Meet Our Staff

Lesly Afranie is a Bushwick native working at the Hope Gardens Community Center this summer.  She’s on the pre-med track at Brown, and is currently deciding between a concentration in Science and Society or Health and Human Biology.  She has a deep interest in the interaction between health and culture, which she draws on to address issues of public health while working at the Center.  Through her work at the center, she is learning a variety of lessons about how to teach, how to create successful non-profit programs, and how to work with and positively impact a community on its own terms. 

Lesly is in charge of the community center’s garden, where she works with the kids to plant and grow a variety of vegetables and herbs, many of which are used in the weekly nutrition class she helps to teach.  She explains that working in the garden is a combination of a gardening club and a plant biology class—not only do the kids learn to take care of a garden, they are also introduced to scientific methods.  They discuss hypotheses, sensory based observations, and use critical thinking to explore their experiences.  The nutrition class she assists with cooks a new recipe each week with a focus on teaching community members healthy eating in order to prevent and alleviate many of the health problems facing Hispanic communities today.

Lesly also worked to launch a new ecology class at Hope Garden, which taught her much about outreach and all of the “bits and pieces of what it takes to be a non-profit.”  She recounts that when the initial idea for the class proved to be less popular than was hoped for, she and the course coordinator adjusted the focus and the curriculum to better meet the needs of those attending the class.  Both at the Coalition and through her volunteering in Providence, RI, she has learned the importance of looking at problems and solutions from the perspective of the community the organization is trying to serve in order to best meet the community’s needs. 

Additionally, Lesly is working on two independent media projects.  One project is designed to highlight all of Hope Garden’s summer programming—from the camp to educational and fitness classes—to achieve a comprehensive understanding of all that Hope Gardens does.  On an even broader scale, her second project is a newsletter for Hope Gardens and its three closest neighbors which she hopes will both increase parents’ awareness of the variety of resources the Coalition offers and strengthen the connections between the four sites, reminding workers of the wider scope of the Coalition’s work.

            Lesly applied to work with the Coalition because she wanted to “tap into home again” after feeling somewhat separated from her neighborhood during her time at Brown.  Additionally, after benefitting from a high school and college preparation non-profit herself, she wanted to be able to give the sense of security and support that she received at that organization to others with her work.  She says that benefitting from a non-profit herself made her realize that in community based work “even if it’s only one person [that you affect], it’s huge [for that person].”  She plans to keep her desire to help people on a direct and local level with her to whichever field she enters into after she finishes college.  

Yuri Iwahara is a rising sophomore at Brown University working at the IS 383 Arts and Literacy site this summer.  At Brown she is a potential computer science and English double major, and this summer she is trying her hand at a variety of positions at the Coalition.  Before coming to the Coalition she had had some prior experience working with children at summer camps, and wanted to learn more about what it is like to work at a non-profit.             

            Her week at the office preparing for the start of summer camp gave her a taste of the complexities and fast pace of the non-profit world, particularly when working with children.  Once summer camp started, she began working as a morning teacher, where she was in charge of lesson planning for a class of twenty 3^rd and 4^th graders.  She says that it was intimidating at first, as she had never been in charge of so many children at once, and she had to learn how to assert herself in order to direct the class.  She also learned to be more adaptable through her experiences in lesson planning, saying that sometimes her lesson plans would not work out as planned, and she had to become comfortable with going off script and completely changing the program in order suit her kids’ needs.

 After a few weeks of teaching morning classes, Yuri realized that she might be able to better serve the program in a different area, so she switched to teaching afternoon classes, which are geared more towards recreation than academics.  Yuri also prepares pre-trip and follow up activities for the summer camps’ frequent field trips for all of the classes.  For example, when the camp traveled to the Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she prepared medieval themed games and shield designing worksheets to familiarize the children with the time period.  She’s also begun working on a video project that will compile interviews with teachers and children about their experiences at summer camp.  Filmmaking is also a new for Yuri, so the project is allowing her to explore an unknown process.

Yuri says that her favorite part of working at the Coalition has definitely been her interactions with the children.  She enjoys hearing their stories and engaging them, though she admits that it has been difficult to learn to balance being friends and being an authority figure.  Additionally, she says that it is through the children that she has learned the most about the Bushwick community.  Though she does not plan on returning to teaching after this summer, she says that she will take the lessons she has learned about assertiveness and taking charge and about quickly adapting to new situations with her wherever she goes.  And she will always carry with her a desire to use her skills to best serve and have the biggest impact at whichever organizations she may work at in the future.