Time is flyin’

Since the conference ended, I have worked on various projects throughout the office, writing, editing, having fun. Another intern has finally joined me, so it is nice to have the company. The next couple of weeks I will be pretty much winding down my internship.

One interesting thing that has happened recently has to do with the arrest of four people (closely associated with WCC) for a peaceful demonstration against Malaysia’s Internal Security Act (ISA) that happened over a week ago on the 50^th anniversary of the Act. The ISA basically allows the government the right to detain individuals without trial and without evidence, under certain circumstances. The government here does not allow public demonstrations (peaceful or otherwise), so in an ironic example of the workings of ISA, people who were simply trying to educate the public on why they should work to abolish the ISA (or at least reform it) were arrested and detained (they were later released). Many members of WCC were present in the large crowd as police officers shoved the people into vans.

Penang is a tiny place, much like a small town, everyone knows everyone, that sort of thing. So it’s not surprising that our friends of WCC were among the arrested. If you are leading a demonstration for the government, then you pose no risk of running into trouble, however, if you are part of the opposition, you will likely face difficulties. It’s a sad but true notion in a place that appears so peaceful to outsiders. Everyday I discover some strange fact or law hidden behind the beautiful façade of the island.

I can feel my time here slipping away, and anxious feelings associated with the beginning of a new semester fill some of my sleepless nights. I am going to try to make the most of my remaining time here, although I am sure I will still have my regrets. Congrats to those of you who finished, maybe you can relax your brains a little before the next chapter.

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Week 8, 9 and 10

The last three weeks of my internship was spent mostly on researching and contacting clients from various US universities. We would have a Professional development training in India this month and I was given the responsibility to coordinate it. So, the last two weeks went busy coordinating and contacting agents. I will do an extra week to get things done.
Apart from work, it was kind of sad to leave DC. I made some awesome friends there and got such great opportunities to network with people. I hope I can get the opportunity again to work with them. It has been a great internship.

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Analyzing the Stop & Frisk Data-An article in NY Times

At the New York City Mission Society/Miniskin, our Law & Justice center started working with the youth in Harlem. We provided them counseling, and educated them what we felt  needed the most; how they can avoid stop & frisk situations.

The Stop & Frisk situation is getting worse in New York City. The New York Civil Liberties Union recently published a report in which they analyzed that between Jan 2006 and march 2010, the police made about 52,000 stops and only a small percentage of those arrests proved to be guilty, rest were all dismissed. The results were published in the New York Times newspaper on July 11, 2010 focusing on certain neighborhood and describing that how the situation became so uncomfortable for people of all ages.

Just After the release of this report, we were able to organize a workshop for Harlem youth which were among the worst victim of stop & frisk, living in the Harlem neighborhood. At the workshop, it was clear that those youth ages 13-18 were very frustrated of the situations. We heard many incidents in which they were stopped and frisked. Also, we were clearly able to see that how these youth were unaware of their rights while being stopped by a policeman. That was one of the main goal which our center is focusing on. Educating these youth about their rights is so important. In order to provide them with a better understanding of their legal rights we arranged another workshop for these youth at the Neighborhood defender services at Lenon Avenue where a criminal defense attorney Thomas Geovanni who was going to talk about handling a stop & frisk situations and the best reactions of youth when a policeman stops them.

The New York Times article came at a perfect time when we are working for almost the same purpose. We were under a process to analyze the stop and frisk data given to us by the NYCLU. Two days after the nytimes article, Governer David A. Paterson signed a bill limiting Stop and Frisk Data. The bill states that, ” Police officials in New York City can no longer electronically store the names and addresses of people stopped in the street to be questioned but found to have done nothing wrong”.

We believed this was a very positive step taken up by the governor which will help resolving many issues.

I will provide the details of the meeting at NDS in my next post.

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Upcoming events

This upcoming week is the cumulation of the summer youth program that I have been helping with, and Tuesday we have a speaker coming from UNICEF.  Still have to get some things from imedia to make sure her presentation goes as planned.  On Wednesday we will have the last gym day, and will be hosting a carnival for the kids.  There will be different games set up all around the gym, and they can win tickets and earn prizes.  It should be a lot of fun.  On Thursday I should be starting to do more with the Law and Justice Center that another Capstone group has put together here in Harlem!

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Wrapping Up

The research into the low-income housing tax credit buildings in New York City is now complete. I now have a week to do some analysis. While a large chunk of my time this summer has been spent deep inside the bowels of the interwebs constructing this database, in talking to my boss I was pleased to learn that he spent his first full year as a full-time policy analyst with the agency developing a similar database that they now use for virtually all of their housing analysis and share with lobbyists and government officials. It may not be as glamorous as the (action-packed intern-based adventure) movies, but it’s important work. My data and analysis will be the centerpiece of the next housing report they put out annually, which typically comes with a press conference with at least the mayor, if not other important officials.

The good news is that my findings (tentatively, as of now, based on my gut reaction, which may change after further analysis) are that the LIHTC generally works in so far as enabling affordable housing. And that’s a good thing.

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Another Week

This week I submitted my final draft on early childhood education with a few graphs that I created on Excel. I kept remembering the mantra from Mark’s class – to keep the visuals clean and clutter free. It’s funny how some things in this internship remind me of school and classes! As my work ends in that area, I really hope that this organization advocates for additional funding for Universal Prekindergarten in New York State. UPK really needs to expand in public schools but cannot do so without proper financing. Currently, it is an unfunded mandate because many school districts do not have enough money to offer the half day PreK classes for 4 years olds.

Afterwards, I began working on my last policy paper. The topic is similar to my previous research on drop out prevention. Now I will be writing about attendance improvement rates in public schools. It is helpful that the topics are interrelated. I have good direction, but this paper is really going to be focused on how to encourage children to attend school regularly – whether they are at risk of dropping out or not. I will be analyzing the CAPS program (Community Achievement Project in Schools) which was initiated by United Way in collaboration with NYC Department of Education. Currently, United Way, the DOE, and various public schools and community based organizations all participate in CAPS to provide attendance improvement and drop out prevention services. Based on my research of existing programs and the effectiveness of CAPS, I hope to offer some good policy recommendations before my internship concludes at the end of this month.

Although my policy work will be completed by then, I already decided to continue working with the Strengthening Nonprofits team as a part time intern in the fall semester. One of the regular team members accepted another job offer, so it will be helpful if I am around a couple of days a week to work on some projects for them.

My internship already runs right into the beginning of the semester (there are a few days overlapping) so I am a teensy bit jealous of my classmates that are wrapping it up! I hope they enjoy the time off before school starts

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Intern Field Trip

This past Tuesday we had an “Intern Field-Trip” to the Florida Modern-Day Slavery Museum that was temporarily located on W. 4th and Thompson Street. It’s a traveling museum based in the back of a semi-trailor that travels around the US in order to draw attention to slavery currently happening in the US agricultural industry.

They travel in a semi-trailor because it is a replica of one that was used to enslave Mexican workers in central florida. These workers were locked in the back of the truck at night and during the day they were worked at gun point for very little money, $.40 cents for every 32lb bucket of oranges/tomatoes they picked. This 40 cent rate has not changed since the late 70s. Many of the labor organizers enslaving migrant workers’ would introduce them to crack cocaine in order to keep them indebted. Almost all the time they would end up owing money at the end of the month for some reason or another.

It was really powerful to be inside the trailer, picking up a 32lb bucket, listening to the stories of different workers. It was really shocking to learn that there is no watch-dog (besides NGOs) to monitor the conditions in the agricultural industry. It is usually up to the illegal-worker to report, which rarely happens. It’s sad to know that even in the US, slavery still exists.

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Another week in my Multifaceted internship

This week we continued with our Tuesday schedule of programming for the kids from the Salvation Army, and had a speaker come from WEACT (an environmental group based here in Harlem that I used for a research paper last semester). It was an opportunity for the children to learn a little bit about the environment in which they live and how to look at it from a different perspective then they might usually be accustomed to. Today we continued with our programming for the two groups of kids on our usual Wednesday sports schedule in the gymnasium. Tomorrow I am going to the garden/park that my capstone group and I have been working on to supervise some of our workers. We are going to work more on the brick wall, water the flowers and vegetable garden, and work on the back fence.

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More on the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)

It’s frustrating to hear people say that we are wasting our tax dollars to make facilities accessible to people with disabilities. I am paraphrasing what one person said in response to a news article in the El Paso Times. The ADA protects people who are currently living with a disability and also those who may live with a disability in the future. Greater enforcement and implementation of the ADA is necessary. As people age and our disabled veterans return, the number of people with disabilities will increase. Just as we buy insurance to protect ourselves and our loved ones, we should invest in the ADA to protect ourselves and our loved ones from difficulties living with any unpredicted disabilities.

My internship at the National Disability Rights Network has taught me much about the virtue of patience, especially if one wants to work on policy, which often changes only by scandal… Lesson learned on how to avoid burnout: We have to celebrate the small successes no matter how small they are.

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Thoughts on a gender mainstreaming conference

The international gender conference that took place this past weekend in Penang was a lot to take in. The entirety of the conference focused on the ineptitude of gender equality progressions in the state of Penang, in Malaysia, and in the world.

Judy Cheng-Hopkins, Assistant Secretary General for Peace Building Support United Nations, spoke of women in conflict situations—pre and post peace agreements and women as essential agents of change. Women are the greatest victims of armed conflict; security remains inadequate during and after signing peace agreements (92 percent of women in conflict areas suffer from sexual crimes as well). Frequently, women outnumber men in post-conflict situations, and they have strong positions in communities, however, they remain tied to systems that do not allow them to actively participate.

The UN response to this (according to Cheng-Hopkins): the Security Council Resolution (SCR) 1889 as meeting the needs of women and girls in post-conflict situations (financing and recovery). She also spoke about how exhortation alone is insufficient and the UN has responded by establishing UN Women in New York.

So why is gender equality not happening? According to many a speaker at the conference, not many people think that gender equality is very important; there exists no real commitment with a clear timeline; male leaders do not see the significance; inequality is taken for granted/natural (human nature); and to change this would be a social revolution—one that people are not necessarily ready for (are we ever ready?).

The presence of quotas is the single most important factor, especially within the political arena. Affirmative action to fast track women to at least 30 percent quota for decision-making positions is essential to create proportional representation; some political parties in Australia have a 40-40-20 rule (40 women, 40 men, 20 up for grabs). Sweden does not have a quota, yet they have achieved 47 percent women in politics (a self-imposed quota); Indonesia has increased women in parliament positions in the past few years.

A United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report highlights the impact of increasing women’s participation in the economic sector—if women’s employment rates raised to 70 percent, countries like Malaysia, India, and Indonesia would have an increase in GDP between 2-4 percent.

On day two, YAB Tuan Lim Guan Eng, Chief Minister of Penang, delivered a speech congratulating the 3Gs conference. He spoke of how it was “heart warming to show that men are concerned about gender equality… men in Penang are gender sensitive; they have their wives to thank for that.” I found his speech a little regressive in the rights of women, but that he acknowledged obvious gender gaps provided a push in the right direction.

The conference itself was somewhat daunting; an overall lack of communication, mixed messages, and interspersion of unnecessary personal opinion made irrelevant many key issues. The days were laden with favorable quotes such as “us women, we worry about everything” (foot-in-mouth) that did more harm than anything else. Confusion stemming from ambiguity of conference objectives hindered, I believe, the logical implementation of educated voices combining to produce a working document for the Chief Minister. Much more could have been accomplished through a smaller group of qualified academicians and political experts (as undemocratic as that may sound) coming together to produce a document after hearing the voices of concerned individuals—which in themselves are well-deserved. There was a detachment between what was aimed to carry out and the issues of concerned citizens.

I am glad I was able to be a part of the conference (and equally glad that it’s over).

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