Table 4.

Findings From Academic Partners

The SEED Community
1. I really didn’t know what to expect. I assumed we would find that there were a lot of fast food restaurants and not a lot of healthy food options. Other than that, I thought that we may find there was a lot of barriers to a healthy lifestyle, although I wasn’t entirely sure what some of those barriers may be.
2. I think that the sense of community in the SEED was its strongest asset. Nowhere else in Manhattan does it feel as though the people in the community actually know and care about each other. Additionally, many people living in the SEED have lived there their whole lives, which means that they feel a strong tie to the area.
3. The biggest weakness is that people living in the area tend to be of low SES…. Money is the biggest challenge to engaging in healthy habits since being healthy often costs more.
4. By far, the biggest complaint I heard from members in the community was in regards to gentrification. Many people felt that, instead of building expensive luxury apartments, low-cost housing should be built. Others also felt that gentrification was ruining the community. That is, these apartments were attracting outsiders, and these outsiders did not have the same connection to Harlem as those who had lived there their whole lives. Since I saw how important the ties to the community were, I also understood why gentrification posed such a threat.
Learning and Surprises
5. Thought I’d learn more specifically the composition of the community—what was located on which blocks…. I didn’t really see the entire SEED but I noticed many sidewalks were not smooth and flat, had many dangerous holes and not enough time to cross the streets before the lights changed
6. I think what I found most surprising to learn was that the residents of East Harlem truly have a sense of community. I live in a suburb on Long Island, and I don’t feel the same sense of community as the people in East Harlem. I think that this plays a strong role in the decisions individuals make, and it is something I hadn’t considered.
7. I also did not realize the limitations that urban life has on one’s health behaviors. For example, it is difficult to go for a run on the sidewalks if the sidewalks are in poor shape, there is garbage lining the sidewalks, or, quite simply, there are just too many people walking around. Working on the assessment made me look at all physical environments in a different way (even though it has been a year since I worked on the project, I still take note of how walkable an area is or how supermarkets organize the food on their shelves). Once again, I had not considered how much the physical environment can impact one’s daily choices and this assessment definitely proved otherwise.
8. I was surprised by how much I learned about the vibrant life of the community. The streets were new and unfamiliar to me and I viewed them with the impartial eyes of a researcher, nothing connecting me personally to what I was mapping. As a longtime community member, [my community partner] has seen these streets change and evolve with time.
9. Through this environmental survey, I learned about the life of the community and discovered some of the powerful ways that community partners are affecting challenged in the SEED area. My greatest discovery was [my partner], who inspired me and challenged me see the SEED community in a totally different and more realistic way.
Interactions With Community Partners
10. My partners had a lot of additional knowledge about the community, what had existed at empty locations for example, how the community façade has changed over time, historical perspective…. I think we balanced each other and it made the experience richer. In terms of data collection, it seemed pretty standardized so I don’t think it affected the data collection per se…. [Community partners] really are the experts on their community.
11. At first, I was not looking forward to it. The academic partners and I had figured out how to do the assessment quickly and I knew that it would take longer with a community partner. I also was apprehensive about working with someone I did not know. However, these were only minor concerns. I actually found I liked working with them because they provided insight I would not have gotten otherwise…. To me, the best part about conducting the assessment with a member of the community was that this person knew a lot more about the community than I did. Often times, there were store fronts that seemed to be closed or out of business. While I may have assumed that the store was out of business, my partner would be able to tell me that, in fact, it was still in business but didn’t open until later in the day. Additionally, the community partners knew members in the community. Thus, other individuals were more receptive to our work because they saw a familiar face was involved with the project.
12. Sometimes the community partners would get a little defensive if we differed. I think they assumed that if we got different counts, that they must be wrong. However, this was not always the case—I made mistakes sometimes too. For subjective ratings, we usually gave reasons for why we chose a certain category, and then decided based on the strength of each person’s arguments
13. I found working with [my partner] to be an extremely rewarding experience. She taught me so much about her history and culture and the history of her neighborhood and shared a lot of personal stories about her experiences living in New York. She inspired me with her commitment to her community and making positive changes for herself.
14. I worked with two different partners, and the experiences were quite different. One of them knew the area very well, and I was able to learn a lot about the area (e.g., one area had a lot of churches and she talked about each church). This partner was very easy going. The other partner I worked with disagreed with what we measured in the assessment, and I felt like I had to constantly justify why everything was important and why we recorded the data the way we did.
Data Collection
15. I really enjoyed it and didn’t feel it was a burden. I learned a lot about the areas I surveyed.
16. The only problem was that sometimes, they did not record information as precisely as the researchers did, or they would miss certain things (e.g., they would forget to also count trees, or they would only count some of them). I wondered if maybe they did not understand how important it is to be precise. However, I usually worked with the community partners on their first or second time out, so I think that they just needed more practice…. I think that there were often more discrepancies between academic and community partners’ data than there was between two academic partners’ data. I think that this was the result of either (1) the community partners just needed more practice or (2) sometimes there were buildings that the academic partner believed to be vacant/closed but the community partner knew was not. I expected that, perhaps, the community partners would be more biased in their judgments (on the more subjective measures, such as the condition of the sidewalks). However, this was not the case; the community partners provided accurate subjective measures. Overall, I think the data was more accurate having collaborated with the community partners…. There tended to be differences when we had to count things (e.g., number of residences). I think that this was largely because the academic partners had had more practice. We knew that if you drew a really good map, you could just count everything up at the end. When I worked with the community partners, they were still learning. Like I mentioned above, I expected the community partners to have difficulty providing objective measures of subjective things, but I found that this was not the case.
17. When we compared our maps, they looked the same. We counted the same number of trees, noted the same abandoned buildings, and recorded the same amount of time it takes to cross the sidewalk. At the same time, our maps were different. [my partner’s] research maps were alive with stories, insight, hopes, and disappointments. While we talked, I learned things about [her]—that she had arranged the planting of an impressive number of trees on one particular street in the hope that her children could walk in the shade of many trees and breathe cleaner air.