See It: The Community being helped

My group will create an eductional video to show on bronxnet and at school assemblies.Drugs and Education will be our theme.  The video will be a documentary focusing on the life of a high School student(s) and thier experience of abusing drugs such as Marijuana and Alcohol and/or a dealing with a family member or friend who is abusing drugs. WE plan to interview several students and re-enact thier story. Our purpose for creating this video is to get Teen talking about how drugs inpact thier decisions, families and future goals.  Rather then giving them answers or more information we hope to have them participate in a discussion after viewing the documentary.

See It: The Community being helped

The project I began this past summer takes place within the Oasis Social Ministry in Norfolk, VA. I raised some funds through my own donation to the project in order to purchase one hundred spiral notebooks, pens, and several return bins. These notebooks were then taken to Oasis Social Ministry and I began to speak with the homeless and needy clients and explain my project, with is as follows: I will give them a notebook and pen so that they can write down their story and/or experiences. They can write as much or as little as they wished, and they could write stories, poems, whatever they wanted. Once they finished, they would simply return the notebooks to the bins left at the Oasis Social Ministry. If enough or a substantial volume of material was handed in, I would take the notebooks and have the stories published in a magazine, newspaper, or even a book through several contacts previously made with editors and publishers. Any profits gained from the use of these stories would be donated to the volunteer organizations in the Norfolk area like the Oasis Social Ministry. So far, there have been close to 50 notebooks handed out. I wish to further expand this project to several of the missions in the area and use other forms of recording to capture their stories, like tape recorders or a camcorder. I would also wish to expand the project to the Blacksburg, VA area, which is where I reside during the school year. In Norfolk, I currently have my brother, Nicholas Cavano heading up the program while I am away. These notebooks finally give many of these homeless a chance to tell their story to the world, with the potential to bring some financial support back to their community.

See It: The Community being helped

The Casa Guadalupe Senior Center story circle meets weekly with two trained facilitators to share stories about their lives with each other. Facilitators encourage participants to share stories across their timeline of their lives that represent a large spectrum of experience. In addition, the group will be encouraged to choose and create some sort of self-identified representation or product based on their stories that can be presented to Casa Guadalupe, the participants’ family and friends, and/or the broader community.

Potential benefits of the story project:

To the participants:
- sharing life stories with each other will allow the participants to gain some insight into each other’s lives as well as their own
- story telling helps with listening and communication skills
- sharing their story allows participants to “give back” to their community, an act that can be difficult for some members of the elderly population
- interests, needs, and wants may be identified through the told stories. Eventually, community agencies can use this information to create more responsive services.

To the broader community:
- The stories developed in the circle may help the broader community better understand the immigrant communities of Allentown. In addition, the story circle may lead to discussions of similarities between and among cultures and immigrant populations that can then be branched out into the broader community and create better inter-cultural understanding.
- The circle will most likely touch on universal themes of what growing older means and what the younger populations can learn from the elderly. This could help develop intergenerational ties and facilitate intergenerational learning, especially if youth are brought in to help facilitate the sessions.
- Identify key community members who may be able to participate in a Community Advisory Board or Community-Based Participatory Research.