Invisible People

As I reflect on my time here at Milano, there are a few things that I think about. One is that I’m going to miss many of the people here after we go our different ways. I’ve met some brilliant, kind, passionate people here. Another thing is that the policy analysis framework is something that I anticipate will be useful far down the road.

But there’s another thought that I have, a thought that I didn’t expect to have when I came into the program. Certain policy issues and neighborhoods tend to be invisible at Milano. In other words, we just don’t see them.

I came to Milano because I have a burning desire to serve my community of Harlem in particular and urban black neighborhoods in general. I thought that at Milano, I would find a community of aspiring policy makers and scholars actively engaged in urban policy matters that directly impact urban communities of color. Sadly, this is not the case. This is not to say that Milano is completely devoid of any discussion of urban communities of color, but there is not the level of emphasis I would like to see in a program that is supposed to offer an alternative to Columbia’s SIPA and NYU’s Wagner. We only have a couple of courses that directly address issues of race, and both of them, to my knowledge, are taught by one professor – Darrick Hamilton. I think Leigh Graham’s classes may also address issues of race, but her Economic Development course wasn’t offered this semester and she’s off to another university next fall. Karen Merson has led the Making a Difference course, but my understanding is that the course is more of a general question-your-assumptions survey of oppression.

I think an urban policy program rooted in social justice should have greater emphasis on the plight and assets of urban communities of color and the potential policy options to improve the lives of people living in these communities.

Now, I should note that the Laboratory in Issue Analysis and Community Development Finance Lab has featured neighborhoods of color including Harlem, the South Bronx, and Brownsville. Political Economy of City definitely includes discussions of race and class but its only a piece. The course helps students understand how ghettoes came to be but doesn’t take the next step in examining possible policy solutions.

I think that a large reason why urban policy impacting communities of color is noticeably absent at Milano is because urban policy aimed at the improvement of communities of color is noticeably absent from government at all levels (notwithstanding Bloomberg’s Young Men’s Initiative). Ironically, we learn about neoliberalism and the devolution of government over the past 30 – 40 years, but we do not examine potential policy alternatives to compensate. Just because the Federal Government isn’t funding community action programs and community development corporations like it was in the 1960’s doesn’t mean that problems that gave rise to such programs have been solved. It seems that once the Empowerment Zones money ran out, once Boyz N the Hood became cliché, and once hip-hop became the best-selling music genre, the problems facing urban communities of color weren’t “sexy” policy issues anymore. At best, we look at pieces – urban education (charter schools vs. district schools), affordable housing, and food deserts. But what about the whole picture?

How can we send policy makers out into the world without ensuring that they have a full understanding of how urban policy has impacted urban communities of color? How can we do this and claim to be a social justice institution?  The Obama Administration was supposed to shine a new light on urban policy in America, but the President’s urban policy efforts seem to be going nowhere fast. As a heterodox and social justice-oriented institution and program, we should not be constrained by what’s hot right now. Of course there is the reality of offering programs and courses based on demand. I’m not challenging that, but what I am saying is that Milano should not just be driven by consumer demand, it should encourage students to engage issues that are overlooked in the popular policy discourse. Milano needs to have a greater emphasis on race, class, and what’s going on in communities of color across the city.

EDITED TO ADD: I also have to give a shout out to Robert Zdenek’s Community Development course. Unfortunately it’s not being offered next year. Supply and demand.

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a schedule which maximizes utility

This academic year, I am trying to Get The Most Out of Milano.  Or, Milano/GPIA.  GPIA/Milano?  A name would be great.  (I’m pretty sure some people are “on” that, but seriously, I’m seeing both versions as well as some other interesting formulations and I think we’ve dwelled in suspense long enough.)

As I was about to say, I have courses I find interesting and thought-provoking (check), a fellowship whose exact components I’m still awaiting word on but will be challenging and provide great professional development (check), a quite fulfilling student employment job wherein I can help people and use those trusty administrative skills for income (check), and….I won’t go on.   The kinds of stimulating people, readings, conversations, activities, and opportunities I’m engaging with this year will hopefully not only position me well for post-graduate employment, but also be just plain wonderful ways to spend my time in the present sense (check).

Amidst all of this anticipated activity, though, there was one other matter which I have found challenging to incorporate during my time at Milano so far, and that is participating in something which reminded me exactly why I am doing this.  Simply put, you really do need to dip your toe into something absolutely inspiring from time to time to remind you of why you are doing what you are.  If you are privileged enough to go to graduate school (and yes, though we have our daily financial struggles, we are privileged and certainly will be moreso in each of our futures), figuring out how to get the most out of your education in a personal sense is important, too.

Over the summer, all of us students (and, it seems, alumni) received an invitation to apply to volunteer at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting.  At the time I was still unsure about many things in my schedule, but I always loved catching up on this Meeting’s past sessions via webcast, and I welcomed the chance to get a peek behind the curtain, as it were, of an event of this stature.

So, this coming week I’ll be deploying those administrative skills some more, but with the opportunity to watch some powerful players in international development, climate change, and human rights work come up with tangible, actionable plans to help our world.  Rather than just sit in a room and talk (not that many of us, former President Clinton publicly included, don’t quite enjoy such a thing) these meetings are supposed to yield concrete policies and solutions to intractable–and critical–problems facing us all.  I know this is going to be a very tiring week, but I’m so excited to watch this unfold in person, and perhaps even hatch a plan which results in participating directly myself someday.

If you are a student of international affairs and global politics, this is an exciting, incredibly BIG week in New York.  We have CGI, the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, and it is also Climate Week.  If so inclined, I bet you could have quite the schedule going on yourself.

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a happy new year

Hola! L’shanah tovah to my Jewish friends near and far.  With Labor Day today and Rosh Hashanah on Wednesday, we have one more slightly truncated odd short week before we really head into fall.  For my part, I’m really excited about my courses this term.  I am taking Public Finance (at long last) which is the last required course for my Urban Policy program before the master’s project I’ll be doing this spring.  One of my elective courses is about Poverty and U.S. Social Policy, which will nicely complement previous reading and work on poverty and social justice.  We’ll be incorporating work in the field examining various aspects of poverty as a problem, and my particular work group will be looking at food assistance programs in New York.  Finally, I’m taking the Sustainability Perspectives and Practice course.  Beginning a term reading Aldo Leopold and Bill McKibben makes me VERY happy, and overall the scope of this course material will deal with everything from environmental ethics to ecofeminism to environmental policy.  Beyond the intellectual rewards, I’m hoping this course helps me to figure out more specifically which issue area I may choose to focus on with my master’s project.

If you’re a current Milano/GPIA student (or alum, or member of our community in any capacity, really) I’m sure you’ve heard about our upcoming annual volunteer day.  I plan to participate again this year, and look forward to seeing plenty of people take a day together to put our value of Making a Difference into practice.  See this site to sign up!

Second plug: we are excited to introduce our newest bloggers to you very soon, but if you’re interested in contributing, please feel free to get in touch anytime.

Welcome back, y’all.  Here’s to a fabulous academic year!

(Um, if anyone can afford to drink a really GOOD gin martini for me to celebrate, I’d appreciate it.  I’m splurging for a great cocktail later this month but until then books kind of take budgetary precedence.  Behold my financial prudence and prowess! Ha!)

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project blogger

Idealist.org started its Graduate School Blog Project in Fall 2008.  Our Milano/GPIA team runs the only “group” blog affiliated with this project (fitting, right?) and it’s time to add more people to our posse.  That means new and continuing students; alums, we have a special invite to you, too!

Our blog’s assignment is to offer a “slice of life” perspective on graduate school to our audience.  Most of our readers are prospective graduate students (both for Milano/GPIA and other programs including everything from nursing to education), students/members of the Milano/GPIA community, and people generally interested in nonprofit management and/or public policy.  We also enjoy hearing from our nerd-groupies; that’s just a perk to this unpaid position.

We are interested in adding a variety of contributors to this group, particularly students from GPIA, returned PCV’s, and writers with blogging experience.  If you’re not one of those but interested in participating, please be in touch anyway!

Please send the following items before September 3 to milanogpiablog (at) gmail (dot) com with the subject line “Milano/GPIA Blog”:

1)      Answers to the following/some basic info:

a. What perspective will you bring to this blog? (International student, student just out of undergrad coming to Milano/GPIA, full-time worker/part-time grad student, etc.)

b. Your program here; which year you’ll be (1^st year, 2^nd, etc.)

c. A list of any writing/blogging experience (a formal résumé is not required), please note any experience using WordPress, HTML or other blogging tools. Include your blog URL; we’re mainly interested in seeing that if your site is at least six months old.

2)      A sample post—yes, even if you have your own blog!  300-700 words, which could be about:

• an episode from a recent day/week in your life;
• why you’re excited/nervous/some of both about beginning this academic year;
• your first impressions of Milano/GPIA, New York, or life newly in—or newly returned to—the United States; or
• a review of a provocative book or film you’ve seen this summer.

To our alums: if you are interested in participating occasionally to discuss postgrad life/process, please be in touch with the above info as well.  Prospective students sometimes ask questions about this (read: the job hunt) which we current students are not always best equipped to discuss, so you’d be helping out!

As always, thank you for reading and we look forward to returning very soon to kick off our third year.

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short days and long winter nights

It’s been three weeks since classes started, but it feels closer to three months. The hardest thing so far has been finding a schedule that works for both the personal and the school stuff as well as realizing many of the great talks on campus happen while I’m in class during the evenings. As a Year One my schedule consists of schoolwide and program core courses and so far it’s been a mixed blessing. The biggest benefit has been the heavy concentration of other Year Ones in the classes, this has served to take off some of the hesitation about being vocal during class for fear of sounding  ‘stupid’.  On the other hand having core courses have given me mixed feelings about the collection of courses I am taking this semester. By far the most difficult course for me this semester is my economics class. Initially I was considering taking Quantitative Methods, but after the student panel during orientation I decided to go with the economics core course – Economics for Management and Public Policy.  Part of the difficulty lies in having the dominant part of my grade determined by the midterm and the final (80 percent), with homework and classroom participation making up the remainder of the grade. Essentially, it’s a microeconomics course and while supply and demand may work for widgets and widget consultancies, it is hard to map that on to the nonprofit sector which is essentially answering the need for services that the for profit sector was unable to find a profit driven response too….

By far my favorite course has been Making a Difference: Global, Organizational and Individual Perspectives of Social Change.  This class demands my engagement and then once engaged it smacks me around a bit … just to send me out into the school week a little pissed (which is a good thing). The readings test my base knowledge and understanding of critical thought while giving me enough gristle to wrestle with the stuff I don’t know yet. This is one of the rare classes over my college career (both undergrad and grad) that I’ve found myself looking for other readings to supplement the assignments for the week because I want to be better prepared for the class.

As it stands my Theory and Practice of NonProfit Management class is my least favorite course this semester. Essentially, it’s a survey course and I believe for me after 5 solid years of nonprofit experience I was looking for more ‘theory’ and less ‘practice’. We read …. we talk…[we are] getting bored and it’s only week four. Hopefully, the professor will recognize the lack of participation as a cry for help and will shift to meet our needs.

The tally thus far for reading (in pages): 114 (week 1), 201 (week 2), and 234 (week 3)….

Eulalia

PS  – I’ve added a couple of pics from this week’s ‘snow day’….school was canceled which was good for me (as my new notebook was delivered) but was a dud for the snow enthusiasts. NYC only received 8-9 inches while my hometown of Philly (a 2-hour drive away) is sitting in 88 inches worth of snow (over the course of back to back weekend snow sessions).

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=SUM(OMG)

I alluded in my first post to the wonders of confronting Excel as a former English major.  Believe it or not I wrestled with how much of that confrontation to discuss here, because There is No Crying In Baseball, and also because like Sarah Palin, I know what I know what I do not know what I—oh bother.

As a blogging team, we share membership in one of the required courses at Milano, called “Making a Difference”, which brings together students from all programs.  We’re in different sections, but we have that common reference to our work.  However, from there as a policy student our similarities end.

My other course this term (my part-time schedule includes two) is Policy Analysis, the first course towards my MS in Urban Policy Analysis and Management.  First up was a tour of the rational model, and (here I’m really zipping ahead) subsequently we’ve been dealing with all sorts of Excel-ent focused work in cost-benefit analysis. 

I could lie here, but how could I to you, dear internets??  I hit the wall.  Blammo!  If you’ve ever had the experience as a student of leaving a class session feeling that you’ve understood the concepts, you feel somewhat ready to tackle a project, only to spend the next few hours (or days) staring bleary-eyed at your computer wondering where it went wrong, then you understand what the last few weeks were like for me.  It’s driven me to distraction.  I spent hours playing with Excel, manipulating numbers here and there, only to end up with results that seemed a) Really Wrong, and b) unknowing of how to fix them.    I had gone to sessions offered by our helpful (and they really are) teaching assistants, again felt like “aha!  GOT IT!” and within 36 hours felt I had cycled right back to confusion.

It’s not just that on a superficial level I have not worked with economic analysis before, it’s that my mind is literally not trained to think that way.  Give me a stack (or a nexus) of theoretical concepts with a dash of brain-busting philosophy sprinkled on like parmesan (mmm, cheese!) and I am a happy, hardworking camper.  Give me a policy problem that asks for a financial comparison, and I want to help, truly I do, but thusfar I am still working on being useful in that regard.

One of the hard things about grad school is that you are confronted daily with all of the things you do not know–perhaps not literally daily, but certainly often enough–and one of the challenges becomes how to integrate that into your outlook without allowing it to overcome you.  If you are, like me, a student entering a graduate program that is a field (or 10) away from your “comfort zone”, reminding yourself as often as possible that you are trying something new, and to be kind to yourself, becomes imperative.  Some days I am better at that than others.

I am hoping that very soon I will have a professional “day job” context in which to experience the other, real-world side of my education.  One of the reasons that challenging moments in study become overwhelming for me right now is that, frankly, I am not in any other worlds against which to compare, to consider, to contextualize myself and my nascent professional capabilities.

I don’t want to jinx that “very soon” by saying more, so let’s move on, shall we?

-KD

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Get out there!

So I have this bracelet. It’s not one of those rubber yellow ones, or a white one, or one of the military ones that the candidates held up during the debates. It may sound a little silly, but I look at this bracelet every day. I guess to be more precise, I look at what is inscribed on the underside of the silver cuff that my mother gave me as a gift.

It reads, “Be the change you wish to see in the world. – Gandhi “

Every day before leaving my apartment I read this and slip on the small, shiny bracelet before I head off to classes in my Nonprofit Management program. Not only does it remind me of family and the support I have from my mom, (that’s important when you head back to school too!) but it reminds of why I am even here, pursuing a career in public service.

It’s easy for students to get caught up in midterms, 10 page papers, textbook readings, class registration, finals and lectures. That’s why we’re here after all! But we are also here to represent something bigger than ourselves. It is important for us to stay involved and active in the kinds of differences we want to make in the world. Whether you want to be a city manager, a school administrator, a campaign advisor or a social worker, it is not only important, but it is refreshing to BE that change.

Over the past few weeks I have had the chance to engage in some voter advocacy for the presidential election by canvassing and phonebanking for my chosen candidate. It was not only fun and moving, but I was able to meet and talk with the kinds of people whose lives I want to help make a difference in. Volunteering is a great way to embody the ideals that we are learning in the classroom, and I encourage everyone to get out there and do whatever it is that inspires you!

Tomorrow Americans will have a very simple (yet very crucial) chance to voice their opinion and to take action. VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! Be that change you wish to see in the world!

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Being the Change

‘Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world, indeed it’s the only thing that ever has…’

These are the words of American Cultural Anthropologist, Margaret Mead. On the eve of the US election I share with you a personal story that constantly fortifies my conviction that no matter how small or insignificant we think our actions to be they usually have an impact more far reaching that we ever imagined. Changing the World really does not have to be as hard you think! As dramatic as  it sounds, on November 4th, 2008 US citizens will all wake up with Special Superhero Powers. Superhero friends, I urge you to use your powers to change the world. Vote. It’s really that simple.

Sleeping with Snakes

At a relatively young age social and civic engagement, became an integral part of my development. I was born and raised in Bombay, the world’s second largest city (17 million people), also home to Asia’s largest slum (Dharavi). Growing up, it was hard to conscientiously escape the impacts of  blatant social and economic disparity which surrounding me. By age 12, I learnt that children much younger than me were suffering and even dieing making firecrackers, which on countless occasions, I had so fondly set ablaze. Children were literally dieing just to make me happy. Around the same time, I was exposed to the cruel world of wildlife trafficking. Restlessness foreced me to act on this newly acquired knowledge. The action came in the form of boycott and volunteerism. It was the experiences I had while volunteering with wildlife rescue and rehabilitation efforts which made me realize that  change begins with me.

Twice a year in India, during the months of February and July, thousands of Lord Shiva’s devotees flock to the temples to pray to the mighty God of destruction. Blessings are sought by ritualistic feeding of milk to snakes (usually Spectacled Cobras). How do you feed a  snake milk you ask? ‘People with snakes in baskets’ sit outside these temples and collect money in exchange for feeding their snake milk. You might think these ‘people’ to be snake charmers, and you would be wrong. After rescuing and rehabilitating over 200 snakes, let me assure you that serpents are practically impossible to ‘charm’. Sorry to burst your bubble, but snake charmers are a misnomer if I were knew one. Now, back to the story. If you know one thing about snakes its that they are reptiles, and if you can recollect 7th grade biology you will remember that reptiles are cold-blooded, egg-laying carnivores……. that do not consume milk!!! According to the Indian Wildlife Protection act possession of a domestic species of wildlife is illegal. This makes the snake feeding ritual not only inhumane but also illegal.

So why then would people indulge in such activities? The answer is a mix of traditional superstition and factual ignorance. Two important notes; 1) A majority of the demographic who indulge in snake milk-feeding rituals come from low income backgrounds, often times these are immigrants who move to the city in search of a better life.  2) India looses over 20% of it food grains to rodents and pests. Rodent populations that would normally be kept in check by predators such as snakes balloon to uncontrollable sizes because snakes are taken out of their natural habitat, brought to the cities to be feed milk by people who believe that the act will bring food to their plates. This may sound excessively simplified (and so some extent it is) but the reality is that lesser snakes in the city means fewer rodents nears farms and granaries, which translates to more food for the masses.

In the mid 90’s, I use to volunteer with a small, yet highly motivated wildlife rescue and rehab organization. The feeding of milk to snakes was an issue which we knew if approached in a police-like approach of Confrontation and Confiscation would not yield lasting results. People had to be made aware about the consequences of their action. Our plan was simple; go to the temples, boisterously talk about the situation, confiscate the snakes, and set them free after tending to their wounds (we’ll save the process for another time). Resources for our first campaign (July 1997) consisted 8 volunteers, a 4-seater hatchback, a rainy day and a city of 17 million. Not the greatest odds but yet we managed to rescue over 150 snakes that day. Two years later we had over 40 volunteers, broken out into strategically located teams, each with its own vehicle and a total catch of 7 cobras.

In conclusion I have to say Making a Difference is not as difficult as it might initially seem, it usually a lot harder, but stay persistent will pay off. Just ask the Snakes.

P.S.: That last campaign ended late, so the 7 cobra’s came home with me and spent the night in my bedroom (in their baskets ofcourse), hence the title.

Final moments in the basket which was probably home for the last 2 months.

I am off to find a home… and maybe even some food

It might be a hole in a tree but sure beat a basket!

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