Community Development is designed to provide hands-on lessons in urban inequality, community organizing, economic development, and other issues that you may have studied elsewhere in more typical classroom settings. This semester, our assignments, lectures, readings, and guest speakers revolve almost entirely around one case study: the affordable housing initiatives of Hudson River Housing (HRH), a nonprofit located in the City of Poughkeepsie. Using the participatory Action Research methodology, the course will partner with HRH to develop and administer a survey of residents in a 2-block target area in the Northside of the City of Poughkeepsie and deliver a report of our findings which HRH will use to evaluate the effectiveness of HRH's past efforts.
Since this promises an extraordinary amount of fieldwork and applied research, we will forego the usual classroom procedures and requirements in favor of a more practical format. After the first two weeks, we will spend one of our two weekly meeting times in the field conducting class tours and individual fieldwork; for these sessions, students will not "show up to class" in any conventional sense. The rest of the time will be devoted to analyzing field, survey, and Census data on the Poughkeepsie area, developing and revising our research methods, discussing relevant literature and issues, and doing other classroom work toward our final goal: a final report to be prepared and written by the entire class.
Objectives for the course: (1) to study the promises and problems of community development as they occur in real social settings, (2) to learn and practice field, interview and survey methods as well as research strategies in local consultation and group collaboration, and (3) to evaluate critically and practically the ways that social researchers study and advance community well-being.
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