Reflection #1

My plans for the semester are to conduct research on what the East St.Louis community knows
about trees and how they feel about trees being implemented into the community. I also will be aiming to educate East St.Louis community members on local trees around them and some of their benefits. This data collection will be mainly to help Daizjah at Heartlands with her research and implementation of trees in East St.Louis, but also to help JJKFan with their greenspace project to help them understand the communities’ perspective. Additionally, we will be attending district board meetings to better understand the stakeholders places in these processes, and to know the best way to enact our research. We should be attending community events as well with Heartlands, as we aim to create informational pamphlets for community as well as asking them questions about trees and asking them to take our survey. With JJKFan, we aim to attend a weekend football events on their academic campus to be able to ask questions and inform the family members about trees, and try to get them to take our survey.
So far, I have learned and categorized the top most common trees in East St.Louis so I can research each of them and understand their benefits to the community. More generally, we know that the community of East St.Louis has a very post-industrial past so the work that we are doing is very important. Although, this means that it is sometimes hard to connect with community members on greenspaces because they have not been around that as much. They have not been introduced to agriculture/trees that much and thats the joint interests of Heartlands and JJKFan that want to implement this knowledge. It surprised me that there are 865 trees in East St.Louis and it cost $220,000. I was surprised that there was so many trees and that it cost that much. I really just want to know how the community members feel speaking to them in person. I also want to understand personally why they feel like they did not care about trees. Additionally, what do they think they would do to try to learn more about trees if they really do find it interesting and/or important.