Wang Lening

For my internship, my main focus was the Lead Abatement Program. It is a 3-year program to remove the lead from Quincy homes. Before 1978, all houses were built with lead paint which is harmful to people’s health, especially children under 6 year old and pregnant women. This program is going to provide $10,000 assistance per unit, $1,000 temporary relocation grant and other supports and resources, in order to remove or cover the lead hazards through changing windows and doors, improving yards and play areas, installing carbon monoxide & smoke detectors, among other initiatives. 

This program just started at the beginning of 2019. Thus, my responsibilities were to help residents get familiar with this program and help them apply for it. In addition to designing a Lead Abatement website for the Office of Healthy Home, I worked with spreadsheets for identifying units which didn’t pass the lead inspection before or were suspected to have lead hazards. I also classified owner-occupied units and tenant-occupied units on another spreadsheet. Then, we used GIS and Mailing Merge to combine the 2 spreadsheets and identified potential target units. Subsequently, we stuffed 500 sample envelopes to send to these residents. I also participated in making the flyers and application forms for the envelopes. It was really meaningful when we sent these envelopes and received everyone’s phone calls and emails expressing their interests and demands on removing lead. In addition, I joined in 2 outreach events for this program, including the August Moon Festival and Cruise open to all Quincy residents. In these events, I prepared the outreach packages and handwork lantern paper with our program’s information for children and coordinated with my colleagues to introduce our program and to answer questions from the public.

What’s more, I worked for the first-time homebuyer program which provided housing mortgage for low to moderate income residents at Quincy. This program started during the 1990s, so what I did was to identify the status of properties of these homebuyers by reading the relavant documents carefully and then updating it on a spreadsheet.  After reading these documents in detail, I learned a lot about the Housing realm and this program, such as some professional words and the thoughtfulness needed to approve applications.

Here are my takeaways:

• Low to moderate income residents play an important role in community development. Almost every city consists of this group of people to some extent. They need local government
•  to meet their basic demands and improve their quality of life. I could feel the desire for healthy homes from residents at Quincy through their phone calls and conversations with them at outreach events.
• I got to know what it’s like working in the American government. It’s different from the Chinese government which has a stricter hierarchy. I think the working atmosphere in the USA is more relaxing and equal where everyone can express their opinions directly. I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to learn communication and coordination skills which were important not only for special events but also for daily work.

The experience of working in Quincy Planning and Community Development is so amazing that I feel like my 3-month internship is too short. Before this internship, I didn’t know which specific area I should focus on after graduation, but now I think Community Development is a super good idea!