My Community

The community that I was involved in was BSU, which stand for black student union. This community was not exclusive just for African Americans. Most of the members who were involved were Asian, whites, Filipino and other different races. What we do as a community is we go out and do volunteer work for the homeless, feed them, and join them in church. We do all of our volunteer work in San Francisco. We also make sure that we celebrate black history month and all the African Americans who made history for this country. What I disliked about my community is that we never were organized, and when it was time to perform on the rallies we couldn't because most of our members didn't have good grades. It seems as if we didn't have a strong relationship within our community because everyone wanted to be the leader and talk all at once. So we lend roles to everyone and I was secretary of our club and we picked someone who we knew would be responsible for the club as president. When we did that, it made our club more organized and stronger, but we still had problems performing for people. I believe it was a hatred and racist thing at our school because the population was mainly whites. Overall we were a community and it made us who we are today.

Plus/Delta of Module 1

The things I learned from Module 1 about myself is being able to understanding the different utilities of a computer, I thought I was computer savvy before starting Year Up, but I learned a lot of things such as different operating systems and why is it so important. I was actually surprised at myself for participating in discussions I thought I would never be apart of, so with that said I was proud of myself, and also being able to communicate with others about my knowledge of computers and apply it to myself. A couple things I wasn't proud of was not being able to take time out and study for tech quizzes, or exams. I did well on all of my quizzes but I didn't understand the material that well, I just remembered from the book. I think if I was to at least take time to process the information a little more I would be on the same page as everyone else. Being here has really boosted up my professional, and listening skills, I've already knew how to code switch in a professional environment because I was raised to do so, so that is also one thing I am proud of.

The things I need to work on to grow as a professional is my writing skills, sometimes when writing I get stuck to where I lose track on what I am suppose to be writing and I lose focus on the subject. Also my grammar plays a role in my writing, I seem to not go over what I've written at times and when someone reads it, it makes no sense to me and I get so upset at myself because I didn't catch it. I've also been informed of a growth area to take more leadership in my community. It seems to be in me but I am afraid to take that spotlight and not doing things well for my community. Also my organization has gotten out of hand this module because of so much work, so I need to be more organized of my work and environment.

I am who I am despite the neighborhood I live in.

My neighborhood has been going through some dramatic changes throughout the years I have been living there. San Leandro was a nice place to live and a great place to have your children grow up in. It first started off as a medium class area back in the 90’s and early 200’s the building I lived in was pretty nice for affordable people and a lot of friendly neighbors causing no trouble.

As the years passed by managers and mechanics who worked in my apartment building began retiring. They never rebuild our apartments because they cared for the younger children more, having a lot of activities, such as train ride around the apartment building. We started getting African American manager workers which was pretty surprising to see once in a lifetime, and they started accepting anyone who was low income to live there not really checking their background history. It began with a lot of selling drugs in the neighborhood and people started calling our building the “purple vill” knows as people selling marijuana.

They made many changes in my neighborhood by rebuilding the buildings and painting them more nicely and approachable to outsiders. Unfortunately this didn’t change the view and the people that live inside my neighborhood. It seem as if the managers were accepting younger adults to live in the neighborhood apartments which grew to an unsafe environment for the people who were living there for years like me.

For the first time in my neighborhood there had been murder which really scared me and others for our safety. There’s so much trash, and needles that around when young children are playing. My neighborhood doesn’t make me who I am; I am who I am despite the neighborhood I live in. Someone who may live in a good neighborhood may experience that they are who they are because of the good surroundings they were surrounded by. It makes me a stronger person to know what neighborhood I grew up in and it makes me want to help build up my community and make it a better place to live.

The “Poverty Business"- dividing the opportunity divide!

Today in the “Poverty Business” world these companies who are exacerbating the opportunity divide with low-wage earners are those don’t really care about our community in helping it become better. The companies try and target the poor by offering those loans knowing that they can’t afford to pay them back. This is their profit to pull out extra money and tax those who already don’t have the funds in the first place. It’s very disappointing to see those companies get away with taxing the poor and leaving the wealthy alone separating the opportunity divide. “Good Cars for People Who Need Credit” I disagree with this because I feel that they should let people who can’t afford cars with good cars to start off their credit. This here is already dividing the opportunity divide with the poor and wealthy, making the wealthy feel as if they don’t have to worry about money and making the poor seem as if they need to grab all their finances and pay for a good car. Who is responsible for these alleviating issues is the individual themselves because we as individuals do not take the time to read the fine prints that we sign, because if there’s money involved we get to money hungry and don’t take the time to read what we are about to sign. Here is a quote I picked out the article, “she said BlueHipHop would debit the account for $124, and Humphries then would owe 17 payments of $71.98 every other week” (p6). Now notice that it says every other week, we don’t look at these important sentences, I feel like this is where the Poverty Business gets over.  Therefore those who are poor need to look for other resources to get money because those companies are out there to dig in our pockets and take everything we own, making us think they are there to help but really they are taxing us more than we ever borrowed. The government provides for a transiency of people, money for those in need we just don’t have the resources to use them or don’t know any resources out there that helps us.