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Also this issue: Flying the Flag of Controversy Get a Job |
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June 19-25, 2003
loose canon
Hillary Aisenstein, whose job is to create a social service network, has just slipped though her own personal safety net.
Aisenstein, 25, directs the Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development (PHENND). PHENND, based at the University of Pennsylvania, matches the needs of scores of community-service organizations with the resources of about 40 area universities.
At the moment, Aisenstein, who travels to more than a dozen meetings weekly, is stranded at 17th and Sansom, holding a load of organic vegetables. The ride she arranged didn't appear.
Aisenstein's job is to leverage the resources of universities to meet the needs of their communities. PHENND has dozens of programs to encourage professors to use neighborhoods for research, provide students with volunteer opportunities and foster learning through community service.
On any given day, a morning meeting with bankers to discuss neighborhood reinvestment might be followed by a brainstorming session in a basement with community activists who want to get a mural painted on their block.
Arriving home in the Art Museum area, Aisenstein talks about knocking down ivory towers.
She says "it's bizarre, it's preposterous" that some believe a university "can exist apart from the community in which it's located."
"True knowledge," she adds, happens in the real world.
Arriving at Penn during a 1996 crime wave, she recalls that while some students "were practically calling for a police state," she worked to lower crime by increasing university involvement in the community.
PHENND currently supports many social service programs, like those that help migrant farm workers deal with immigration, assist inner-city families in getting food stamps and counsel low-wage workers about how to claim their earned-income tax credit. PHENND also helps faculty members point their courses toward meeting community needs, like one that created materials for Women Organized Against Rape.
If Aisenstein's Rolodex were a book, she says its name would be "The Top 3,000 People in Philadelphia You Need to Know to Get Things Done." A weekly sampling of people to know and things to get done is available by subscribing to Aisenstein's weekly listserv, the PHENND Update. Her e-mail address is hillarya@pobox.upenn.edu.
To hear an extended interview with Hillary Aisenstein, download the audio file at www.schimmel.com/aisenstein_hillary.mp3.
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