North Bellport

January 2003.  For a report on the first phase of Learn by Doing, see Bellport Station at Library--Bookstore.

December 2001.  After many months of planning, the project, "Learn by Doing," finally got under way on November 29, 2001  with the first of a series of focus group discussions in which  neighborhood residents identify questions to be included in an opinion survey and other research activities.  The following summary was handed out to participants.

NORTH BELLPORT LEARN BY DOING

First Phase: Update participatory community design

Introduction

New Directions proposes to mobilize multi-disciplinary university resources, in its Academic Associates Network, to form a team that will help Bellport, Hagerman, East Patchogue Alliance, Inc. (BHEP) and its Weed and Seed committees to establish a community learning process, and to conduct a grassroots assessment, future search and updated community-building plan for the North Bellport neighborhood. This team will help the community to evaluate the work done over the past twenty years, and especially since 1990, including the efforts resulting from the 1991 Enterprise Foundation study and current Weed and Seed activities.

     Further, we propose that, while the twenty-year retrospective analysis is underway, BHEP will invite residents of North Bellport to participate in group learning and leadership development prior to the launching of a Circles of Hope™ grassroots community-building process.

     The ²Learn By Doing² process will introduce community-based research (CBR) into the North Bellport community. CBR is defined as research done by, for and with the residents of a given community. Community development, in this approach, is believed to increase the local capacity for self-help as a product of group learning. It is contrasted with a top-down, external delivery of services, which does not strengthen the ability of residents to help themselves and to help one another.

First Phase - Update participatory community design:

First Phase Objectives

To write the initial chapters of an open-ended community profile;

To undertake the first steps in community learning;

To conduct a participatory neighborhood design process;

To begin to establish a community-university partnership for community-based research (CBR).

First Phase Activities

Profile:

Begin to gather information for a local history, highlighting community-government partnership (student interns); Similarly, begin a review of the progress achieved in response to the 1991 Enterprise plan (student interns);

Using sociology professors and students from SUNY Stony Brook, produce a comparative socioeconomic factor analysis showing North Bellport compared to its school district, town and county;

Using New York Institute of Technology architects and students, conduct a physical assessment of the neighborhood;

Convene neighborhood focus groups and facilitate several dis-cussions about the achievements, the problems, the possibilities and the needs of this community from the grassroots perspective

Design a questionnaire reflecting these observations;

Present these to a Weed and Seed committee, with whom a survey process will be designed using local high school students;

Compile and report the results to the Weed and Seed committee, for adoption;

Arrange to disseminate these first chapters of North Bellport's profile in cooperation with the local library.