The final project update will surround the events concluding the project on environmental justice, including the presentation at the Macaulay event, as well as the creation of our popular education product. An important aspect of the project that we worked on was the PowerPoint presentation for the Macaulay student conference. The most helpful resource when creating this presentation was actually our white paper, as it provided a clear outline on how we should present our project. As a result, the creation of the presentation was quite seamless.
Our experience at the Macaulay Seminar 4 student conference was a wonderful one. We were placed in the “urban environmentalism” category, also grouped in a panel with projects in the “future of labor” category. Presenting in front of peers was an interesting way to gain insight into both current events and issues that are important to New York City, but also into different aspects of presenting that made each group either successful or unsuccessful at getting their points across. One thing that I noticed was that each campus had its own personal take on Seminar 4. Although we were all concerned with different aspects of life in the city that are shaping the future of New York, different groups were concerned with different issues, which were typically linked with the concentrations of their respective campuses. For instance, many groups from Baruch were focused on topics like spreading awareness of the importance of having bank accounts. I found this aspect of the event quite interesting and I felt that each of us learned a lot from other groups.
Overall, I believe that our group’s presentation was clear, concise, and successful at presenting our main points. Perhaps the major advantage that our group had was the access to community contacts. While the other groups presented their projects well, they relied entirely on secondary data sources. Including information obtained from direct contact with organizations involved in our topic added not only something engaging to the audience, but also an element of credibility (in my opinion). In addition, our group was successful at pacing ourselves and presenting within the given time constraint. A major issue with many of the groups was that they were unable to conclude their presentations within the 10 minute slots that each group was designated. Their presentations were very thorough and detailed, perhaps to the point where there was an overload of information. Once again, utilizing our white paper helped us avoid this issue. By only including the major points of each part of our white paper onto the presentation, we were able to finish at 8 minutes.
Although our presentation did proceed smoothly, I feel as if there were some things that could be improved upon. We faced some minor technical difficulties because a few of the photos on our slides were overlapping with the text, which was probably the result of a glitch when the file was downloaded from Google Docs. In addition, perhaps we could have gone into greater detail since we did have almost two minutes remaining. However, finishing early was the safer option. This experience was definitely a great learning experience above all else and we all gained valuable presentation skills that will be put to use in the future.
In addition to the presentation, we also completed our popular education product. As a group, we decided that a video would be a great way to spread awareness of this issue because videos spread quite rapidly on the Internet and if we could present the issue in an engaging way, we may be able to actually achieve our goal. We decided that the target audience of the video would be the general public of New York City. Therefore, we had to frame the video in a way in which people would feel interested partially due to the fact that they would be affected in some way. Our plan was to combine various video clips of the South Bronx that we filmed on one of our visits, along with other forms of media like photos and voiceover audio.
One of the greatest difficulties faced was editing the video. Although our first draft of the video was decent, changes needed to be made in order to make it more engaging. This was when we realized that making a video would not be so simply as to simply compile video clips and audio. A great challenge was to not only get the audience engaged, but to also keep them engaged throughout the course of the five minute video. Using the helpful feedback from classmates and the professor, we made some changes to the video in order to make it more entertaining. Animated graphs were added to display statistics. Although creating these graphs was initially a challenge, they definitely add something interesting to the video. In addition, on-screen text was added to highlight important concepts, which were being discussed. Overall, we learned that there are so many things one must consider when trying to create a popular education piece to raise awareness of the issue. It is not simply bombarding an audience with statistics and research findings, but ensuring that they are engaged for the duration of the video.
Although the course and our project have come to an end, I believe that our work is not yet done. As a group, we are currently still striving to raise awareness of this issue because it has not yet been resolved. By contacting South Bronx Unite and Friends of Brook Park and sharing our white paper and our popular education product, we are still hoping that we will be able to make a difference in this community in some way. Working on this project has taught us about the importance of taking the time out to get involved in issues within our community because we are all affected by issues like environmental racism. Hopefully, the use of our popular education product will inform more people of this issue and have some kind of impact on the future of environmental justice in New York City.
