Day 1

On Day one Sydney and I started our project with a meeting at Northpoint Transitional Housing with our mentor, Ed Gemerchak.  We showed him our original list of ideas for questions in our interviews.  We made it clear that our questions were just prompts and that we would do our best to go with the flow of the conversation, only coming back to the questions when a lead stops.  He gave us some ideas for new ones and then sent us off to 2100 Lakeside where we met with Annie.  It was convenient that Sydney had already spent time with her and that they were already comfortable and familiar.  Annie took us on a tour and made sure I knew my way around because she is transitioning out of 2100 and onto a new job, so she is only at 2100 until about noon every day.  We then got the questions officially checked over by the LMM (Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry).  They also suggested a prompt, “Tell me one thing you’re good at.”  We then went to recruit some guys to be our first interviewees.  At first people were hesitant to be on film but it wasn’t long before our first guy agreed to sit with us.  Our first interview took 27 minutes and I got my first interview ever done.  Honestly, I was a little nervous that some of my questions would be taken in an offensive light by accident or something accidentally unfortunate, but nothing like that happened.  He was very pleasant.  The next one Sydney asked the questions and the interviewee was hesitant to speak on camera but spoke a lot off camera.  I then spoke with a man right at the end of the day who was also a good interviewee, but he needed to get to work so we kept the interview shorter.  As we left for Hawken, Sydney and I commented that the interviews were much more successful than we had expected, in all honesty.