Communities.

I’ve always referred to these types of communities as low-income neighborhood. I can’t really remember a time when someone told me a different name to call them. I’ve heard of all the other names i.e. high risk, but for the most part it’s always been low-income neighborhoods. 

I absolutely love the quote “We refer to ourselves as a community of opportunity, a community of strong assets and capable leadership. These terms for communities lacking financial resources communicate the challenges as well as the energy, promise, and hope in these neighborhoods.” I think it’s extremely important to go into a situation where you don’t look at all the problems, but look solely at the potential. It’s really just changing one’s mindset to being more optimistic. These communities are a plethora of opportunity. It’s always hard to change a mindset, but I think changing the community’s mindset will help change other’s mindsets and perceptions of the community.

Parachuting volunteers into a community is a hard thing to evaluate. On one hand it’s good because there is some good at work, but on the other hand they’re just going in doing a quick project that doesn’t really get into community to understanding. After going to Ghana, I completely realize that it is so so important to make a sustainable impact in the community. If you don’t it makes it harder for future groups coming in to be trusted by the volunteers. Also, a sustainable project means that the community takes an active role in the project to make it have substance and meaning to the community. That’s why it was so crucial to create a sustainable mentorship program for the kids at Hope.

In order to involve the community in our STRONG group, It is imperative to get the kids excited about helping their school and community. First, we need to develop and train student leaders who can carry on the group for next year. It is important to develop some sort of leadership body within the group that we can give resources to so they can carry on STRONG for generations of students to come. In addition to that, I think it would be vital to involve the students of strong in community service based projects in their communities. For example, we will first start the kids working with the Purple Bike Project.  By enlisting their help the kids will realize how easy, important, and useful helping one’s community is. Hopefully this will inspire them other students, their families, and their communities to aid the Mart Community as a whole.