Success

I went into doing craft fairs, not needing to make money. I was still working or in school or something. So it's a weird balance to be able to do both, I think. I don't know why, but I'm fairly successful. I haven't lost money at a market, ever. I don't know, I think part of it is the engagement does drive the sales more. I'm not so worried about money. I'm just worried about engaging with people and having a good time. I don't look at my numbers all the time and things like that. I'm not trying to make more money and sell more of the certain product. I'm just, I look at it as for the experience. I think there's a little bit of that money versus engagement mindset, which has also lended to me making money, too. I guess it's just that everybody's goals are different.

I think that for me, it's about triangulation of different things. And I wonder if maybe in efforts to scale up if there could be some strategic and creative triangulation of different modes of evaluation and measurement, so that on some level, I think that it's hard to measure community impact. And I think that, like you said Sarah, what were the values that you set for yourself in doing this project? And if those values were I'm going to do no harm while I'm here, I want to leave something that they can hold onto afterwards and I'm going to follow up with them to extend the relationship beyond this one event. And those are the core values then I think that you can build something around that. I think that it's tough to grapple with scale when I think that so many of these things are so specific to a certain geography, to certain histories

how do you create a toolkit that's mostly about values, right? That's what's being passed on, I think in many ways. It's these are the principles and I think it goes back to meaningful, right? If I can articulate what the values were that drove my decision-making, then those can be concrete, but in such a way that they become a scaffolding for people to fill in in the circumstances, right? Because the other piece about the partnerships in ... Communities are different and you're going to have, if you're trying to meet people where they are and to build from the ground up, that ground is different. So I think and I'm not sure what that would look like but to think about how you might create a toolkit that is values driven as opposed to logistics or content or any of the other things that we would think of as being primarily in a toolkit of that nature.

I do think that this question of language, we started with meaningful and we talk about success. the idea of impact, right? I struggle so much with figuring out capacity building, but what's the capacity. And I just feel the language itself gets me tripped up and it needs to be the way in which we tell the story, right? Ultimately you need to have the language to tell the story to do the work. And sometimes I feel the language fails me and we just haven't quite figured out the right language to use to make these things make sense outside of our hearts. That feels so much what I felt like actually driving the other day. I was reflecting after listening to y'all's conversation in Atlanta and I was like, "Wow, what did success really look like? And what would success even look like for us?" I mean, let's just say that every single kid that came to one of these booths now became a scientist. That's not realistic, and that's also not what we're even shooting for, right? We're just trying to get people interested in science and liking it. And in my case, when I really distill what it is, why I'm doing what I'm doing, it's because I want to make Yale be less shitty and certainly even better. And that doesn't necessarily mean make every single kid in Dwight, a doctor or scientist, engineer, but it's more so just enrich their lives and the way that which they should be getting already from having Yale in their backyard. And there's no 200-year plan for how to make things more equitable... At least that I have mapped out or seen mapped out. And that's why I think that I have real difficulty with these metrics of success for do I have to, does it really mean that I did a good job if I hit 100 students versus 1000 students? Do I have to increase their math scores? Do I have to have a pre and post survey to tell them that, "Oh, they have two more science facts in their head now." But there is this gut feeling when you see a kid run up to you and remember you from last time and say, "Oh, what are we doing today?" And I don't think that any of our activities are necessarily going to be these eureka epiphany moments for any kid necessarily, but it's a layering of just more resources and capacity building and what you said as well. They get a chance to play with slime or they get a chance to learn about how their muscles turn a bike, but they also get a chance to be in a nice green space and have access to food and housing security and stuff like that. So I have no idea how to actually put it in the grant, because if you write that in the grant, they're just like, "What is this person saying?" Because also if you try to communicate to that somebody, especially who hasn't done this work, or hasn't put a lot of thought into it necessarily, it's tough to even articulate that in words,

what does success look like? Right? And when we are plugged into a super inflexible structure where we have to have X, Y, Z metrics, and it has to take place within this one or three year, whatever the funding cycle is, as you mentioned Justin, I think it's really hard for people to think about success as building capacity when capacity feels such an immeasurable entity. People just want metrics, they want numbers, they want graphs, and that's how you get your money to sustain your engagement work. And so we are pitted against what needs to be done just to survive. And I think that is highly, highly problematic.

Surveys often are that way to collect data on outcomes, I always think about whenever I'm administering a survey, I try and think very carefully about how I am as a survey complete, or how I am as a person completing a survey. A person who is giving off those outcomes that people are trying to collect. So I think that while they can be valuable in many ways, I think that they're limited, and I think, especially when we're talking about this, when we're talking about what is happening or what happened on Saturday, it is so much more than outcomes, it's so much about process and I think this goes back to everything we were saying around the relationship building piece, the cultural competency piece, how you have to build those parallel strategies. If you are building those parallel strategies, then it's just not about sort of the outcome of what was learned, or how did you engage with science, it is about the process of how this event came to be. So something like an interview with a Dottie Green, or a set of maybe even like three or four qualitative questions that you could ask a subgroup of students or parents leaving the event. I think that is some of the data that should go hand in hand with some of those outcome metrics.

having some kids play with slime is not going to fix a pipeline program or pipeline problem, or it's not going to increase, just by increasing exposure to STEM is not going to be solving any intricate and multifaceted problems, and I never thought that it would. I think that maybe this isn't an idea for a springboard, for how best to get... Like for instance, one of the main drivers of Science Haven was that I saw that all these graduate students that are from largely privileged backgrounds, are living in a neighborhood that is extremely secluded away from everyone else in New Haven, and it's just basically for Yale students. I was really bummed out about that and I was like, "Wow, these people aren't experiencing New Haven for what it is truly, they're just from one Yale bubble to another Yale bubble that's separated by New Haven." Which is like some sort of some sort of tunnel they have to go through to get to their job, and I think that's extremely problematic, because there's such a wealth of experiences that would be formative for them to better ground themselves and be able to use their privilege later on once they are continuing to earn more money, become more politically influential and things like that and they're not actually seeing New Haven residents for what they are and realizing that they are neighbors and that they're friends and just because they don't have a Yale ID hanging from their neck or from their belt loop doesn't mean that they're not supposed to interact with them. I am not really good at articulating these sort of ideas, but this is the sort of feelings that were bubbling up when I was thinking about this stuff, and it's not that I think that a VR headset is going to like, it's going to break down all the systemic barriers. Like, "Oh, this kid, he had a chance to see a VR headset and then he just loved science and became the next NASA director." But there's more to it to where I think that working together with people that have a lot more experience with this kid could help you know make this more of like a neighborhood development and leadership program, and like honestly just like soul searching for graduate students who are extremely privileged to be able to be paid to go to graduate school, and to do research to get a PhD, to where they could be interacting their community in a much more serious and important way for all society and not for what they get to put on their CV.

the emphasis on relationship building was first and foremost, because we have to have relationship between the graduate students and the neighborhood leaders to have repeated ways of getting out to the community in a real and genuine way. So it's more so just like teaching graduate students that they need to be thinking about outreach in a way that's not just, I'm going to take a Saturday afternoon go in front of my laboratories, my laboratories like lobby area and do some activities with kids who came here with their parents who are also professors or scientists or something like that. So it was sort of shifting the way that we think about outreach overall,

So I think in some ways, success is just figuring out how to have a real moment of engagement with a new organization or a new partner, with a new institution that feels meaningful. That feels like it serves their mission, which thereby serves our mission and that it feels like it's a relationship that means something. And that then potentially, has room for growth. And then sometimes I feel like those things feel so small and we have goals and as success markers and this is something we're all obviously struggling with too. It's like when you run a festival that reaches 60,000 people, it sometimes feels like not as meaningful to say that you had a really great several long hour event with 10 families. But I also think that, it's doing a little bit of different work.

interrogate those assumptions that you're making about an audience, that you "Serve." And actually taking the time, the money, the energy, to ask these audiences what exactly they need from you. Versus deciding that they need a science exhibit to inspire kids to pursue STEM. The idea is that kids aren't inspired? Kids are inspired all the time. It's the connections, from passion, to purpose to, I guess, career that gets lost. It's the support, from passionate, to purpose, to career that gets lost. And so what we've also been having conversations about, it's not just enough to inspire.

There's this question, is this a really good use of our efforts? What value does this have? The impact, all those classic questions. In which case, is this feeling really small, and insignificant? Participation in cons, or parades, or other programs? Does that move any needles that I actually care about? Or on the other hand, is this a really good path to reaching people? And particularly people we don't normally reach, and is this actually really important? If this idea, that if your organizations, and your values aren't visible, then they're invisible. And is this a great way, to ensure visibility in the communities that we operate in?

I have this internal gauge that I know when I'm on the right path. I know when things are right. That's when I get chills. When I get chills, I'm overcome with such an emotion that I can't really describe it in words, but it's just, this is so cool. It's almost, it gets to your heart, whatever it is and when you're on paper and the thought behind it and you're going, "Yeah, these were put for these reasons," but when you're there and you're dealing with humans, you're dealing with kids that are so passionate about what they're doing, and are so generous to want to explain it to other kids, and then they tell you their reasons why, it just sends shivers throughout my body.