last week some of the parents at Hollow Drive commented that it would be nice to have a basketball hoop in the community to give kids (especially the older kids) a productive & safe thing to do instead of getting into trouble. So I did a small campus fund raiser during finals and made about $200 and now they have a hoop, and it's been great to see both parents & kids using it together.

Overall, I'm feeling definitely some mixed emotions as I'm getting ready to move out and back onto campus. I've definitely loved the opportunity to live and work here, and think I've made some good sustainable changes in the community. At the same time, I definitely began the summer with more optimistic expectations of being able to fix or at least help fix some of the more serious issues in the communities - such as the parents with drug & alcohol problems, and one family that had a dysfunctional family dynamic with their teenage daughter, whose since been taken into state custody. On the other hand, interacting with these issues has helped me learn tons about the culture of poverty and why the poverty cycle is do difficult to break.

I probably won't post another update for a few weeks, but look forward to meeting with the UVSE Board members sometime early this fall and will have many more thoughts to share then.

I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday weekend, and I want to thank all the members of the class of '82 for making my summer experience possible. Thanks!

Brian

Update Saturday August 16t

Hello friends,

I apologize it's been a little while since my last update. The last week has been good and busy. I've also been fighting laryngitis which is always fun. But the highlight by far of this past week was that I received word from Comcast that I had received the $1000 grant I applied for to cover funding for internet service and future technology expenses in the community centers for at least the next year. With the new funding, both the community centers now have their own wireless signal (I'd previously been borrowing a neighbor's signal in one of the communities). And the community centers are being used a ton now, which is good to see. Although it's also been a bit crazy because the on-site Americorps member at Northwoods is finished working here, and so the kids come straight to me when they want to use the room.

In other news, weekly meetings continue to go well, and the number of parents who come each week is pretty consistent and sustaining itself. Each week I need to do less and less reminding individuals, and this week about half of them even came 10 minutes early. The one-on-one meetings have become a bit more difficult recently only because I'm having more and more conversations about the bigger issues that have no quick-fixes, like alcoholism, drug abuse, etc.

I've continued to spend considerably more time thinking about how to sustain my role in the community in the coming school year, and while I see relatively few difficulties in making sure the weekly meetings and computers terminals are sustained, I've been struggling much more with the question how to tangibly measure the impact that meetings and computers are having on the more big-picture issues. I think survey-based data will be a good start, but I'd like to eventually be able to work with more hard facts about DREAM's impact on these communities.

Lastly, this week is the last week of the Dartmouth summer term, and so I'll soon begin working with the current program co-chairs during the interim to finalize changes and refinements to the DREAM leadership structure in order to implement them for the start of fall term.

Like always, I appreciate any comments or feedback.

Brian

Update August 5

Hello everyone!

I am a little over a month into the full-time portion of my fellowship project. Feel free to read up on the last few updates and send me any comments you may have. I try to make a post roughly every week or so.

I've now had my first four weekly LAB (Local Advisory Board) meetings for the parents in both communities. Overall I've been very pleased with the turnout and quality of discussion. Just yesterday we had a parent educator from The Family Place come in and facilitate an awesome informal discussion of parenting strategies & struggles. We actually probably had a few too many parents turnout to the meeting, as a few times it was tough to keep the discussion focused and on track. Last week I brought in an internet safety specialist from Prevent Child Abuse Vermont and she gave a nice presentation about the dangers and powers of the internet and how to monitor / teach your child how to use it responsibly. Two weeks from now we'll be having a teen parenting workshop, and the following week we will likely have a program put on by the Consumer Credit Counseling Service of VT/NH. So weekly meetings are going well, as are my one-on-one interactions with individual parents. One of my big struggles though continues to be how to help parents follow through with the little things that add up, like making a follow up phone call to get their child signed up for something. I've frequently found myself realizing that it's often not that parents are unaware of resources or opportunities, but are often too overwhelmed by their own personal health issues or the craziness of raising young kids to get the little things done.

The computers are finally behaving themselves for the most part. I fixed all the major bugs, and finally got Comcast internet service installed and funded at Northwoods last week. Though I'm still working to secure long-term funding for the internet at Hollow Drive. The computers are also finally being used by parents as well as the kids, which is awesome to see. It's definitely been a struggle engaging and introducing the completely computer-illiterate parents to the world of e-mail, but I've now gotten all except for one to at least sign-up an account.

As far as everything else goes, I've been doing more and more thinking and brainstorming this past week about how to sustain the work I've been doing and what changes to the DREAM leadership structure will be appropriate. And as far as living in state-housing surrounded by kids and parents non-stop, it's definitely at times overwhelming, but very worth it.

Thanks for all your continued support, sorry this post was a bit long!
Brian

Update #3

I’m now a full three weeks into my full-time fellowship and things are going real well. It's been a great experience to be living in the community and interacting with parents & kids all the time. We've had two weekly parent meetings so far, and the next two weeks are lined up with an internet safety specialist coming in this week and a parent educator coming in the week after to lead discussion workshops. So far I've gotten really good feedback from parents about the utility of the meetings, and parents have said that DREAM is definitely getting better on the communication front. Computer maintenance has been definitely more of a headache than I imagined, but things are chugging along. I've also almost closed a deal with ComCast whereby they'll be sponsoring / subsidizing high-speed internet for the long-term and we can stop borrowing a signal from nearby. I've been working really closely with a few parents, but am definitely struggling with trying to engage all parents and manage my time most effectively. As far as connecting parents to resources, it's definitely been a work in progress as there's a wide range of awareness about the available services. I also learned first hand this week why parents reported car repair issues as a primary concern, and was fortunate to have a few residents take a look at my own care with me to help me figure out what was wrong.

End of Week 1 Update

Hello all,

I'd now say I'm fully settled into my fellowship work. Tonight I had my first Local Advisory Board (LAB) meeting tonight with the parents at the Northwoods community. I thought it went incredibly well. I was incredibly please with the turnout, and the discussion was relatively smoothly, and it was good to see parents who normally keep to themselves sharing their perspectives with each other. The computers are 99% set-up with internet filters and all, and connected to a temporary internet source, so I can begin setting up parents with e-mail this week. Trying to negotiate a good deal with various ISPs has been an ongoing headache, but I'm close to setting up a long-term solution with ComCast. I've also begun handing out and collecting initial parent surveys that will serve as the benchmark of my progress many months from now. All-in-all, I feel like have a fun and exciting first full week and a half of living here. It's definitely a great learning experience to be treading new waters and figuring things out as I go.

Until next time,
Brian

And so it begins...

Hello everyone! This will be my first blog report of my Class of '82 UVSE Fellowship, and I will be making updates once a week, probably every Friday. I just got back from an 11-day adventure in Florida with the DREAM High Adventure program, where I led a group of 16 teenagers and 8 other Dartmouth students on an adventure of a lifetime. Now that I'm back in the Upper Valley, I'm quickly transitioning into my fellowship work, settling into my apartment in the Northwoods housing complex where I'll be living for the rest of the summer. I do not know how familiar most of you are with my project goals and specific plans, (and I will be the first to admit that the specifics are still evolving), so I will keep this first update brief and will have much more information to share in a week from now. I did start installing the new computers in the Northoods community center today, and will be going door-to-door tomorrow re-introducing myself and my role for the summer to the parents that are now my neighbors. Overall, I am tremendously excited for the experiences that await me in the next few months and beyond.

Feel free to send me comments or questions at brian.j.bensch@dartmouth.edu.

Until next time,
Brian