10/31/2021 0 Comments Taking Matters Into Our Own HandsAs many of the readers that have been following our journey may know, our group has struggled finding shelters that will accept our assistance. We have reached out to many, and heard back from none. Because the websites of the shelters haven’t been updated recently, our group wonders if shelters are even accepting assistance during the pandemic. Our group has felt lost and defeated as we have made little to no progress with the whole purpose of our project, connecting with the people. We even came close to changing our project entirely, but we decided not to give up. We have prepared bags that include hygiene products and non-perishable foods, but have been unable to give them out as we had hoped to go through this process through an organization. Because of our struggles with trying to find an organization that will get back to us, we decided to take matters into our own hands as we had first planned to do.
This past Thursday, our group decided to meet to hand out the bags we had made during Week 3. We gave out three bags in total. One was to a mother who was struggling, the others were to two men who claimed that anything helped. We didn’t see many people, which can be viewed as a blessing. We went into this hoping to form connections with the people we helped, but with being in a line of busy traffic, there wasn’t much time to do so. Although this hadn’t gone exactly as we had hoped, we’re thankful to be helping. In the following weeks, we hope to go out into the community as much as possible. We plan to give out the rest of our supply bags, along with blankets and hand warmers. We’ve also talked about making cookies to give out during the holiday season. Although we haven’t met our goal yet in forming connections with those less fortunate, we as a group have grown closer with each other through this project.
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10/24/2021 1 Comment More & More strugglesLately, we have been struggling with understanding the meaning of why we are doing this, our overall goal, and how exactly we will be going about this in terms of giving our care packages on the streets, feeding the homeless at a shelter, or attending a coat/clothing drive and possibly collecting cans. As you can see, we have many options relating to how we could carry out the purpose of this project, yet, we feel as though we have gotten nowhere in the past two weeks which is the frustrating aspect of this.
Regarding the homeless shelters, we have reached out to about three and have gotten no response. We have considered sending follow-up emails and we will most likely go through with that just in case they didn’t see our inquiries or something of the sort. We created those care packages to hand out but if we feed the homeless at the shelter we won’t need the packages, therefore we created them for what? We are ⅔ of the way complete with this project and still have not interacted with the homeless like we wanted to. The coat/clothing drive would be held this month at a church whose name we have forgotten but of course, we will figure that out before we attend if we decide to. It would not be a bad idea to participate in the drive but if we want to, we have to decide soon before we miss out on it. Then again, our care packages would be useless in this situation because we wouldn’t need them for the drive. This is also not what we had planned to do in the beginning but we have to be open to change if we want this to work. Maybe we are all just set on what we had planned from the beginning that we aren’t willing to take what is being given to us. In terms of the care packages themselves, the easiest way to incorporate them into the project would be to ride around and hand them out to the homeless that we see on the side of the road at stoplights, intersections, etc. If we want to volunteer at the shelter, we could give the packages out whenever we aren’t doing anything else, that way the care packages aren’t just some dead weight. I guess we could hand the care packages out in any of these cases within our free time. Collecting cans and donating them would also be an easy thing for us to do in our free time that would eventually add to the overall project. 10/17/2021 0 Comments Finding a way around challengesWe have finally begun to make some progress moving forward with our project. These past few weeks have been particularly challenging and a little bit stressful for the three of us. We were still trying to find a homeless shelter to work with seeing that the other ones that we reached out to never got back in touch with us. We were also trying to decide what our overall end goal for this project should be. But, luckily, with time and thought we were able to work through this challenging time period.
Our issue of not having a shelter was solved around this time last week when Jordan told us that her mother is friends with someone who works with a homeless shelter. We are going to get in touch with her so that we can get started with the purpose of this project because we don’t want to run out of time. Throughout our struggles, we have learned that if we don’t do anything to make it happen, it won’t happen. We can’t sit and wait around for the homeless shelters to get back in touch with us. That’s why in the meantime, we put together our bags that we want to hand out and brainstormed ways to get in touch with a shelter. While at dance practice, Kadence came up with the idea that our overall goal should be to give out "x" amount of bags to the homeless. It’s a concept that we were overthinking in the midst of other chaos. We agree that it is so funny how an idea can hit you at the most random times. With that being said, we have six bags right now that are ready to be given out. We will continue to make more and we will discuss the amount of bags that we want to have prepared by the end of this project in order for a goal to be reached. Meeting these roadblocks and finding a way around them as a group has built all of our characters and taught us to do whatever we can to make this project work, even though it might not be going the way we planned for it. Follow along with us to watch our progress! 10/12/2021 1 Comment working the kinksWith week three of Genius Hour coming to an end, it has quickly hit us that this time is flying by faster than we thought it would. So, what did we do this week?
This week was a productive week in terms of reaching out to other homeless shelters, getting care packages done/put together for the future visits to the homeless shelters, creating a schedule, and working the kinks of our project. We began the week by discovering an organization that is more geared to the idea that we originally had, called Watchmen of the Streets. This Christian-based organization isn’t considered a homeless shelter because they go out as a group of volunteers and go to the homeless, pray over them, and interact with them more. We were thrilled when we stumbled upon this as this was more along the lines of what we wanted to do originally, not as much a homeless shelter. Their website and the pictures shared were incredibly uplifting/inspiring and we are hopeful this works out for us. This was also a great discovery because we have not yet heard back from Bethesda Center of the Homeless. With that being said, we inquired and submitted an application to volunteer. We are excited and hope this works out! As we began to look into this idea more, they suggested ways to get involved with their organization. This included making homeless care packages, making visits to the homeless camps, or praying for volunteers and ministers. We began thinking from there and decided to create prayer cards for the care packages. This led us to coordinating a time for us to go out and gather supplies for these care packages. We had a few scheduling issues because we are all busy and involved with different things, but Jada and Kadence were able to go out and buy supplies. They were able to find hygiene supplies and food at Walmart and Dollar General that kept them on-budget. From here, they created six care packages that had products such as various snacks, hand sanitizer, tissues, deodorant, wipes, gum, chapstick, etc. Despite our scheduling issues, we feel good about our progress we made this week and hope to hear from Watchmen of the Streets soon. 10/6/2021 5 Comments the next step...Today, we visited the website of the shelter that we are hoping to volunteer at, Bethesda Center for the Homeless. We entered an inquiry to set up a date to attend the shelter and feed the homeless. As of now, we are still waiting for a reply from them concerning availability and dates. We are crossing our fingers that everything works as planned.
When it comes to the productivity of our project, we have been a little concerned. There have been many roadblocks and difficulty figuring out where to start and what to write about in these blogs. We decided to start by calling the shelter. That didn’t work out as planned, so we agreed that the easiest way to get in touch was by visiting their website and finding out information from there. Once the people from Bethesda get back to us, we will be able to set up dates and times that we can go participate at the shelter. We will also be able to update those interested in our journey. Until then, we will be making plans to go out within the next week to gather supplies that we may need for this project and working out some kinks in our plans. If there is one thing we have learned so far, there is always room for improvement. We are wanting to interview those at the homeless shelter somehow. The execution of this is something that we are discussing because we don’t want them to feel as if we are invading their privacy. We also don’t want it to seem as if we are doing this because we have to or we are wanting to “toot our own horns” so to say. We chose this as our project and we believe that their voices matter. In no way would we want to cheapen that. With all of that being said, this is a sensitive subject and we want to make sure that we do this the right way. Hopefully, we will have several new updates in our next blog. |
AuthorsKadence, Jada, Jordan Archives
December 2021
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