Kalamazoo Poverty Reduction Initiative: First Day

So today was my first official day working for the non profit organization in my community, and I have to say that it was a pretty decent day considering that it was mostly reading policies and previous VISTA member's notes on their procedures.

There is a woman that I share my office with is quite nice, she's the communications leader and has been doing the event coordinator job while the position was vacant. She is pleasant to talk with and was very helpful in explaining everything that I needed to know in order to do my best. The one thing that I did find out today was that the director of the PRI had put in his resignation and this would be his last week. The Vice chair Barb will be our interm director part time until they find someone else. I'm quite disappointed in the fact that I won't get to work with Patrick while being there because he seems like he would be a really good leader to be work with. He's very passionate about his job and the cause, I mean he travels from Flint every Monday to work and then drives home every Friday. That takes dedication in my book.

There was one thing that I was disappointed in today and that was finding out that I won't actually be doing direct service with the community, but instead just building capacity within the community and educating people who are already employed about poverty. I understand that getting them to be more sensitive to the plight of others is a good idea, but I think that the poverty simulations that they do now don't really capture what it's really like to be in poverty. I agree that it gets people thinking about it, but I think that it's different when you actually experience it, so what I want to do is change how we do the poverty simulations, or add a different perspective to them. Currently the poverty simulations are more like team building exercises, but what I want to do is get the people more integrated within the homeless community. So I want to do a day long simulation where a small group around 10-15 people where they have to begin at 8:30 with talking to the homeless people who are standing outside of the mission or at Martin Luther King memorial park to find out their story and possibly accompany individuals in their every day life. They around dinner, the group would join the homeless people for dinner to experience the quality of food that the homeless have to eat. Many individuals don't know what it's like to eat a three day old doughnut or what it's like to eat stale bread. I believe that when people who wouldn't normally give an actual thought to these condition would benefit from these experiences because it actually opens their mind about what it is like to be homeless. I'm going to add this aspect to the poverty simulations, I think it will be so much more effective and it will give the organization a more wide spread name.

As I stated before, I'm a little sad that I won't be doing direct service in my community, but I'm still hopeful that I will be making a change in my community.