Praxis Course: AFST234: Advancing Racial Justice

Semester: Fall 2025

Faculty Advisor/Professor: Dr. Bailey and Sarah Spath

Community Partner: Neighbors Helping Neighbors on the Main Line

Praxis Site Supervisor: Muneera Walker

Praxis Poster:

Further Context:

Neighbors Helping Neighbors on the Main Line (NHN) is a grassroots organization providing a range of services to support underrepresented neighbors and transform other entities that exist to support them in Lower Merion Township. NHN’s goal is to help create an empowered community where every person has equitable access to what they need to thrive. NHN has three primary areas of focus: Education Empowerment, Food Security, and Outreach. & Resource Connections. NHN has several recurring programs and runs events for the community. NHN runs a food pantry distribution every Thursday and Saturday from 10 AM-12 PM. They deliver meals to 130+ families every week. From 3-5 PM every Monday-Thursday, community members join the “Homework Club,” a free homework help and tutoring space for students of all ages. NHN puts-on several large events that are open to all! We attended a car show block party and “Tails on the Trails,” a dog walk and run to benefit NHN.

I, Lori, feel like my cup is overflowing in a beautiful way thanks to my work with NHN. Something that I was immediately struck by is the familiarity between everyone who comes to NHN events. They truly create spaces for genuine connection, which feels so vital in a time period defined so much by forces that stoke fear among community members and isolation from communal resources. I hope to continue supporting their work in future semesters.

I, Aya, am deeply grateful to be a part of the work NHN is doing. My time with NHN has helped me grow as a photographer, a learner, and a teacher. There is so much love and care present at NHN – it’s a space of inclusive and intergenerational community where neighbors support one another and help each other to thrive. Working with children at NHN has been a real blessing, giving me the chance to learn how to teach and how to support others in their learning. I am working to create ongoing fundraisers as well as clothing and food drives for NHN at Bryn Mawr and Haverford. I look forward to continuing my involvement with NHN beyond this class.

To help support NHN, you can contribute to NHN’s work directly on their website, share the work they are doing, attend the events they throw, and volunteer on site. Help is especially appreciated during the Homework Club, the food pantry, and packing food deliveries.

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:

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.

Creative Data: Exploring intersections of Data and Community with Neighbors Helping Neighbors on the Main Line

Semester: Fall 2024

Course Instructor: Darlyne Bailey

Field Site: Neighbors Helping Neighbors

Field Supervisor: Muneera Walker & Rachael Omansky Chou

Praxis Poster:

Further Context:

Neighbors Helping Neighbors (NHN) on the Main Line is a grassroots organization supporting underrepresented communities and youth in the Greater Philadelphia region. One of the three cornerstone initiatives of NHN programming is their Education Empowerment work. During the school year an important part of this work takes place during their Homework Club which provides Free in-person after-school homework help and healthy snacks, Monday through Thursday. Tutors include retired teachers and students from Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges. Our praxis project focused on collecting and analyzing data to both qualitatively and quantitatively measure the success of the NHN Homework Club program. We aimed to understand and illustrate how NHN’s efforts effectively support their participants’ academic success, using both qualitative insights and quantitative metrics.

We had to redefine the project several times as we had to be particularly careful about the data we were collecting since the work we were doing was with children; permission forms and ethics, and protecting privacy were especially important. Defining those rules and making sure we understood those parameters took some exploration and help from our mentors.

Next, understanding how to best frame our survey questions to present information in a format that the children would connect to was challenging. After two days of implementing paper surveys with lukewarm reception, we were inspired by a class reading to pursue a community data collection method called photovoice. Making data collection FUN drastically changed the levels of excitement in participating – no participant opted out, and several tried very hard to convince us to take the survey twice so they could take additional photos.

Finally, data sorting, labeling, and interpretation are the biggest remaining chunks of work that our team is left with, and in retrospect, we think collecting the data should have been half the project and an entire separate semester could have been dedicated to sorting and interpreting the data.

Our Creative Data team is left still wanting to better understand how to represent and communicate the data we have collected to clearly define next steps, maybe not for our project, but to leave the work we have done in a better place for another project to be able to use the photos and paper surveys as a foundation for their own photovoice work with NHN. One semester was just too short a timeline to accomplish a project of this scope. Our group’s final step will be the sorting and labelling all of the images that we collected with their corresponding descriptions collected verbally from the children as the photos were taken. Following this, we hope the photos could be used as tools in a series of discussions at NHN to find themes and meanings, perhaps using the 10S Framework, and drawing inspiration from the Photovoice project and the teachings of Paulo Freire.