About the Interns
"We're
interns from the Oakland Museum of California's Urban Spaces NEED Leadership
Project. We worked with neighbors of a one-acre vacant lot called Jungle
Hill for a year and a half, helping them plan work days, community events,
and activities for kids.
We found that a vacant lot is a great place where neighbors can get together, learn about nature, and improve their community. Kids, teens and adults came together to take care of Jungle Hill. They're making a difference in their community.
With an open mind, patience and hard work, you can bring your community together, too."
The Urban Spaces NEED Leadership Program was designed to help urban residents learn more about their neighborhood. We worked with neighbors of Jungle Hill (in Oakland, California's Fruitvale District) to help create a plan for how to use Jungle Hill. The Urban Spaces NEED Leadership Program was sponsored by the Oakland Museum of California.
The "NEED" in our program's name stands for "Neighborhood Environmental Education and Discovery." Through learning about the history and ecology of Jungle Hill, its neighbors are better able to plan for its future. Through activities on Jungle Hill and in neighbors' homes, field trips to other urban gardens and mini-parks, visits to museums of natural history, and through neighbors talking with one another, Jungle Hill became a catalyst for strengthening this community. Leadership was also an important aspect of this program, so the project was designed to support neighbors (especially young people) in building their leadership capabilities.
Our Youth Leadership Interns were central to every aspect of the Urban Spaces Program. Interns Tania Grande, Frank Leyva, Sergio Perez (above) and Kellynna Tran worked 15-25 hours per week from March 1995 through July 1996. Their responsibilities included organizing and supervising a weekly Jungle Hill Kids' Club (with neighbor Kris Wagner); developing and implementing a survey of neighbors' opinions, attitudes, and wishes for Jungle Hill; and organizing community meetings and community celebrations such as the annual Easter Egg Hunt, July 4th Bar-B-Que, and camping trips for neighborhood kids. They also strategized about how to involve more teenagers from the Jungle Hill neighborhood, and came up with the idea of doing a mural. For that project, they wrote two successful mini-grant applications, hired a muralist from the group Support Oakland Artists, and did the outreach to get teens involved. Team leadership was rotated on a weekly basis, with a different staff person responsible each week for assigning tasks, leading meetings, and keeping the team on track.
For the first nine months of the project, we focused intensively on our work with the neighbors in making positive changes for Jungle Hill. For the last nine months, we gradually tapered off of our direct involvement in the neighborhood, as we put more of our efforts into designing and organizing the museum exhibition, This Is Our Land! Teens Speak Out On Nature and Community in the City.
The interns' role in the exhibition was also central. Together, we chose an exhibit designer to work with us, since none of us had ever designed a museum exhibit before. With the designer, Darcie Fohrman, the whole team worked hard at coming up with a concise list of "communication goals" -- statements of how we hoped visitors would be affected by our exhibition. Once we knew what the exhibition's goals were, the interns did initial design brainstorming to come up with what we might make the exhibition out of. This gave Darcie a good sense of the how the interns wanted the exhibit to "feel" -- for instance, Tania was really clear that she didn't want it to look slick, or too professional; she wanted it to look like teenagers had done it.
The interns critiqued Darcie's first design, and sent her back to the drawing board for a few more drafts. We also met with some of Jungle Hill's neighbors to get their input to the design. Once the whole team was satisfied with the design, we started to write the text and create the drawings. Most of the text for the exhibition was written by Sergio, with a few sections by Tania and their supervisor, Susan Quinlan. Sergio and Tania also translated the text into Spanish. Meanwhile, Frank did the drawings that would ultimately be enlarged and airbrushed. This was crucial to the exhibition's hip-hop feel.
We still had lots more work to do, though. The interns chose the colors, type styles, and organized the photographs and several of the layouts for the exhibition. They conducted interviews and recorded ambient sound for the exhibition's sound elements, and gave on-camera interviews for the exhibition's video. And of course, they did media outreach and interviews to publicize the exhibition. In short, they participated in every aspect of the exhibition.
All of this work took a lot of skills and leadership! Our interns brought a lot of talent, skill and dedication to the project, all of which they built upon through the project. They gained very concrete, practical skills, like using a computer for databasing, desktop publishing, and doing spreadsheets, as well as word processing. They also improved their writing skills (see what you think of their writing -- much of this website was originally written by Sergio for the museum's exhibition). Through the project, their public speaking improved tremendously: at the beginning of the project, they were pretty nervous about giving speeches, but by the end they were giving eloquent, engaging television and radio interviews -- in Spanish and English. Throughout the project, they attended workshops and trainings on public speaking, working with the media, and meeting facilitation. The interns increased in responsibility and leadership, as the project gave them increasingly complex opportunities to use and develop these skills.
-Sandy Bredt
Project Director, Urban Spaces NEED Leadership Program
Return to This is Our Land! Homepage
Whats' so Great About Open Space/ The History of JH/ The Dreaded Wall/ There's Power in Numbers/ Teens Make a Difference/ Problems/What would you do with One Acre of Open Space/ Interns of JH/A Work In Progress.../JH Update/ Visitor Comments/ Credits
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