After School Programs in New York City and The Freedman Home

South Bronx, NY, USA

By Burak Sancakdar
youth spaces, after school programs, south bronx, andrew freedman home, policing

The project investigates the after school programs in the South Bronx through qualitative and quantitative research.

This project is a collaborative effort of Burak Sancakdar, Burgess Brown, the Andrew Freedman Home and G.I.R.L.S. Achieving INC. Before explaining the project, we would like to say thank you for all the participants who give their feedback on our project.

Project Brief:

For our thesis project, we have been partnering with various non-profit organizations and community leaders in order to co-design a youth center in the Andrew Freedman Home, where our partners running their operations in the South Bronx since late 2016.

The key values we set for ourselves from the beginning of the project were revolving around combining of research, theory and engagement, which became the definition of our practice and methodology. In other words, whatever we maintained a feedback routine from our community partners almost each step we took with our respective backgrounds from design research and theory.

Through our engagement process with the youth leaders and stakeholders, the main takeaway was that the youth was not utilizing the existing after-school programs in the neighborhood, whether because they were not feeling comfortable to participate to them or the programming was not representing the values of the neighborhood.

This takeaway led us designing a collaborative design process for the Andrew Freedman Home which would be an outline for their expansion in after-school programming.

This website serves as a platform where we will document our quantitative and qualitative research.

Quantitative Research:

For our quantitative research, we created a short film series where youth from the neighborhood would interview each other about the challenges in the neighborhood. Through these series of interviews, the youth talked about why they don’t feel comfortable to use the after-school programming in the neighborhood, their interactions with the police and their thoughts about the Andrew Freedman Home.

You can see the first of the video series below.

Young Adult Perspective Project from Burak Sancakdar on Vimeo.

Qualitative Research:

In one of the focus groups we held with our stakeholders, we designed a mapping exercise to learn where the youth hangs out in the neighborhood. The aim of this mapping exercise was to learn about where the youth hangs out, what are the values of these spaces which makes them more attractive than the dedicated community centers. This way, we would be able to distill the values that makes the spaces attractive for the youth and apply them into our co-design process.

Through this mapping exercise, we realized that the youth was either not familiar with the dedicated community centers or they did not feel comfortable to participate to these programs. Even though this static mapping exercise was fruitful for our process, we decided to make an online version of this map because of the limitations of 2D Maps.

Our community partner Tabaitha Rodriguez guided us what information we should show in our online map.

Tabaitha’s feedback was crucial for strengthen our thesis argument. Her suggestion was that we would use the parks and the bus lines in order to render the real issue, which is not the number of the dedicated community spaces or their location, but it was what they represent. In other words, according to Tabaitha, it is not that there is no investment into these programs, but the issue is how these investments are utilized and don’t represent the values in the neighborhood.