In this blog I will write a reflective blog seriously evaluating my project. Do I think I improved the world? To what extent? What are my future plans for this project?
At the end of the day….
So you ask, do I think that I improved the world? I would have to say that I think that I have. I think that doing anything that is positive, especially when it’s done out of the goodness of your heart for someone else, you are making the world a better place. I think that I have changed and impacted the lives of the children that I have encountered while completing my mission to help the youth; if it was just playing tag with the kids on the playground, or reading to the children, or playing them in a game of basketball. For that time that I was interacting with them and forming this bond between us, I served as a model to be good and do good, while making them feel wanted, giving them attention, and making them feel appreciated. I was simply trying to give back to the youth, and I end up improving the world.
The extent in which I changed the world is not like the Civil Rights Movements or anything. I think that I have just touched on my mission to change the world. The visits to the Bolden Child Care Center were just my starting grounds and only the beginning to something much bigger. I feel like one of the hardest parts to my mission is out of the way; initiating the plan is one of the hardest parts. Think about it, during the Civil Rights Movement, timing and opportunity was key. During the Rosa Park incident, it sparked a whole movement that would change lives of many. Rosa Parks was not even the first colored lady that this happened to, but before Rosa the women that were offended were not have caused the right case and get the right response. After the Rosa Parks incident, this became a stomping ground and the blacks, especially Dr. MLK used this as fuel to light the torch that would set the forest on fire which becomes the Movement. If it hadn’t been for the Rosa Parks incident, the Emmit Till case, and the other individual cases that could occur, my people, millions of blacks would still be oppresses and nothing would have ever changed. So, I think of what I have done as the Rosa Parks bus incident, or the lighting of the torch, that will ultimately set the entire forest ablaze. Now that I have started, it should and will result in a chain reaction, where I will be coming closer and closer to completing my mission. I expect it to be really gradual and I don’t expect to see any big impact for about 10-15 years when I have the resources to really start my plan.
For the next 15 years… I plan on making occasional to frequent visits to children centers where I can interact with children on a personal level. I know that when I am at home, in St. Louis Missouri, I can visit this children’s program called Kingdom House, which I used to be a member of as a youngster, and I can get involved with the children there. I have always been very social with the children in my neighbor hood and I feel that I serve as a good model for them, because they all know that I am in college, which is rare in the neighborhood that I be in, and they all know that I know the importance of school, and maybe it will start to rub off. I know that when I was young, there was no one in my family or around me that was in college, so it wasn’t up until my later years of high school when I started to think about college. Actually, I didn’t start filling out college application until the end of fall, beginning of spring of my senior year. This is even with the children that are in my family. My nephew is only like 10 years old and he is saying that he want to go to a college in Hawaii, that is unheard of in my family, someone thinking about college at all, before I came to college. Now, even my sister is already thinking about how she is going to pay for him to get through college, and she has put more emphasis on him getting good grades and putting himself through college. College is becoming a reality in my family, and I feel as though I was the stepping stone, when maybe I should give most of the credit to my mother, who has always told me the importance of school, but I never used to think about it resulting in me going to college and getting a degree, to go on an make a lot of money doing something that I enjoy. I gave myself options and opportunity, and that is what I am trying to provide for the children of my family and the children that I impact.
In the future in about 15 years, I would like to start and organization or program that visits these less fortunate neighborhood weekly or even more frequently and provide the youth of the neighborhood with older people who will listen, help and embrace them and guide them to the more positive things in life. It will be a program where the children will be able to talk to older people about anything, and receive help in school and in personal situations that they have. Working in this program will be counselors who are willing to create a very person bond with these children and to the point where these children see them as a friend, a guardian or even a parent. As of now, I would have to say that I would want to carry out this mission to create this program in my hometown, St. Louis Missouri. However this could change because I do not know when I will create this program or where I will be when I create the program therefore the location of the program is very tentative.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 30th, 2005 at 6:58 am and is filed under Project Progress, Week 15: Reflection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.