Seattle so far

I've been in the city for just about five days and it's been a whirlwind of getting acquainted with my neighborhood (the fantastic Capital Hill with its abundance of restaurants, hills, and bookstores) and the project. I had a meeting with two members of the Women's Commission on Thursday to map out some details and figure out a likely time line. I'll be joining the Commission's monthly meetings and presenting the project at the all-Commission gathering in late June.

For the duration of the summer, I'll be housed in the Seattle Office of Civil Rights; they're being kind enough to allow me to use their space as a home base for the project. The SOCR actually sponsors several other city-wide commissions so it should be really interesting to have an eye into how these bodies work with local government. It seems, at least from an outsider's view, that Seattle's city government is quite committed to ensuring and engaging citizen participation and that citizens return the goal by volunteering to be involved.

As far as my project with TentCity 3 goes, I'm still in the prep work phase. I want to make sure that I'm not only eliciting information and thoughts from women who live in the tent city about their access to health care, but that the project also provides a tool for empowerment and self-determination for such services. I'm hoping to learn more about how TC3 works on a daily basis to best figure out how to advertise for the interviews, determine where will be best to conduct them, and figure out the best way to frame the project and myself. Apparently, mentioning the 'H-bomb' in Seattle (the ubiquitous Harvard name-drop) is a sure way to lose friends out here so I'll just identify myself as Emily, the graduate student working with the Women's Commission. In fact, I've been working on learning various Seattle-isms and was told that out here, someone going to Harvard doesn't even pull the typical east-coast "Oh, I go to school in Cambridge" line- it's more of a vague "I go to school on the east coast." I'm more than happy to oblige (no offense HKS buddies).

Anyway, as part of the project's prep work, I've been working at securing gift card donations from area drug stores to help incentivize interview participation. It's harder than I had hoped. But there's a good number of stores near to where the tent city just moved to yesterday. It's being hosted for the summer by St. Joseph Parish at 18th and Aloha, in the northern part of Capital Hill. The church is hosting a welcome ice cream social this Thursday so hopefully, I can attend as well and begin to introduce myself to community members. It's not a far move from its previous location, but I don't doubt the amount of work that has to go into such a migration. Here's a few pictures from SHARE/WHEEL's website of former tent city sites (these are actually at Tent City 4 in Mercer Island) so you can get an idea of just how large-scale such a movement is every three months:





I'll head over to visit the new site tomorrow so stay tuned.