One-To-1 Exercise Paper

Lance Stewart
One-to-One Exercise Paper
Going Local: Community Development & Planning
Clark University
Dr. Laurie Ross & Dr. Ramon Borges-Mendez

The first article I read within the class, which served as my formal introduction to community development work, What is my Public Narrative by Marshall Ganz, helped me develop my public narrative. Within the conclusion of the article, Ganz states that “Narrative allows us to communicate the values that motivate the choices that we make. Narrative is not talking “about” values; rather narrative embodies and communicates values. And it is through the shared experience of your values that we can engage with others, motivate one another to act, and find the courage to take risks, explore possibility

I eventually found someone that had a compelling passion to help build his community using experiences
I chose Jose Herrera, a candidate for the Certificate of Youth Work at Clark University and a volunteer at Straight Up Ministries. Jose and I know one another from encounters between our mutual friends. With my knowledge of his passion for wanting to work in youth development, and my experience as a classroom teacher, I thought he would be perfect to have a one-to-one interview since our interests were similar in a way. For the interview, I did not take notes, and to my surprise, I was able to leave our interview with an overall view of Jose’s passion for working with youth, his future goals, and most importantly how our experiences as children helped mold our outlook on our work today. During the interview, Jose mentioned, “Youth are Youth”. As organizations and youth development workers, we have to stop differentiating between youth that are “at-risk”, on “the-cuff”, or won’t need that much intervention due to them being able to “survive the storm”. I hold those same principles in my teaching with different students who may learn at different paces. Jose

Through our meeting, Jose and I could have built a relationship to combat the student, or adolescent, that falls within the middle; “at-risk” youth who are neither an academic scholar, or a perceived risk of dropping out of school, committing violence and selling drugs. After our meeting, we could eventually meet again to discuss our goals further and figure out next steps. However, do we know if these services already exist within another organization? If so, do we talk with them to figure out if we could join efforts? If not, do we conduct more one-to-one interviews to see if we could grow our collective effort? The effort to combat youth & gang violence, education, and other crime prevention in Worcester is a citywide effort. Main South is a piece to the puzzle, but is not the only neighborhood that is plagued with these issues. However, the social capital associated with the issue of gang and youth violence, along with high school dropouts, has a strong network in the Main South Neighborhood, making that community of youth development workers strong. Robert Putnam defines Social Capital as features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit (Putnam: 2005). Though the term, “community” is not given to certain neighborhoods or cities, when we look at collective