Refine and Reiterate

As the Creative Writing Laboratory comes closer and closer to existence (cue lightning bolts and menacing laughter), our team has divided tasks and refined our focus to the key aspects of getting the project off the ground. Our primary focus is now on programming as well as community engagement with stakeholders in or connected to our chosen neighborhood. Additionally, team members are tackling the budget and narrowing the fundraising targets for the pilot project.

The Community Engagement Team continues to target and identify stakeholders in order to build our prospects of partnering with existing organizations and individuals for both space and programming. This team is also determining potential volunteer pools that will be the foundation of the Mad Scientist Shop.

In order to reach out to both the community, volunteers, and of course the kids, the Community Engagement Team is also developing a marketing plan and defining goals on reaching our target population. We are certainly excited to witness our own story being written as more and more of the creative elements come into place.

The Programming Team is delving into the services we are going to provide to students. We continue to explore a variety of different models and potential partnerships to combine the right ingredients for maximum impact. Our stakeholders have given us a wealth of ideas for programming, and several team members are bringing their own experiences in youth engagement to define the scope and goals of the organization.

Discussing the structure of the organization, we are now focusing more of our effort on programming as opposed to the storefront component, in order to begin serving the students sooner rather than later. We still value what the storefront will bring in terms of community engagement and sparking creativity, however, for logistical and financial reasons we are scaling down our idea of having a large amount of inventory at the start. Nevertheless, we do plan on incorporating thematic elements into the project to capture the essence of the storefront we hope to eventually open up.

In terms of the physical space, the Budget Team has been diligently dividing the budget into line items–from crayons to TP. We are developing several budget scenarios for the project, to allow us—and our donors—to visualize various, potential scales of the project.

To make sure we have the basics when we open our doors, the Fundraising Team has been compiling lists of potential donors and grant opportunities that will hopefully support the project. We are exploring both monetary and in-kind donations to make the shop come alive…it’s alive…it’s aliiiiveee! (ALMOST!)

Finally, as the Systems aspect of our project comes due, we are developing a continuity plan to prepare for the coming year. The Mad Scientist team is ensuring that the project will have a smooth transition from planning to actually doing, and we are excited for all of you to be a part of making that happen!

With all of that being said, we would also like to invite you to see how it all comes together in our final presentation. We will describe the progress we have made, where we are going, and solicit feed back from our stakeholders. We hope you can join us. 

The presentation information is as follows:

November 21, 2011

8:00 AM

Hamburg Hall Room 1002

4800 Forbes Avenue 

Mad Scientists to Experiment with Laboratory in... Garfield-Friendship-Bloomfield!

After many intensive weeks of stakeholder interviews and research, we faced a very difficult decision: choosing a neighborhood in which to launch our mad scientists’ laboratory. The fact that we met helpful, resourceful, and enthusiastic people in each neighborhood we explored was reassuring and invigorating, but it also made our selection process quite challenging!

After a lot of conversation and many calculations, Garfield/Friendship/Bloomfield rose to the top! While we felt relief at arriving upon a decision, I must admit that we also felt saddened that this selection might close some doors to specific partnerships elsewhere. Nevertheless, we knew that narrowing our neighborhood focus was necessary at this stage in the process if we wanted to create a “third place” and begin planning our program model. It also helped us to remember that we could broaden our reach down the line. For example, as we grow, we hope to create satellite projects within schools and in other neighborhoods.

In the meantime, we are thrilled about the opportunities that await us in Garfield, Friendship and Bloomfield. We look forward to having a positive impact on the children and partners who join us in our laboratory to concoct, invent, and experiment! We hope that children from all around the city will visit us.

In the coming weeks, we will report on our outreach efforts and partnerships. We are currently creating the business plan for a six month pilot project that will launch in the near future, offering workshops and after school programming, as well as the essence of a quirky storefront. The pilot project will serve as a prototype, enabling us to experiment with partnerships and programs, and allowing us to show prospective volunteers/participants/families/partners/funders the potential impacts of a future, permanent, and more extensive organization.

(For those of you who want to know more about how we approached neighborhood selection, we’ve provided more details below.)

METHODOLOGY
The six neighborhoods we investigated included the five we highlighted at our first presentation plus Homewood, since a number of interviewees suggested we include it:

• East Liberty
• Garfield/Friendship/Bloomfield
• Lawrenceville
• Downtown
• The Northside (Central Northside, Allegheny West, Allegheny Center, and Allegheny East)
• Homewood

For each neighborhood, we evaluated accessibility, community support, need, and retail character. We assigned weights to each of these decision criteria by asking the question: At this point in time, which criterion matters most to ensure that our project continues beyond this semester? We weighted community support most heavily since the team felt that its metrics -- partner organizations, teacher support, volunteer pools, support from neighborhood organizations, Mainstreets loans and grants, strategic plans and other neighborhood initiatives – were most relevant to us in this phase of our project. The other criteria still matter, of course, but high scores for community support seemed like good indicators of future success.

After apportioning weights to each decision criterion, we assigned values to that criterion for each neighborhood. We then determined the total utility value for each neighborhood under consideration by multiplying values and weights, and then adding them up per neighborhood. In technical terms, a utility value is “the measure of the welfare or satisfaction of an investor or person.”[1] It’s a way of placing a numerical value on things that cannot be easily quantified. In other words, using utility values allowed us to incorporate both qualitative and quantitative factors into our decision process.

After all our calculations were complete, Bloomfield/Garfield/Friendship scored highest. As we illustrated in our neighborhood map during our first presentation, we’ve lumped these neighborhoods together since Penn Avenue is a border between them as well as a commercial corridor and an east-west thoroughfare. While our precise location is not yet determined, a storefront along the Penn Ave. arts corridor could provide us with the visibility and proximity to children we want, as well as a number of creative neighbors.

Of course, there are so many unknowns with an entrepreneurial project like this one. It’s just not possible to perfectly predict the future. With that in mind, we conducted a gut check. Because this process was a mix of art and science, we compared each teammate’s intuitions against the outcomes to identify potential confounding factors. However, we discovered that while team members’ values varied by neighborhood and criterion, Bloomfield/Garfield/Friendship had scored highest or second highest when team members had completed the decision matrix on their own, prior to our group exercise. In other words, our deliberate decision-making process seemed to work!