Students discuss how building a cafe together opened up new possibilities and realms for collaboration, and allowed us to anticipate future opportunities for cooperative work.
At WHEELS, our work with The Fortune Society via The Ship’s First Shape Was a Raft, stemmed from a desire to create (more) opportunities to focus on a shared concerns. WHEELS students and Fortune students have been unwavering in their vision for a “something” that allows for the possibility of community building (around storytelling, around the sharing of information around jobs, around the possibility for a safe space free from policing and surveillance). Our triangulated partnership with Parsons increased WHEELS students’ capacities to springboard other projects that were/are deeply connected.
WHEELS students attended our district’s participatory budget meetings, and pitched, among other ideas, a teen-run cafe/lounge/community center, possibly even a pop-up version of any of these, out in a yet to be determined uptown space. While the cafe project failed to gain traction, an ancillary WHEELS project, for a community playground, did, and was selected in the spring of 2015; we hear the city will break ground in 2017. Subsequently, WHEELS has become a site for PB voting. Last year, hundreds of uptown community members voted at a WHEELS staffed site. Coffee and snacks, on the honor system, were available.
Kerry MacNeil, WHEELS teacher