Roman Hreskiv

EXPL-291

Instructors: Dr. Patrick Green, Susan Haarman

April 21, 2019

Final Reflection

1. At the beginning of this semester, which seems like it was yesterday, I had no idea any kind

of expectations about what this class will turn out to be or what it will require of me.

However, at this point I am sure that I had a privilege to experience personal and professional

growth. I worked with fellow students and professors from Loyola, as well as great people

from Chicago Friends School community. This experience was truly unique and rewarded

me with a lot of great memories and experiences. In order to describe what was so important

that happened during conducting a community-based research with Loyola students, I want

to start from the beginning and walk you through the semester.

I remember writing the first reflection, at which point I had never done anything similar

to this kind of research. In that reflection the main point was to describe our own view on service

and compare it to the assigned readings. Even though my view on service has shifted a bit

throughout this semester, I still believe that I had some understanding of the act of service. Some

interesting thoughts were hard for me to accept, like philanthropy being “bad service”, which

still for me is really weird to think about. I understand why authors who wrote about this made

such point, but I see the other side of philanthropy, such as millions of people who have no

money for fresh water, food, or shelter that would suffer much more if not for philanthropists.
 Next, after the period of heavy reading our class started preparing for the research itself.

One of the major preparation points was the assignment called “Organization Action Research

Paper on Community Site”. It was required to learn as much as possible about our community

parent, Chicago Friends School. What helped immensely was a trip to CFS and meeting with

Karen Carney. This helped to bring all of the information found online into one complete puzzle.

We really saw how school’s mission and vision are realized in real life.

Now, about one month ago the fun part started – research itself. Being part of internal

audit group, our main goal was to gather as much information about current practices on

diversity and inclusivity as possible. We started with creating interview questions for three

groups: parents, teachers, and marketing. Then began the hard part – conducting interviews. It

was hard to find suitable time for us and many people from CFS community that we wanted to

talk to, however, with great help of our community partner Karen Carney, we managed to do it

as fast as possible. For me, this was the first time I had to interview someone (at least for a

research/school purposes), and I really liked it. These people were open for conversation, willing

to provide all of the information they can and thus help the school. My partners in internal audit

group, Tim and Katlyn did a great job interviewing others as well. When we had most of the

interviews done, we created transcriptions of our conversations in order to analyze the data we

collected. Then we created important preliminary themes that we included in the final project for

Chicago Friends School. With this information we were able to come up with some

recommendations for our partners to consider. After all groups – internal audit, external audit

and asset mapping, finished their parts, we combined all of our findings and work in one big

research paper.
 My takeaway from this school happened when I attended their “Monday Meeting”. I was

privileged enough to sit with the whole school in one circle. The atmosphere was great. Karen

led the meeting, which included some minutes of silence, followed by some thoughtful

questions, some of which were answered by volunteers, others just to think about. This meeting

reminded me of meditation, which I started practicing not so long ago. After only one month of

meditation I see progress and was surprised that students in this school can experience such in a

very young age. This is a huge advantage to them in my opinion.

2. The book we were assigned to read for this class was “Research Methods for

Community Change” by Randy Stoecker. To be completely honest, it was by far the easiest and

most enjoyable (if this word can be applied here) reading in this class. It was written in a way

that is understandable for people who are new to research, especially community-based research.

The main point from this book for me was that in author’s understanding, CBR means to work

with community partner, not for them. The communication with community is essential for the

success of the research. Community members have much more knowledge than the researchers,

thus have to at least actively involved in the research process, if not be the leading element of the

research. In reality, this is very true for our project with Chicago Friends School. Our community

partner was very important for the success of this research. Without this help, we could have

spent much more time than we actually did.

3. Now, I would like to discuss one essay by Keith Morton, called “Starfish Hurling and

Community Service”. In the essay, Morton argues that the whole story is totally wrong and

should not be used to describe community service. I am somewhat skeptical for such a view,

because rushing to help, even one person at a time, can be life-changing for THAT exact person.

Moreover, it is much easier for people who live a very busy lives to go out and help just one
person (which can make a huge difference if we talk in terms of the whole world population)

than to take a lot of time and think big picture. Don’t get me wrong, Keith Morton is someone

who has much more knowledge in this area then I do, and his points are very accurate. However,

I do not agree that this would be a better solution for the world. My vision is if you help one

person to transform his/her life, you are a huge success.

4.Considering this is my last semester as an undergraduate student, I had a ton of mind

shifts. Some of them occurred because of this class. At the very least, I had an experience to

conduct a research that included other people that we interacted with outside of Loyola, which

was new to me. At the beginning of the semester I had no idea how this kind of research is done.

With great help from both professors Patrick Green and Susan Haarman, I learned the process of

conducting research and then applying the new knowledge in practice. Moreover, I realized how

many organizations are there in Chicago area alone. There are millions of people doing

something for a higher purpose, making it their life path. Being on a verge of “adult life” I spent

countless amount of time thinking about my next steps, about what I should be doing. But most

importantly I was thinking about my “WHY”, why do I want to achieve something great, why do

I want to live the life I imagine for myself and my family in the future. Seeing other people’s

“why” and how it makes them feel (referring to how passionate people in CFS are about school’s

values). Actually, the last take-away described is even more important than the experience of

conducting research.

5. Leadership was not the main focus of this research in my opinion. What I experienced

much more was team dynamics, team work and ability to communicate correctly with people

you have never seen (at the beginning of the semester) and developing strong relationships based

on mutual respect (by the end of this course). On the other side, being able to work with people
contributes to leadership skills and abilities. It teaches a lot about productive and enjoyable

working environment. I can connect this project to multiple components of Social Change

Model, such as charitable volunteerism, informal associations, or sociably responsible daily

behavior. It was a collaboration of people with similar point of view on lending a hand and

working with community for a good purpose.

6. I asked about important life experiences at a job interview, I would answer that I had a

chance to be a part of great professional project. It taught me to find something that can help the

company or organization, provide opportunity and potentially expand it. I can organize a messy

pile of data into something that can be used for good and productive purposes.

7. Community-based research in my understanding is a continuous work of partners – the

research team and the community. They have to work side-by-side in order to get to the stage

where the research can provide social change. Both parties need to heavily exchange knowledge

and opinions, which will help to get to the root causes of the problems at hand and, thus, find

better ways to work on them. This type of research requires a continuous engagement.

8. Shift in consciousness. Sound so complicated, but in reality, happens all the time. This

shift is basically change that happens in humans, in their thinking and comes from growth.

Growth by far is the most important part of human life (at least in my opinion). It lets people stay

motivated to do something new, to experiment, to become great in something. I feel like “shifts

in consciousness” come all the time, but most of them are small and compound over time to

create a completely new person. One of those shifts for me is the realization that research is not

something only people with very high IQ can do, or not something done only using data. It

comes down to committing to figure something out and learning as you go. Hopefully in the

future I will have more opportunities to conduct research, I actually liked it.
9. Loyola is a highly diverse university in all of its interpretations: racially, economically, age,

sex and so forth. It Loyola mission it says: “We are Chicago's Jesuit, Catholic University-a

diverse community seeking God in all things and working to expand knowledge in the service of

humanity through learning, justice and faith.” There are some similarities between Loyola and

Chicago Friends, because both strive to provide knowledge, both strive to be diverse

communities and most importantly both are values-based. Being a Loyola student, I understand

how important it is to be a good person, to have empathy, to provide value to others, to promote

justice. This is what I saw in CFS, this is what they teach students there as well. I think our class

did a great job on helping this small community to grow and expand.