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Sowon Kim ’22 is one of 26 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.

This summer, I worked with Midtown Utica Community Center (MUCC), an inclusive, multicultural, and refugee-friendly community center in Utica. Founded in 2014, MUCC provides a variety of after-school programs, summer youth employment opportunities, holiday meals, vaccine clinics, college-readiness workshops, filmmaking workshops, and more for the local refugee population. I worked with MUCC as a grant writing fellow. 

During the last eight years, MUCC has served more than 4,000 community members, fostering connections between local refugees, migrants, and the broader central New York communities. Despite the growing refugee community in Utica that MUCC serves, MUCC has only one full-time employee (the executive director, who also comes from a Karen family) and is operated by many volunteers and interns. In addition, MUCC resides in a church built in 1906, which is inaccessible, energy-inefficient, and contains health hazards such as asbestos in the basement. In order to reach sustainability, MUCC is seeking to expand staffing. Also, this summer, MUCC applied for New York State Consolidated Funding for building renovations. 

My main responsibilities as a grant writing fellow included assisting with the consolidated funding application, drafting support letters for grant applications, facilitating on-site community events as needed, and creating a spreadsheet that keeps track of past grant proposals. The spreadsheet records information such as proposal titles, dates of submission, amount of funding requested, dates declined or accepted, and more. Finally, toward the end of my eight-week fellowship, I created a short guide for the next grant writing intern, hoping it would help orient the next person, who would pick up where I left off.

This was my first time working as a Field School Fellow, and I would not change any part of it. I applied to be a Field School Fellow because I wanted to learn more about the central/upstate New York communities by engaging with them directly. As a comparative literature major, I was also curious to know what it is like to work as a grant writer. Working at MUCC allowed me to gain such experience. While I was often challenged to manage different expectations, the Upstate Institute staff provided so much support and guidance. Without them, I wouldn’t have been able to navigate the challenge as successfully. Also, the field trips on Fridays to local sites such as the Shako:wi Native American Museum were incredibly interesting, and I couldn’t believe it took me four years at ²Ø¾«¸ó to visit them. It was a joy to work for the Upstate Institute with a congenial group of fellow students.