Truthfully, I think that an Edutainment blog would be the most fun and interesting piece of writing to develop for project 3. That being said, I haven’t been able to think of a topic over the last few days that I think I know well enough to write a really cool edutainment blog about. If I get inspired in the next day or two though, I might try to explore that idea a little more.
This being said, a lot of what drove me to go to school for engineering was the thought that I’d be able to make a solid impact in my community. My hope was that somehow my community would be able to benefit from my education since I have so many people from my community to thank for helping me to receive my education. Right now, Worcester is overhauling all the ugly parts of town and putting a lot of money and effort into community development. There are a lot of requests for proposals (RFPs) on the city website that have to do with neighborhood development, repairs of old broken structures, renovations to schools, etc. It’s really cool to see the progress that is being made, and think about how much the city has changed in my memory. I looked through a bunch of RFPs,but there were a lot of them that were engineering related that were just way over my head still, but there was one called the “Community Development Block Grant Program” (CDBG Program) which asks for any proposals for how to spend a $3.8 million annual federal grant the city receives. They have some very vague guidelines for what they want to accomplish (minimize slums, meet an urgent city need, serve low- moderate income persons, etc.) and the rest is fairly open.
It has always bothered my how much space in Worcester is just taken up by old factory buildings and ugly junk yards. It’s mostly just a waste of space and makes the city look a lot more run down and poor than it actually is. I cross referenced this with some of the (very) many RFPs for city development in Boston to see what kind of stuff might fit into this CDBG RFP and got a lot of ideas for things people might want to do with empty lots in developing neighborhoods. Boston has really tight guidelines for what they are willing to build and what proposals they won’t even look at. I hope to use these Boston proposals to help me develop a public initiative proposal in response to the Worcester CDBG request.
I also think that this kind of proposal will fit in well with the schema that group 3 put together during project 2. They focused their proposal format on city development, since those were the best examples they found. I also think that their schema is very straight forward considering that proposals need to flow well and the format is fairly predictable. My only confusion, now that I’ve looked at examples of how they have used their schema, is what parts of the schema are required and whats optional? It seems like some of the examples leave empty elements in the schema, and I’m not sure that is just because it’s not totally finished or if the empty elements just aren’t required.
To develop this for project 3, I’d need to decide on what kind of actual development I’d like to see in these ‘wasted spaces’ in Worcester, be it a park, community center, commercial building, etc. It also might help to pick a particular space that could be redeveloped. This whole time I’ve been brainstorming I’ve been picturing some old abandoned factories that are in the residential areas near Union Station and WPI (downtown Worcester) but I’m sure there are other neighborhoods that I’m sure could use similar development that might work better for this project.
I’m concerned about not being able to either (a) do the proposal justice and actually put a good amount of content in it, or (b) spending way too much time and making a project that is way longer than it should be for project 3.
