Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, declared in March of 2020, there have been many lifestyle changes which have likely influenced tobacco smoking behavior. Such lifestyle changes include lockdowns, stay at home orders, reduction in social cues related to smoking, increased stress, and boredom among other things. This study utilized a cross-sectional survey which looked into these behaviors, primarily perceived risk to COVID-19, and determined if there is an association between perceived risk and education level/race. Education level is a proxy for income and material resources, therefore making it more likely that people with lower levels of education have fewer resources and higher perceived risk to negative effects of COVID-19. Additionally, people of color are often marginalized in the medical community along with being the target of heavy advertising by tobacco companies which have likely impacted risk to COVID-19 as well.

This thesis project utilizes Bolman & Deal’s (2017) four frames to analyze how the Internship experience at TigerMountain Foundation, a South Phoenix community garden nonprofit, can be optimized to help the organization more effectively reach its goals. A brief explanation of the organizational context and structure is given as well as an overview of the relationship between community gardening and decreasing recidivism, as well as TigerMountain’s position in a food desert. TigerMountain Foundation can ultimately be framed internally as a human resource and symbolic organization and externally as a political organization. The Internship program presents a political benefit to the organization and can benefit from some human resource and structural additions to the onboarding process and overall experience. The recommended additions include providing a thorough onboarding packet to Interns at orientation that includes a questionnaire, includes a brief overview of the organization in human resource framing, a contact sheet, and instruction sheets for commonly used systems. Other additions to the Internship experience include setting up a ratio of how many Internship hours can be earned at the gardens and farmers’ markets compared to working administratively, requesting that Interns send in their updated availability weekly for scheduling purposes, and the implementation of an “on-call” system for farmers’ market shifts.

For the past six months, I have been working with Black Lives Matter Phoenix Metro on the Tempe’s People’s Budget coalition. I served as a member on the research team as well as a temporary member of the Black Lives Matter’s nucleus leadership team. I joined weekly meetings for both groups, and conducted research on city budget proposals, initiatives, and resources. I also lead discussions and conversations about progress, next steps, and goals of the coalition with over 50 volunteers within the coalition. The Tempe’s People Budget crafted a survey in late October and sent it out mid-November to members of the Tempe community, asking them what community resources they would use and which resources and investments they believed the city of Tempe should commit to. After five months of survey collection, we presented a preliminary budget proposal to Tempe’s financial office for consideration for the 2022-2023 budget, using data from 318 survey responses. With the creation of the survey among the adaption of the Tempe’s coalition, we wanted to look at what preventive community resource most respondents wanted Tempe to reinvest in. We found that the majority of survey respondents would like investments in renewable energy, housing stability, and alternatives to police. It is the city’s job to protect and serve all members of their communities, and public safety should be prioritized by investing in preventive measures instead of remedial punishments. Public safety concerns would be most effectively resolved by addressing issues such as: little to no income, housing instability, lack of access to food and water and other basic necessities to survive. Currently, Tempe is investing in the police, who most often only serve punishments.