Peter Kimball

This past spring, I interned at the Allston-Brighton Community Development Center, a non-profit organization that focuses on affordable housing and the Allston-Brighton community.  I spent most of my time researching, analyzing, and preparing maps and data that would accurately reflect the composition of the community as well as provide support to value of more affordable housing within Allston-Brighton.  This experience allowed me to gain experience by using skills I had learned from previous courses in a professional context.

Throughout my time at the Allston-Brighton CDC I gathered two main takeaways:

1. In the planning field outside forces will alter what tasks are priority in your day-to-day work.  I originally went into this internship with the need and intention to focus my research on the Allston I-90 Interchange project; however, that became relatively less important as certain funding fell into place. I then shifted my research towards the affordable housing all across Allston-Brighton.
2. Do not limit yourself to existing compiled data- if you need information, gather it yourself. The second half of my time at the Allston-Brighton CDC focused on gathering data on all the existing affordable housing units.  No formal list of affordable housing in the neighborhood existed. I searched for this information creating new excel sheets and maps that can be a further resource for interested parties.

I am grateful for time at the Allston-Brighton CDC because I was able to work with an organization that focuses all their efforts on enriching Allston-Brighton for all the residents.  They gave me the opportunity to utilize my existing skills and build upon what I wanted to work on during my time with the organization. While I continued to take courses that would further my knowledge on topics within the planning field, I was able to continue to exercise my hard skills throughout the internship experience.