Reflection Response 1 Community Economic Development Name: Hodge factory visit Date: Early September Description: It was during our first class trip to Springfield. One of our local contacts led a group of us on a tour of Brightwood, which included a walk down Plainfield. Whenever any of us would ask our guide about one of the factories on Plainfield, he would say something along the following lines: ‘I don’t really know what that factory makes / made. I don’t know how many people work / worked there. I don’t know anyone from the North End who works / worked there.’ We stopped in the driveway of the Hodge factory. We found out that the factory employed over 40 workers, and that a larger manufacturing firm had recently acquired the Hodge factory. One of the employees went in to the factory and brought us a catalogue of the products assembled on-site. The products did not seem remarkable in terms of quality of design; milled stainless steel from the Northeastern United States hammered into shape at this facility in Springfield. It was then that the factory’s steel supplier said: ‘you’ve gotta keep manufacturing in the Northeast.’ Why this moment: This incident gave me a sense of the expectations people had for us. What on earth was I doing in Springfield? I could not keep manufacturing in the Northeast. I don’t even know what manufacturing wages are in the Southeast, or in China! But contrast what the steel supplier’s representative said with what our guide had been saying all morning. If our class were to improve community economic opportunities for North End residents, then didn’t we have an obligation to find them paths into manufacturing jobs? Wouldn’t that mean joining a larger struggle to strengthen employee power in the Northeast? Was our class equipped to work with North End residents with that objective in mind? The one thing I was sure of: this class would help me better understand the extent to which local economic development can be linked to larger regional or national political organizing.Community Economic Development Name: Affirmative Action and Employee Power Date: First / Second Class Meeting Description: In the course of our overview of the client, neighborhood, city, region and field at the very beginning of the semester, I suggested that it might be interesting to investigate affirmative action compliance and union membership as ways to develop programmatic and institutional recommendations that could assist North End residents. I found the conversations that ensued, not all of which were direct responses to my suggestions, very interesting: one professor said that the neighborhood had a relatively high proportion of skilled workers who could not find permanent employment in the trades. The other professor said that union membership was often a barrier to workforce entry, particularly for minorities. None of us were quite sure if the city of Springfield was a significant (public sector) employer, or how an investigation into affirmative action compliance would help our client. Why this moment: This discussion left me worried that our community economic development strategy would literally be too focused on the ‘community’. In other words, I was worried that we might only end up pursuing very insular strategies aimed at improving business, workforce, and / or real estate opportunities within the community itself, as opposed to finding ways to connect North End residents to residents in other majority-minority neighborhoods. It strikes me, in retrospect, that we did not push the envelope in our institutional approach to community economic development. For a city that is often colloquially thought of as a majority-minority city (the census figures suggest this is not strictly true), it is striking that Springfield still has an Anglo mayor. Having met Juan Gerena and tried to dig up a little on his career history, I cannot help but think that the city of Springfield is governed by a system in which neighborhoods are played off each other. Development is located at the level of individual neighborhoods, and each neighborhood has its own citizen’s council that provides turf for local political bosses to exert sectional interests while not disturbing the peace at the mayoral, gubernatorial and congressional level. One consequence of this system has been the designation of theNorth End as the neighborhood for the poor, disabled and unemployable Puerto Rican population. Enterprising and successful Puerto Ricans leave the North End. Low-Income and Minority Neighborhood Name: Client Focus Group Date: Early November Description: Our conversation, which turned out to be our first and only intimate group conversation with the client staff, covered a wide spectrum of subjects. I was particularly struck by the way in which one staff member’s monologue, in English, about welfare / public assistance dependence in the North End crowded out everyone else’s comments. Another student and I then engineered a way to bring other staff members back into the conversation in Spanish. It worked, and a very different portrait of the neighborhood tumbled out of one of the staff members’ mouths. Why this moment: I had read articles critiquing conservative narratives on ‘welfare dependence’ in Paul Osterman’s class, but this diatribe was the first time I was treated to such talk at close quarters. I have always maintained that some of the client staff understand English very well, but are hesitant to speak in English (to students from MIT). Whether those staff were partly responding to the initial comments or simply expressing a seldom listened-to opinion on poverty in the North End, I cannot be sure. What I am sure of is that the different staff members were operating with the resources of two very different discourses, and were defining poverty in two very different ways. The first discourse more closely mirrored conventional explanations for poverty, according to which poverty is behavioral and public assistance gives the poor perverse incentives to stay poor. The second discouse more closely resembled the human-capability perspective that has won Amartya Sen the Nobel Prize for Economics. The second opinion spoke of a very different kind of poverty, which was not exclusively tied to income deprivation but thoughtfully engaged with the effects of health disabilities and incarceration. I was