Internal Process: Neighbors Helping Neighbors on the Main Line
Course Instructor: Darlyne Bailey
Field Site: Neighbors Helping Neighbors
Field Supervisor: Muneera Walker & Rachael Omansky Chou
Praxis Poster:
ARJ_Internal Process_Combined
Further Context:
This semester, we had the opportunity to volunteer at Neighbors Helping Neighbors on the Main Line (NHN) as the Internal Process team. NHN is a non-profit organization that supports underrepresented youth and communities in the greater Philadelphia area.
NHN has many different programs; however, we focused on the Education Empowerment program, which offers free in-person after-school homework help, one-on-one tutoring through a hybrid platform, and year-round youth mentoring. As the Internal process team, we aimed to review the structure of NHN to find strengths and weaknesses while also growing the program organically to include new features. Specifically, we focused on cursive writing, promotion, family engagement, large group reading, and cataloguing.
Our first project was catalogs. The catalogs consisted of documenting and digitalizing the book and games offered at NHN on the Main Line. This process was tedious. After taking pictures of everything, we put them onto a google doc. Then, we made them into catalogs to highlight the expansive library with many popular books and detail the skills learned by the games. This project was just an inventory project. It revealed a need for books for kids above the age of 12 at NHN.
Our second project was CursiveLogic. CursiveLogic as offered by our Praxis supervisor, Muneera, is a cursive writing program that tries to use colors, shapes, and catchphrases as a way of trying to make learning cursive more comprehensive and more accessible. We first began by researching the history of cursive writing to which we created a timeline that goes from the 1500s to the present day. Alongside the timeline, we offer a brochure that includes the research done about the benefits of cursive and our investigation of CursiveLogic. The last part of the brochure includes the way that CursiveLogic can be implemented at NHN.
Our final project involved adding family engagement events. We developed a series of family-oriented programs and organized them in a detailed spreadsheet. We planned five events to take place throughout the year, with the ultimate goal of increasing parent involvement and fostering a sense of community among families. The programs include Open House/Back to NHN Night, Reading Workshop, Career Day, Community Cookout, and a Gardening Workshop. We first created an event planner spreadsheet that can be used as a template for organizing any future events at NHN. We filled the planner out for each of the five events to provide a complete event description, logistics, objectives, and to-do tasks. We also included a post-event evaluation section that can be used to track the reach and impact of each event to analyze how they can expand over time. Lastly, we created mock flyers for each event, which can be edited and used for NHN promotional use. We wanted to provide both the spreadsheets and flyers to give a clear picture of what we imagine the events to be and make the implementation process seamless.
I, Makayla, really thought I knew about racial justice, but I was wrong. I thought I knew what most NGOs behaved like, but I was wrong. I had an amazing experience with NHN and the overall community that upholds the shared commitment of the four pathways: radical love, cultural humility, forgiveness, and compassion. This experience has forever changed my perspective on ongoing racial issues within the environmental justice movement. I believe that if we can heal people, then the next step is to heal the world.
I, Jess, really enjoyed my time at NHN and am very grateful for the growth opportunities and insights into what racial justice can look like. I learned how much of a difference community-based education can make as a supplement to traditional schooling and how it is in many cases a more effective environment for teaching because of the extra intentionality behind the methods of youth mentoring. I also observed how process improvement efforts can happen organically and not always need a systematic approach. The mission of Neighbors Helping Neighbors inspired me to pursue a role in process improvement, as this experience gave me insight into how that can be achieved naturally within a community-based organization.
I, Salem, am very appreciative of the opportunity to work with NHN. Having been involved with similar yet less successful educational organizations in the past, it was really enlightening to observe how NHN is actually enacting racial justice. I think it boils down to immense care and patience at every structural level. I learned about applying academic concepts and research to real life contexts, which, being community-based, differ from traditional settings. I feel emboldened in my ability to contribute to the communities in my life, on both an organizational and personal level.