Blog #3: Wenzhu Liu in Team 7
Social Matrix
We have worked on the after school programs project for more than 2 months, including collecting research papers, brainstorming, interviewing, narrowing down ideas and visualizing our projects. From policy to design, we first found and collected policies, then raised our own ideas based on existed and assumed policies, and now try to design and visualize some new systems and devices to support our thoughts on after school programs in Pittsburgh. This is a long-term and comprehensive process to complete a project related to design and policy.
For the conditions exist now that affect after school programs in Pittsburgh, I want to discuss these from 3 main aspects.
Where is the funding for after school programs from and what effects it does?
Financial problems matter with the operation and the enrollment rate of students for after school programs. If after school programs don’t have enough financial support, the quality of course content may decrease because of lack of useful devices and good teachers. And if the students don’t have enough money to pay for after school programs, they would stay alone with themselves or meet some dangerous things and hence some after school programs are short of children to run smoothly.
Now, there are 3 main federal funding sources to support after school programs.1
The 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21CCLC) exclusively supports community learning centers to provide a broad set of programs such as tutoring, sports, arts and other activities.
The Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) provides vouchers to subsidize the low-income families and funds for improving initiatives of state child care quality.
Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) also focuses on low-income families to support after school programs.
The funding positively encourages the development of after school programs and brings more opportunities to low-income families children, but it couldn’t figure out the current situation very well.
Our team project targets on low-income families children between ages 13-16 and finding ways to help them attend high-quality after school programs. So the funding plays more important role in our project. According to the research on the source of funding, I found even though there are some federal funding opportunities, the funding is not enough for supporting after school programs and helping low-income families students stay in after school programs. And moreover, some organizations like 21CCLC don’t support children older than 12. The current situation is that most high-quality after school programs are still very expensive (we have interviewed the Assemble 2 last Thursday and they said a very popular art program needs almost 300 dollars one week per person.). Low-income families couldn’t afford the fee and their children have to drop out of after school programs. So how to solve this problem effects the development of after school programs in future.
For this condition, I am considering an idea to encourage low-income families children to earn “money” to pay back the after school programs. We build a system between school, after school programs, and the community, such as the church, local business companies and individual mentors. For instance, the church are responsible for contacting local business companies, and companies provide job positions for children, and children earn something like money nut not the real money, then they could use this to pay for the after school programs. After school programs are connected by schools and offer the skills and knowledge for the children’s jobs (The idea is in the orange square (1, 1), the purple square (2,2), the pink square (2, 3) and the yellow square(3,2) in the Social Matrix). This not real money idea is inspirited by “RLabs, Reminding Young People: Remember, Create Value First, You Can Earn Some Money Through That” posted in blackboard 3. In this article, young people earn currency that they could spend in the cafe or buy toiletries at a retailer, go and have their hair cut, or purchase educational programs. This idea is creative and applying to our project.
Visualization of the Idea
Are the after school programs useful and attracting children?
There are huge number of after school programs in Pittsburgh like YMCA of Greater Pittsburgh, Higher Achievement, Young Places and so on. But except that some programs are very expensive, the contents in those programs are complicated and not so effective. From the interview of Stephen MacIsaac (the Executive Director of Neighborhood Learning Alliance), he mentioned that it is better for after school programs to focus on one thing and do that things the best. Currently, a lot of after school programs offer lots of things but without emphasizing on one thing, which turns out children are not able to learn these contents in heart. From my aspect, the system as indicated above provides a one-week schedule for students to attend after school programs and work. The children could formulate the schedule by themselves under the tutor of teachers. For example, one child wants to do something related to design, so from Monday to Wednesday, she attends the graphic design, the appreciate and analyze for art and design thinking courses after school and goes to work on Thursday and Friday (The idea is in the green square (1,2) in the Social Matrix). Even though the contents in these 3 days are different, but they are related to each other and combined to improve the child’s ability in design domain, and then the skills and knowledge learned from these after school programs could apply to the next two days’ job.
How to arrive at after school programs?
According to interviews and research, I realize that more than 70% of after school programs are proceeding in school and each school provides school buses service for picking up children to school and back home. It is convenient and safe for children to attend after school programs because they don’t need to move other places. But how about the other almost 30% after school programs? We interviewed parents and staffs in Assemble, they said parents must bring their children to the outside after school programs or the children have to take bus by themselves, and it is one reason to hinder the development of some outside programs. Based on this problem, we are considering that each school provides some school buses routes for children, and these routes could connect almost all the programs around the school, or the school could cooperate with public buses to provide the transportation service.
I mainly discuss 3 conditions that positively and negatively affect our project. To solve the negative effects, we still need to complete our ideas by asking more critiques and suggestions from more after school programs staffs, parents, children, teachers and other professional people.
Reference:
1. http://findyouthinfo.gov/youth-topics/afterschool-programs/funding-afterschool
2. http://assemblepgh.org/
3. http://www.changemakers.com/futureforward/blog/create-value-capturing-value-marlon-parker-shares-tips
Providing Learning Opportunities to Keep Kids Off the Street
Our topic is #78 Pittsburgh After School: Providing Learning Opportunities to Keep Kids Off the Street. Through our exploration of the topic we have come across policy concerns and social coming together. Our detailed report can be viewed on the given below link.
Timeline
Blog #1: Learn and Think by Wenzhu Liu(Team 7)
By Wenzhu Liu
After one month studying, I have learned how to combine policy with design, and how to realize a better policy by means of design. Before taking this class, I have little knowledge about policy especially how to formulate a policy, and I seldom think about the role of a designer playing on a policy.
What impressed me most deeply are two lectures: Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Get Started. For the first lecture, it prompts me to think more rather than just listening more. As social innovation, it means “A novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, or sustainable than existing solutions and for which the value created accrues primarily to society as a whole rather than private individuals.” Prior to this class, I just reckoned innovation is always easy to be accepted because it has a lot of advantages, but in the later content, I saw that “Getting a new idea adopted, even when it has obvious advantages, is often very difficult.” This reminds me I should think before getting a conclusion. To realize a new idea, it needs not only innovative, efficient, and effective, but also financial support, enough time and so on. This process inspires me to think a lot before accepting.
And for the latter lecture, it focuses more on how to implement a social innovation design. There are a lot of details such as brainstorming, Collaging & Art, the problem tree and interviews with experts, to encourage us getting started. The way for brainstorming using sticky notes like affinity diagram, and when we stuck in a few ideas, this method helps us get out of trouble. We three wrote almost 170 ideas after brainstorming. It is so efficient.
For our team project, we choose the 78th policy: Providing Learning Opportunities to Keep Kids Off the Street among 100 policies to change Pittsburgh. Before we researched, we allocated each people different parts of research. My part is about students behavior. According to the topic, there are some questions for starting research and I searched many websites and articles to investigate them.
1. What is important for a child’s development?
I have read an article about children’s development, and there are some important tips related to children’s activities after school. For example, for the age of 8 years, parents should facilitate and support the child’s playtime with friends and in extra-curricular school activities.
2. What kinds of parents are good for kids?
I found that good parents should be warm, willing to set limits and unwilling to breach a child’s psychological boundaries by invoking shame or guilt.
3. What are the reasons of students dropping school?
There are 3 main reasons: lack of parent engagement, poor academic performance and work/Family economic needs.
4. What about students’ life after dropping out?
Most of them choose to come back to an alternative school program because of economic and job reasons.
5. How to better take care of children after school?
During 3pm-6pm, most parents are on work and have no time to take care of their children, so after school programs play important role on supplying a place for kids to play and study.
6. Why is after school care required?
Under the supervision of engaged adults in safe and structured environments, high quality after school programs offer a variety of activities such as academic enrichment and support, homework help, career exploration, service learning, sports, fitness and wellness, arts and music, civic engagement and more.
7. Who take part in these after school programs?
There are lots of types of after school programs. Most of them are provided by public school, non-profit organizations, museums, social service agencies, community organizations, faith-based organizations and many other types of organizations.
8. What kinds of after school care options for single parent family?
There are 4 main options for single parent family.
a. Community-Based After School Programs
b. Swap Child Care Hours With Another Single Parent
c. Free After School Child Care Options
d. Hire an After School Babysitter
For our topic about after school programs, I think politicians and innovators. After searching some websites, we found most after school programs are provided by public school and non-profit organizations, and some are free. It means a lot of after school programs are sponsored by state governments and non-profit organizations. So politicians and innovators play an important part in setting up and keeping these programs.
It is only the first step for our team project, and we would summary our research results and conduct interviews, personas, modeling, and iterations later.
I still remember the sentence appearing on the last page of the first course content: “Life is a journey, not a destination.”, which encourages me to insist when I feel down in dumps.
Cite:
How children develop
3 Reasons Students Dropout of High School
Design and Policy 