RE: Another Five Project Ideas. Which One Should Be Awarded 3,000 STEEM?
To follow up on my comment from the previous post, from the position of presenting the money and asking how these organizations would use it, I am most inclined to support the Free Walking Tours idea. Bob Skiba, with the William Way Community Center's John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives developed a walking tour to educate visitors on Philadelphia's LGBTQ+ history. I attended one of these in October 2016 and it was quite impressive. This past summer I heard that he was looking to fund additional walking tour programs along these lines and potentially bring in interns to lead these tours if he could find the funding. Perhaps that could be one way of funding a free walking tour and internship opportunity?
I also really like the idea of supporting a community-led oral history project with Art Sanctuary, Juntos and/or Asian Americans United. If this is something these organizations would want to tackle with these funds I think it would be an outstanding way of funding grassroots public history in Philadelphia. At the same time, it might also be worth asking what kinds of projects they would like to see done.
A paid walking tour internship would be awesome! Could we contact Bob Skiba about that? For the past couple of weeks I've been very team fund Art-Reach internships, but I'm open to other types of paid internships.
I also agree that the oral history project seems great, but we do need to avoid placing new programming obligations on organizations. I think that's why I'm so into the paid internships, because instead of creating new programming it would simply provide funding to something that's usually already in place in the form of an unpaid internship.
I proposed the tours to be created and disseminated to teachers (instead of led by paid guides) because of the cost of running a tour operation, but using interns might work. A few interns could develop the tours, then lead them for schools for free. They won't require the training and oversight needed for regular tour guides, and won't need to memorize scripts, as they did the research themselves. We'd have to keep the number of interns low to ensure they're adequately compensated, but I'm not sure how many it would take to meet the demand because I'm not sure how much demand there is.
Tours work best with groups of 20 or less; once you go above that it's hard to keep them together, you basically have to yell for anyone in the back to hear you, and you can't field as many questions. In my experience the schools bring anywhere from 50-100 students per tour, usually from the same grade, which would require up to 5 guides. I can't say for sure because I don't do the scheduling, but I think most of the schools I've dealt with are fairly small--smaller than Philadelphia schools at any rate. An entire grade wouldn't have to go on the same day, but with the number and size of Philadelphia schools 5 interns could easily be overwhelmed. I guess it just depends on how many schools have interest in taking the tours.
If the demand proves too much and using interns as guides is impractical, they could still be used to create and disseminate the tour materials. Or they could lead tours for teachers, then have the teachers give the tours to students. On the other hand, if they don't lead tours at all they might be able to create more tours overall to disseminate.
Since he already has experience creating a tour from the archives, I agree Bob Skiba is a good candidate to oversee the program.
Developing and giving tours would be great experience for the interns as well, as it develops their research and writing abilities as well as their interpretation and education abilities. It would prepare them for a variety of museum jobs, helping them break in to the sector.
Finally, the interns could post on Steem as they create their tours, generating funds for next year's interns and more tours.