Content: Add initial content with formatting and links

[aniyip]

Add following content to About page - with formatting (note bold and italics), linking to any references to other pages (e.g. EXPLORE), and adding some formatting to Mission Statement heading to distinguish heading from general/paragraph content.

Taken from content under About page in following document for easy referencing: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OgQOdMkVXc8kH7pkQa3IBmqbBdU-1Q2ROkgov-9vD6M/edit

Mission Statement

The Mattapan Mapping Project is a community-based initiative to collect and share resident stories alongside quantitative and spatial data about how Mattapan is changing. By providing diverse, relevant, and coherent information on a single open-source online platform, the project seeks to empower residents, policy makers, and other relevant stakeholders, to take civic action and advocate for equitable policy and urban development.

What are we working towards?

This project is comprised of complementary components that aim to create a platform for shifting narratives and promote better planning and development practices in Mattapan:

• The Mattapan Mapping Tool, a creative and user-friendly online mapping tool designed to track nuanced data (i.e. demographic and land use statistics, audio and video files, cognitive maps, alternative housing and land use typologies) that affirms and amplifies the place knowing and spatial claims/aspirations of community members. EXPLORE more about the neighborhood’s built environment, past & present here...

Why are we doing this work?

We aim to build participatory action research and community capacity through data gathering, analysis, visualization, and recording narratives. This seeks to shift extractive practices of knowledge production and scholarship led by outsiders to democratic modes of knowledge creation and applied learning which are at once contextual, participatory, and change oriented.

Who are we working with?

To build the tool we have utilized participatory planning methods in which Mattapan community members inform other residents, neighborhood and civic leaders, organizational and institutional representatives, researchers, planners, designers, policymakers, and city staff about displacement pressures and advocate for equitable development in Mattapan. MEET Mattapan residents, activists, & organizers involved in this work and learn about the neighborhood here...