Total: ~14 hours 20 minutes

Breakfast for the Homeless Youth

For my first act of community engagement I helped cook food for the homeless youth in my area hosted by the VOA. It was a very fun experience being there with my classmates. This was the first I interacted with some of them. It was nice to be able to get to know them more.

Being able to serve food for the homeless was really eyeopening for me. I hadn't really done any service which relates directly to the homeless in my area. Since I was serving the youth, it was even more insightful because I saw people that were around my age. I never considered the effort and difficulty that all of them were going through. One thing I noticed about my self is I had some biases coming in. I expected the people to behave/look a certain way. Noticing that and trying to remove that helped me get more out of this situation. The people there were just like me.

A lot of the people that were there members of the LGBTQIA+ community. They were kicked out by their families because they didn't follow the beliefs of the rest of their family. Since they got kicked out directly after high school they didn't have a buffer or support to work towards a job. The people here were adversely affected because of who they were. The place that we went to was very useful for these people since it provided a place to stay and some materials to help get back on their feet.

Image from SOHY Blog

Stones of Hope Youth (SOHY)

Stone of Hope Youth is an organization to help mentor disadvantaged kids. For a few months I went weekly to help mentor. The mentoring sessions were only around 80 minutes long and were broken down into three main time segments. First there was discussion about how to be a better person and how you can improve your life, next was a segment on teaching good financial habits and skills, and last was a time to have fun and play some games. The short and sweet segments allowed for engagement to stay up even if the current activity wasn't particularly interesting.

Google Maps (since I could not find any other recent image)

The community that is fostered there is really inclusive and each student is willing to actively participate. If you just went to the classroom without any prior knowledge, you wouldn't be able to tell that they came from disadvantaged families and had a lot of struggles. A lot of them live below the poverty line and have no family members that have been to college. Getting through high school and eventually onto college would set them up for success. These people have lived in families where there is constant fear of resources. Breaking the poverty cycle here is the first step to improve that.

I came into the experience without much expectation. I didn't know if I would enjoy it or if I would be able to connect to the kids. Having such starkly different backgrounds made me a bit anxious when I first went. I'm really happy to say that it has been a blast and I never felt out of place. It has been super fun being around them and being a part of their school experience.

Near the end of class we had Maya Stephens talk about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and the importance of trauma informed care. Through her lecture she discussed how ACEs can predict a lot of health issues. All of these boys have probably faced multiple ACEs and may have not had the resources to properly deal with them. For trauma, it's important to start early, but also to practice trauma informed care. Trauma informed care is making sure you accommodate everyone and don't accidentally resurface old trauma. In SOHY, whenever someone was uncomfortable they talked to an adult and there was no judgement, even if other kids heard. If the kids ever spoke about an issue or person trouble, there was no judgement, but they also weren't being forced to share. SOHY tries to help everyone look towards a brighter future and grow from all of their experiences. They have a motto from Martin Luther King Jr.:

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.

Trauma is there, but there is an active push to improve and develop healthy habits for dealing with difficulty. I think that the whole program will help for years to come.