Community Action Gateway Presents Spring 2024 Projects with Hartford Partners
In the Community Action Gateway (CACT), a select group of first-year students learn about social change in the city and engage in research and creative projects with community partners. This spring, the 2023-24 cohort produced outstanding work in partnership with FREE HART Closet/Mutual Aid Hartford, Make the Road CT Madres Guerreras, the CT Black and Brown Student Union and Mercado Popular. The Community Action project assignment asks small groups of students to partner with Hartford organization to take on a semester-long project that is mutually beneficial. Along the way the students learn more about how to engage in community-based research and design communications products, and for partners, the goal is that the projects help them advance longer term goals.
We started our first class with a video and discussion on adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds which helped guide our work and projects through the semester. Each week we covered a different topic to support the semester-long projects: reviewing the basics of community-based research, developing good interview skills and techniques, analyzing and visualizing data, creating work plans and managing partnerships, building trust with each other and community, making public presentations and communicating about social change issues, and reflecting on grassroots organizing and self-care within this context. Through these projects, students also built on their knowledge of Hartford’s history and present assets. One of the most important themes that came up in our class discussions was the importance of doing meaningful work with partners and debunking harmful stereotypes about Hartford.
We extend deep gratitude to our community partners Gabbie Barnes, Dri Milner, Shineika Fareus, Sara Swetzoff and Jocelyn Cerda, guest evaluator Tiana Starks ’21, CACT mentors Nicole Ankrah ’26 and Maribel Mendoza ’26, CACT 101 instructor Stefanie Wong, the entire CHER team, Trinity staff members Dave Tatem, Mary Mahoney, Cheryl Cape and Ilda Ramos, Ron Miller at Heritage Printers; and everyone who has supported the cohort this year. Please take a look at the students’ projects and reflections below.
Supporting Hartford Artists with a Library of Things
Saanvi Bajaj ’27 and Oyu Sainsur ‘27 with community partner Gabbie Barnes, FREE HART Closet/Mutual Aid Hartford
FREE HART Closet, founded in 2022, is a free art supply shop located in Hartford, CT making art more accessible to adults. FREE HART believes that art is a human right as important to our survival as food, water, shelter, and safety. In addition to offering high quality art supplies the FREE HART space cultivates opportunities for residents to connect with each other, welcoming organizers, activists, creatives, educators, and everyone in between to use the space for intimate gatherings, workshops, and meetings. FREE HART is a project of Mutual Aid Hartford and a member of the Free Art Supply Network.
To support the work of FREE HART, founder Gabbie Barnes was recently awarded Shareable’s 2024 SolidarityWorks Library of Things (LoT) Fellowship which focuses on communities that have been socially marginalized and most impacted by climate disasters, structural inequality, and class oppression and helps them establish new Libraries of Things in high-potential communities. Gabbie asked Oyu and Saanvi to conduct a needs and assets assessment to inform the development of a Library of Things, identify existing resources and partners as well as impact areas that will allow Hartford artists to take their work to the next level.
As part of their data collection process Oyu and Saanvi attended Performing Hartford Trinity Bicentennial Day programs. The first session was a panel discussion that featured Cynthia Rider and Floyd Green – Co-Chairs of Mayor Arulampalam’s Arts and Culture Policy Committee, which has been charged with recommending arts priorities to the mayor’s office.
The second session, moderated by Austin Arts Center Director Deborah Goffe and Assistant Professor of Theater and Dance Rebecca Pappas, titled “Performing Hartford: Advocating for Hartford Artists” delved into the intricacies of supporting independent artists and cultural bearers. Oyu and Saanvy analyzed the participant feedback from the session and invited artists to follow up with them for individual interviews and small focus groups. To present their findings they then designed the below StoryMap.
Justicia Linguistica – Language Justice
Kamille Anaya ’27, Maria-Isabel Herrera ’27, and Jessica Salinas Rodriguez ’27 with community partner Sara Swetzoff
Make the Road Connecticut works to support immigrants to be active in their communities and to lift themselves out of poverty through legal and support services, civic engagement, transformative education and policy innovation. We believe that the path to change is to build the power of communities to organize themselves and fight back against inequities, sexism, institutional racism, and all the other isms. Our members lead rallies, create strategies to win our campaigns, educate neighbors about their rights, and support community members who are currently in deportation proceedings, have had family members deported, or are children of parents who have been separated by deportation. Make the Road members work together to create an invaluable space where children and adults gather to share food, strategize, dance, laugh, & cry together.
A primary organizing group of Make the Road CT is Madres Guerreras (Mother Warriors) from Hartford who have been building the leadership of immigrant parents and pushing for policies to ensure their children get a quality education and that school and city officials are responsive to families’ needs. Their most recent campaign has been to advance language access and interpretation rights for parents of Hartford Public Schools students. Sara and Madres Guerreras asked Kamille, Maria-Isabel and Jess to assist with the campaign by conducting phone and in-person canvassing of parents and designing brochures in English and Spanish to be used for base-building and story collection. The project is dedicated in memory of Doña Imelda Barajas, a founding member of Madres Guerreras and instrumental leader in community organizations like Make the Road CT and Hartford Deportation Defense.
#CareNotCops Police Free Schools Campaign
Hermeline Berteloot ’27, Jeevan Gowda ’27 and Aida Haile ’27 with community partners Dri Milner and Shineika Fareus, CT Black and Brown Student Union (BBSU)
The CT Black and Brown Student Union (BBSU) serves as a statewide hub of resources, technical assistance, capacity building, training and development for young people, educators and community organizers in the state of CT. They offer Education & Leadership Development, seek to build Transformative Networks, and lead the Community First Coalition (CFC), a group of youth-led or centered organizations fighting to reimagine public safety without police or policing in our communities. The CFC’s current #CareNotCops campaign aims to dissolve Connecticut’s reliance on police officers in schools and build a system that emphasizes community and care in our educational system.
As the campaign progressed through this Spring’s legislative session, Organizing Director Shineika Fareus and Membership & Outreach Manager Dri Milner asked Hermy, Jeev and Aida for research and communication products that focus on storytelling: helping to promote and explain the campaign in ways that center the stories of the CT BBSU members and other directly impacted populations.
For research and communications products Shineika and Dri asked for a print and digital Zine that includes a summary of the large Senate Bill where the #CareNotCops legislation is written, a timeline of the campaign, and information about how supporters of the campaign can take action and 2) social media content documenting testimonials for the campaign. Students were also invited to attend coalition meetings, press conferences and public hearings at the Legislative Office Building, and other BBSU events as participant observers. View their Zine here!
Food Insecurity and the Mercado Popular CSA Box Program
Jimmy Balboni ’27, Xiaowei Elias ’27 and Kentaro Lee ’27 with community partner Jocelyn Cerda, Mercado Popular
Mercado Popular is a community-supported agriculture store focused on bringing fresh, healthy food to the downtown Hartford area, educating people about growing, purchasing, and cooking healthy food, and supporting farmers who are people of color. Mercado is built by the Hartford community and for the Hartford community. Mercado Popular believes in supporting people in making the right nutrition choices for themselves. They offer two ways to enjoy fresh, healthy food from local farms: shopping at Mercado and the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share box program, to be piloted this Spring, where enrolled farmers deliver their produce, and staff lovingly packs a box for each CSA member.
Mercado Popular’s founder Jocelyn Cerda is a life-long member of the Hartford community whose personal journey led her to find ways to help others connect and share their knowledge of health and nutrition. Jocelyn asked Jimmy, Xiaowei and Kentaro for help piloting the Mercado CSA box program in Spring 2024 (check out the CSA program’s feature from CT Public!) The pilot program will onboarded participants representative of the racial/ethnic, geographic, and income diversity of the city (and will operate on a sliding scale).
Jimmy, Xiaowei and Kentaro designed a consumer feedback phone survey, analyzed and shared back their findings and conducted interviews with urban farmers about their experiences working with the CSA program and growing culturally relevant foods. As the final product, the group designed a StoryMap to share their findings with their community partner.
In the Community Action Gateway, first-year students learn how to create community change with community activists, neighborhood organizers, government leaders, non-profit directors, journalists, and social entrepreneurs in Hartford. If you have questions about the Gateway, contact Director of Community Learning [email protected]
