Listening Lab's mission is to foster social cohesion by designing programs that engage communities in the practice of listening. Their projects invite discourse, develop soft connections and contribute to a more resilient, interconnected society.

Loisaida Inc. partnered with Listening Lab to create a Summer paid internship program from July 10th to August 17th. During this 6 week's program, participants can learn from inspiring guest speakers and participate in hands-on workshops that teach them valuable skills such as recording audio, video production, and content creation. Most importantly, they go out into our community and make a real difference by using these skills to create impactful experiences that promote social change.

The Listening Lab group has been learning from industry professionals and thought leaders for the last several weeks, including Mindy Fullilove, Amer Jandali, and Andrea Gordillo. Along with an understanding of community building and outreach, they have been learning how to use recorders, microphones, and editing programs for production and content generation. In the next few weeks, they'll be preparing a curation of their work for a showcase. In their most recent outing at Washington Square Park, they asked passers-by, “When was the last time you felt belonging?”.

Lynkable x Loisaida's mission is to promote community engagement, tech education and wellness promotion. Through community engagement at our events, we serve to address many underlining disparities that the community faces, from bridging the tech divide to nutritional education. Our overall vision is to be a liaison between the local NYC art-based community and the tech industry while using this platform to promote health initiatives and collaboration with small businesses that aim to serve the greater good of our targeted community.

New Museum

The New Museum team aspires to share their stories and use art to express their personalities. Interacting with the New Museum's exhibition of Pepón Osorio's captivating installation art, titled "My Beating Heart" or "Mi Corazón Latiente".

Thrift Pop-Up & Zine

Inspired and unified by the team’s love of fashion, the Visual Group’s team has created two projects to focus on during the program – a bi-weekly thrift pop-up and a digital fashion zine. These projects explore the interns’ personal styles and relationships with fashion as a form of self-expression.



Sounds of Loisaida

Over the past three weeks, the Sounds of Loisaida team has established a weekly recording session routine to host guest musicians for intimate concerts and inspiring interviews. Focusing on teamwork, the interns have actively participated in all aspects, from selecting and scheduling bands to being hands-on with the setup, filming, and editing of the videos and audio.

ECOLIBRIUM's summer session started on July 10th and introduced ten new Summer Youth Employment interns, including students from the Cooper Union School of Engineering, St. Johns University, Scholars Academy High School, and LaGuardia High School of the Arts.

Each day, the interns receive subject matter orientation, and then break out into their respective projects. Here's what they've been up to:

The IoT/Tech Team is working on creating environmental sensors that will measure indoor and outdoor air quality. They take on tasks needed to build and program the sensors, such as coding, implementing GPS, PC board design, CAD design, and 3D printing. Their process involves general problem solving and skills sharing.

The sole Media Team member is new to video editing, but quick to learn. She has been tasked with documenting the team's progress and producing short video clips and social media posts.

The Environment & Data Team has begun an emissions inventory, incorporating existing public data and past work of our prior team. They engage in guided self-learning to improve coding skills, including python, which is used to perform data visualizations using outputs from the environmental sensors they are building. An important part of the project is learning how to work with digital twins to model changes to our buildings and built environment to simulate possible outcomes that will help us adapt to climate change.

"Digital Twins" are computer models of individual buildings that can be used to simulate impacts of energy efficiency and building electrification on operating costs/rents, electric grid stress, and GHG emissions under varying environmental conditions. It can simulate changes made to buildings, systems, and appliances, that increase energy efficiency and reduce GHG emissions. The Environment & Data Team is working with digital twins of 2000 buildings in the Loisaida neighborhood, encompassing Community Board 3 / NYC Council District 2.

A couple weeks ago, the entire ECOLIBRIUM team performed a field study to examine the health of the soil and trees, in street tree beds along both sides of East 9th Street, spanning between Avenue C to First Ave. The Media Team member documented this with video and GPS embedded still images for mapping.