Lucrezia Di Vincenzo ’25 is one of 31 student fellows who completed research with a community-based organization in upstate New York this summer as a part of the Upstate Institute Summer Field School. She describes the project below in her own words:
Known as the “town that loves the refugees,” Utica is a small city in upstate New York that has welcomed tens of thousands of refugees in the past 10 years. These refugees have helped revitalize this declining city and turn it into a diverse and thriving community. Despite their outstanding impact, these people face many issues when first arriving and settling into the United States and do not have much support. This is where the Midtown Utica Community Center (MUCC), the organization I worked for this summer, steps in.
MUCC does the important work of providing a long-lasting support system for this community by running an inclusive, multicultural, and refugee-friendly community center. They run various after-school programs, filmmaking, and college-readiness workshops, as well as English as a second language and citizenship classes. Their programming is designed to be as accessible to the community as possible and to help create long-lasting strong relationships between individual peers and the community as a whole.
An example of this programming is MUCC Camp, a free weeklong summer camp for high schoolers, providing an unforgettable bonding experience for the campers and helping foster community by hiring previous campers as camp counselors to serve as role models and teachers for the years to come. MUCC’s mission is to help support the refugees past the initial 90-day resettlement period, helping them access the needed resources to integrate fully. The space also allows people to learn from each other and grow in a diverse community and neighborhood. Since 2014 MUCC has served more than 4,000 community members; however, this vital work is being done in an ancient building.
MUCC is based in a church built in 1906 that has not been renovated since. The space is physically inaccessible to community members, not energy efficient, and has serious health hazards such as asbestos. MUCC is looking to make some serious physical renovations on the space and is currently seeking grants to accomplish this. One such potential grant is the New York State Consolidated Federal Application (CFA). This grant is an extremely large project that the grant manager at MUCC has been tackling; therefore, I have been working on projects and tasks that she has had to put aside while working on the CFA.
I have helped write other grant proposals, such as the Community Foundation of Herkimer and Oneida County’s Science, Education, and Health grant, in which we requested funds for the after-school tutoring program that is organized every school year. The money will be used to pay the program coordinators who facilitate the program, recruit volunteers, materials, and the cost of transportation of the students to and from MUCC. In addition to helping write grants, my duties at MUCC have ranged from helping in community-centered events to updating the yearly master budget with budget information from grants and grant applications. In addition, I have been doing grant research, searching for local recurring grants, and assisting in closing out completed grants.
I applied to be a Field School Fellow to stay more connected to the place I live in most of my year. In addition, this program would help me explore future career options. As an English and international relations major, I am still determining what my future will look like, and this summer I wanted to take a proactive step in figuring that out. I decided to apply to the MUCC internship as it would allow me to exercise and improve my writing muscle while also helping an incredible community. Through this experience, I have learned so much about a range of topics, from the history of upstate New York to what an actual working environment looks and feels like. I will bring the knowledge and skills I learned — writing and communicating in a work environment — with me to all my future vlog classes and even beyond.