IDEA Corps Intern: Wesley Walker

The week started rather unconventionally. I appeared on site and no one was there to greet me. It was the brightest morning we’d had in ages, and I was more confused than anything else. After a quick call to my supervisor, Tim I had my plans for the day. 

It wasn’t very structured, but he’d given me enough to go on to get started. Excited to have some direction, I got right on it. Tim asked me to do “one on ones”. These are usually scheduled and scripted but today they would be completely organic. A one on one consists of meeting with a member of the community and talking to them about the positives and negatives that exist there. The idea is to crowdsource from the people closest to the issues at hand so any planning will reflect the will of the community. I was even told I could take down contact information for use later if I found people very interested in our cause. I didn’t have a sheet of questions or a clipboard or even any preparation really but I did what I could. This began with a walk to the bus stop where I made my 1st attempt at talking to somebody.

It was an older Latino man who kindly brushed me off. I'm not quite sure if he thought I was some sort of Jehovah's Witness or selling him something. This was the first of many failures, but I had to believe they were all part of the road to some sort of success. Discouraged but still hopeful I put a smile on my face and tried again, this time with an older black woman I saw with some youth collecting trash. They were much more responsive and willing to talk to me. According to her, litter and illegal dumping were a big problem in Emory Grove and they’d decided to take matters into their own hands. This lined up well with the evidence I would see myself later in the day as I passed signs warning of the consequences of illegal dumping and beer bottles in the street. 

But at that moment I was just grateful someone was treating me like a person and not some sneaky car salesman. As the day went on, I grew a new understanding of the area as I traversed the many packed streets in the hearts of these Gaithersburg neighborhoods. There were so many more houses than I could have imagined. Many were squished between each other in back roads and cuts far from the main road. I took many back paths and ended up pleasantly lost. All the while I said good morning and tried to start conversation with just about anyone that would entertain it. Most people were working or unwilling to do more than return my pleasantries but even that told its own story. 

The story of a hardworking community well versed in Spanish and home to a huge elderly population. A few of the elderly people I came across were even blind or deaf. While I didn’t get many answers from them, I eventually came across an El Salvadoran man and his niece that were much more talkative. According to him Emory Grove’s biggest problem is the lack of maintenance. He’s been living here for years and the same complaints they’ve been having still aren’t being addressed. Potholes, broken odds and ends and other inconveniences remain, the promise of fixes unkept. My day continued in this trend. A little information gathered at a time, hot sun, and struggle with the language barrier. When it was over, I felt exhausted but at the same time enlightened and somewhat content. The rest of the week i felt far less so. I spent it on required reading and Harvard lectures about relationship building. While I saw their relevance and took many notes, it’s hard to beat real world application.

My second week at the internship in Emory Grove felt far more structured. While I still spent the majority of my time on one-on-ones I finally had some direction. I sat down with my supervisor, Tim, at the beginning of the week to discuss everything he had me read. He had a lot of insightful advice for me and stressed that I must be the one to design my work in order for me to get as much as I can out of it. From there I started building initiatives based on what the residents were looking for. This required many more one on one meetings to determine the need. I found even more than I could have hoped for. According to the people I talked to, one of the biggest issues Emory Grove faces today is illegal dumping. 

People both within and outside the community are treating some of their neighborhoods like a common trash can. And to make matters worse the county has failed to do anything about it after years of letting this continue. The best effort I’ve seen has been a handful of signs discouraging the act and a few committed citizens venturing out with trash bags to do the work themselves. In order to address this, I am planning a trash collection weekend to clean up one of the most important and historical centers in the area, Johnson Park. The baseball field just behind it was a Mecca for Negro baseball but today it’s been reduced to a littered-on softball field. 

Urban redevelopment has diminished what was once the pride of the community to the point the single grill left at the park is so dirty your hand comes back black when you touch it. Using flyers, one on one meetings and a partnership with a nonprofit parks organization I plan to get volunteers, supplies and music out there to fix this. I spent much of the week workshopping this idea and pitching it to a variety of people from community members to a man running for city council. This week was great because it felt like I was seeing movement for the first time in terms of generating recognizable change

This week was even better than the last. I got the commitment of the Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Commission to helping with my cleanup effort. They connected me with their volunteer department and me and its head have been in contact continuously on how we plan to fix the issue here. More than that I’m great full for the response of the community members I’ve talked to about this. I’ve gotten commitments from 4 such people to show up to the cleanup and one man playing with his kids even helped clean up the playground with me while we talked about the need for more to be done. It meant a lot to me that what I said inspired him not just to think something but to do something. This has been a great week from communication.

I even managed to talk to one of the people responsible for cleaning the park. They’re a parks service responsible for the incredibly large from here to Potomac. They are receiving funding from both he county and state but according to one of their employees they are criminally understaffed and only manage to make it out here once every two weeks. Worse yet they only clear the trash cans and ground trash from the grass they must mow. That leaves the playground, pavilion, and basketball courts untouched and slowly piling up. This will be the focus for my cleanup effort. The next struggle is working through the logistics of my cleaning operation and getting my other program off the ground.

Looking back over the last couple of weeks at my placement I’ve made countless decisions and concessions. I started out with the goal to independently make a change that would be visible even after I left. That still has not changed but the context around it has. I spent my entire first week just researching history and the next two were mainly rooted in planning and organizing. 

This took a lot of time away from the hands-on portion which I had anticipated being so involved in. Furthermore I only ended up planning two projects. Not nearly as revolutionary as I had hoped. However, after beginning these projects and realizing how many hoops I would have to jump through to get either one of them completed I see my previous goal might be a little unrealistic for this timeline. I still intend to make visible change but I no longer think it will come in the form of some revolutionary alteration to the placement I’m a part of. 

Instead I’m happy to insert myself in the areas I’ve discovered have a need and chase change in those smaller areas. Thus I have divided my efforts into two camps.The first is a single event cleaning up a local community center in which I hope to build ownership of the park and unity between the residents. 

Depending on whether or not the park is well kept after that this may not have the most lasting effect. But through taking people’s information to find new leaders and having them clean themselves to change how they value the space hopefully there will be a lasting impact. My second project is much more likely to stand the test of time. It is a financial literacy program that would take place at the church. I still need to find volunteers for the first class, clean the only space in the church big enough to house them and further flesh out the curriculum with my sponsors. There’s a lot more leg work to do but ideally this would last long after I leave. If I’ve seen god anywhere in my placement it’s been in people’s openness to me. 

Even now while I write this in a park near my placement I’m listening to a new friend I made talk about his job at honeybaked ham. He works for corporate at honeybaked hams and he’s struggling to find a car before he gets promoted so he can make it to his new placement. Him and so many others have been willing to share a piece of their story with me even though i'm virtually a complete stranger. I'm not quite sure why. Maybe it’s just in their nature, maybe it's my inviting face or maybe its the lord. Regardless I’m thankful. I couldn’t do what I do to the best of my ability without them.

When my internship began I had one clear goal in mind. To learn how to significantly contribute to service without any type of road map or micromanagement. I was fortunate to have a supervisor who not only understood what I was looking for but was looking for the same thing. Perhaps it was due to this that he gave me so much free reign to decide what kind of projects I would be working on and how I would achieve them. I wasn’t even required to check in but it came so naturally and he was such a great resource in regards to his experience in organizing that I found myself doing so frequently.

Unexpectedly through his teachings I found myself learning about not just organizing but leadership and history. The Marshall Ganz Harvard classes he had me study taught me about empowering those in the community to lead each other. Thanks to them the distinction between doing something for a community and with a community became much clearer. Furthermore I learned a lot about the community of my placement itself as well as its place in the grand scheme of things. Emory Grove's history functioned as a lens through which we analyzed multiple greater social issues. These included educational inequity, the effects of segregation on modern society and Gentrification. This would lead to projects build around attacking the effects of these issues. Among them being finding a remedy to the terrible upkeep of local community centers, putting financial literacy courses into place to prevent residents from being economically taken advantage of and putting together a team to address lack of resources at an annual SGA meeting.

However all of this would not have been possible without some guidance and inspiration. It is for this that I owe Tim, my supervisor, a big thank you for this experience. I don’t think my internship would have been nearly as fun nor would I have gotten as much out of it if I had anyone else leading me.