News from MIT: The Challenge We Face

Submitted by Mary Beth Mills-Curran, Friday, October 1, 2010.

One of the largest challenges we face, at the MIT, site is trying to create sustainable, collective action, rather than just short-term service. This challenge also offers a large potential pay-off. We have struggled to figure out how we can engage the 70 people that committed to us last year in real collective action. It would probably have been easier for us to just plug into an existing organization, but none of them really had the collective community perspective that we wanted to develop. In addition, if all of the people who committed 1% of their time to Hope in Action were to turn out, we would overwhelm any single community partner.

Why Area IV?

Area IV is the neighbourhood that lies between MIT and Central Square. It is not only MIT’s immediate neighbour, but it also is possibly the most underserved community in Cambridge. It is home to a vibrant immigrant population, mostly from the Caribbean, but also from Côte d’Ivoire.

Our Strategy

As I see it, our work has two main components, which may be served by the same activities, but have different goals. The first is to honour the commitments we made last year. The second is the use

Last year’s time commitments

In order to give the people who commitments of time last year, we want to provide a number of “plug-in” service opportunities. This will probably consist primarily of encouraging them to become regular volunteers at non-profit organizations at work in Area IV. The main drawback of this is that we feel that it does not adequately satisfy our desire to engage in collective action. It is, however, probably the best thing we can do at this stage in our development.

Making our work collective

In order to make our work more genuinely an expression of collective action, we want to add several types of community building events.

1. Occasional large group service events possibly incorporating an environmental perspective.
2. Social Events--among MIT members of Hope in Action, and with both MIT and Area IV residents
3. Lectures, forums, films, or other more reflective/awareness-raising types of events

Moving forward to real collective action

The main work of this year’s campaign will be to figure out how we can take these relationships that we have built and transform them into collective action. In that vein, it seems like it will make sense to try to have a few members of the leadership team engaged in listening in the Area IV community. We spent last year listening at MIT, but now we need to listen in the community that we wish to serve. So for a while I guess we will just be showing up at events in Area IV and meeting people.