Speculating San Diego

I’ll be heading back home for a couple of days at the end of this month for a wedding. So far I’m dateless, and my misadventures and missteps have led me to a position where I could be dateless for the wedding altogether.

So what to do other than cause a spike in my cholesterol level?

Update old projects!

Early in my career I signed on with the Voices PROJECT based in the Sherman Heights Community in San Diego. During my very short tenure with Voices, we worked on, what could be termed as today, an asset map. We went around to City Heights, and Sherman Heights documenting folks that worked in the non-profit sector of said communities and served immigrant and seriously underserved communities in these areas. Most of the folks we interviewed were people of color, and usually scraping by. These are requisite to create or foster a sustainable change within a community. It’s not a pull em’ up by the bootstraps kind of mantra — far from it, usually the folks we’ve documented operated within an infrastructure that let them shine.

Here’s Sherman:

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Here’s City Heights:

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Needless to say, we finished up the project, and it was up on the internet for a bit, but then the organization folded, because our ED got into a graduate program. Subsequently, the website also went off-line as did those narratives. Luckily, I have the raw footage, and the edited footage sitting in a hard drive at home and it got me thinking that perhaps I can do several follow-up interviews, or at least some supplemental material to update what’s been going on in San Diego, especially within these two communities. It’d be interesting to track how their work is fairing, but also how certain external factors have affected the nature of the work, primarily redevelopment and other city planning issues. Plus it’d be nice to visit a few friends that I haven’t seen in a minute…

However, if I do get a date, then I throw this out the window… ;P Just kidding… kinda.