Activist Lab

Student Researches Local Neighborhood Safety for Activist Practicum

Nickita Gupta conducted “boots-on-the-ground” community work to understand the needs of residents in Dorchester’s Grove Hall community, through a summer practicum funded by the Activist Lab.

Nickita Gupta estimates she only stepped foot in Dorchester’s Grove Hall neighborhood once prior to starting her practicum there this summer.

The second-year MPH student at the School of Public Health believes it is important to preface discussions of her work by acknowledging her status as an outsider who came to the community with the intention of partnering with them to research neighborhood safety. With support from Jonathan Jay, an assistant professor of community health sciences and principal investigator of the Research on Innovations for Safety and Equity (RISE) Lab, she spent the summer observing Grove Hall’s physical environment, connecting with local schools, and documenting community members’ perceptions of the neighborhood.

“My role throughout the summer was really doing community work—boots on the ground—figuring out [from] folks who live, work, and play in Grove Hall,” says Gupta. “What are their thoughts? What are their perspectives on safety and the infrastructure of their community? What are the needs, assets, and challenges?”

Located approximately two miles southwest of SPH at the intersection of Blue Hill Avenue with Washington and Warren streets, Grove Hall is marked by rich ethnic and racial diversity, says Gupta. Once a hub of Boston’s Jewish community, in the 1960s when cities across the country saw an exodus of white Americans moving to the suburbs, banks redlined the neighborhood, transforming Grove Hall into a predominantly Black community. Today, a large Caribbean immigrant population calls the neighborhood home. Grove Hall was chosen for the project, however, because it is also marked by a history of community violence, says Gupta. During Boston’s 50^th Caribbean Carnival this year, for example, eight people were shot on Blue Hill Ave.

Gupta focused specifically on three local Boston Public Schools (BPS) where the YMCA has partnered with BPS to implement the National Education Association’s community schools model. The framework for educational equity calls for dedicated on-site coordinators who work to address systemic barriers to learning by providing students with support tailored to their cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. The coordinators consider both the in- and out-of-school factors that disrupt learning, including neighborhood violence. Together, Gupta and the YMCA Community Hub School coordinators identified fourteen community leaders for in-depth interviews and a variety of teachers, parents, and students for participatory mapping exercises.

“Children’s safety in the spaces near school can be a serious, daily concern that affects children’s learning and wellbeing, but it’s an issue that can fall between siloes—it’s not exactly school safety, but it’s not necessarily a focus of community safety programs,” says Jay, who assisted BPS and the YMCA on defining the scope of Gupta’s research. “Nickita did a great job of getting out into the community, asking the right questions, and being open to responses that weren’t necessarily what we were expecting. She was able to learn about ways that our hypotheses fit with community members’ experiences and ways that they didn’t. This was incredibly useful information for understanding student safety in Grove Hall, and more broadly for understanding how we, as researchers, can best contribute to school safety in Boston.”

Gupta is one of four Safety, Justice, and Health Practicum students mentored by Jay. She also belongs to a cohort of MPH students benefiting from funding and professional development training from SPH’s Activist Lab. She says their support aided her in addressing imposter syndrome when first approaching Grove Hall community members.

“Trust building and relationship building [were] a huge challenge in my role,” says Gupta. “I don’t look like the folks that live in that community. I was very aware of that, so I wanted to make sure that I was spending as much time in the community and learning about the community [as possible].”

Gupta especially valued the opportunity Jay arranged for her and her fellow Safety, Justice, and Health Practicum students to watch “This Ain’t Normal,” a documentary on gang violence in Boston, and to ask questions of Rudy Hypolite, the film’s director and producer. Gupta also credits Craig Andrade, associate dean for practice and director of the Activist Lab, with helping her to hone her public health practice.

Community building has long been a cornerstone of her life, Gupta says. Growing up in California’s Bay Area, she remembers her elementary school hosting a variety of formative events that later inspired her organize her own events at her high school, such as “Cocoa for Carpools,” which encouraged people get to know one another and reduce emission by sharing rides to school. These formative experiences led her to public health, she says, and are the reason she chose to study Community Assessment, Program Development, Implementation and Evaluation (CAPDIE) at SPH.

Ultimately, Gupta would like to build a career authentically engaging communities to effect change. The opportunity to work in Grove Hall fulfilled a longtime dream, she says, “Rather than just talking the talk, I’ve now walked the walk a little bit too.”