Zina Linnik Project - How Tragedy Changed a Community Through Deep Civic Engagement

This is the research that I am working on over the next 5 months..

Introduction

On July 4, 2007, a young girl named Zina Linnik was abducted from her backyard in the Hilltop neighborhood of Tacoma, WA. The community searched for her for a week before police located her body and confirmed that she had been raped and murdered. Zina was 12 years old and attended McCarver Elementary school. From this tragedy came an opportunity for the Hilltop community to come together and preserve Zina’s memory.

Community members of Tacoma wanted to gather and figure out ways in which they could prevent any sort of incident like this happening again. In coming together, members of the community were able to brainstorm and come up with rebuilding McCarver Park so that the children could “play in peace”. This park is adjacent to McCarver Elementary, and had not been kept up in any way. From this plan stemmed another plan to rebuild Wright’s Park, another Tacoma park that bookends the Hilltop community with McCarver Park.

From an awful tragedy that struck the Hilltop community came an outpouring of community involvement and efforts to regenerate the safety in Tacoma. The Zina Linnik Project gained much momentum and turned into a 3.5 million dollar project. There have been many steps along the way that have changed the lives of community members, especially the children involved. Students from McCarver Elementary have had the opportunity to participate in a positive way, leading to change in their community.

Research Objectives

The objective of this research is to document the process that the Zina Linnik Project has done thus far. It began as a grassroots effort that gained a lot of support and eventually state and city grants. There have been many community members, students, college students, college professors and the Greater Metro Parks Foundation (Tacoma), involved in making this project possible. It is important to study how all of their efforts have impacted their community, and how this process might be helpful to other communities and their efforts to positively change their own community.

Another objective is to quantify data that can measure the impacts of this project. There are a number of ways in which this project has impacted the community, and my research hopes to provide data that indicates these impacts. This includes questions about increases in student enrollment in college-bound middle school programs; the activation of student voices and respect they experience from others (e.g., in families in school, in community); parental involvement in their children’s school-based activities; and community involvement in the project through campaigning donations and participation in the new community garden.

This research is not aimed for publication; it is an undergraduate research project for credit that may or may not be circulated in the public as information only.

Subject Recruitment

I plan on using normal volunteers and students for interviews of their involvement of the Zina Linnik Project. There will be college-aged students varying in age and sex. I also will use teachers from McCarver Elementary, former and current students of McCarver Elementary, a professor from University of Puget Sound, professors from University of Washington, individuals from the Greater Metro Parks Foundation in Tacoma, and community members. I plan to contact all of the subjects by phone or email, and will provide a brief description of my research.

Method and Procedure

My data collection will include obtaining numbers of parent participation at McCarver Elementary. This data will be anonymous, and aim to see if there was a difference in parent participation before and after the Zina Linnik Project was set in place.

I will document all the fundraising that has been involved as well as a breakdown of how the money was raised for this project.

I will be conducting interviews of the teachers at McCarver Elementary School to see if there was a difference in grades, behavior and attendance. I will also be asking their opinions about how a project like this has affected them as well as the students.

I will collect information about enrollments of McCarver Elementary School graduates in the local middle school college-bound program.

I will also interview college students who have participated to see how they have been impacted in helping out with the project, and if it has made a difference in their further community participation in other projects.

I also plan to interview some previous McCarver Elementary students as well as current ones in order to find out how this project has affected them.

Research subjects will not be compensated.

My research will be from February 2011 – June 2011.

Benefits

Better understanding the impacts and potential long-term outcomes of a community project such as this will not only benefit the local Tacoma community that has been involved, but will also benefit other locations that may be interested in working on such a project. More specifically, the benefit of this research is to provide specific data that will both assess the value of the project and its potential reproduction.

Risks

There are minimal risks with this educational research project, particularly because all subject-based data will be collected anonymously unless the individual is speaking as an official (e.g., principal of school, executive director of community organization). There always remains a risk of invasion of privacy and potential stress of seeing one’s own self in aggregate data.

Informed Consent

Prior to each interview I will obtain informed consent by explaining how their interview will be used in my research. For those who wish to not include their name, as well as minors; I will use their information as anonymous aggregate data, using anonymous quotes in my paper.