Event #1: CRIS Mural Project
Service Event
For my first event this month, I attended a service event on Sunday, October 27th at a local Columbus elementary school. At this event, I helped paint a mural outside of the school’s library with other IA members, students who volunteered with CRIS (Community Refugee and Immigration Services) and parents/teachers/students who attend the school. The mural extended on several different walls and included a variety of different things, but my favorite was one part that had a huge tree painted on the wall and then the students wrote positive messages on paper leaves and put them on the tree. Then, other students could come and take down a leaf whenever they needed extra encouragement. Truly so precious!
This event relates to International Affairs because the school in which the mural was painted in has a large population of immigrant and refugee children. These kids have gone through so many obstacles and heartbreak in their young lives to even be able to come to our country and start a new life here and i.t is so important to be able to support them in making their transition to Ohio and the United States easier and make them feel more welcomed/comfortable in any way possible. That is why I personally think that the paper leaves is such an important aspect of the mural because it’s a great way for kids, who may feel out of place/alone/scared, to receive positive and heartfelt messages from their classmates. On the same note, before coming to this event, I had no idea how the mural could really be that important of a CRIS service project. However, after seeing all of the kids’ faces and understanding the power of the messages that the various. artworks were conveying, I understood the depth of the service project in bettering the lives of these kids. It was really cool for me to see these kids so excited about having a new part of the school dedicated to them and for them to be able to have a part in making it, because I know a lot of these kids are used to having their voices quieted and are often pushed to the side (or outright hated on by xenophobic people).
Lastly, this event helped to intersect with some of my personal and professional goals. Currently, I volunteer at the Legal Aid Society of Columbus on the Pro Bono Community Engagement Team. Through volunteering at the LASC, I have expanded my knowledge of the discrimination and marginalization that people of lower socioeconomic status face on a daily basis, often serving as a severe barrier to reaching their full potential. As such, I have become more interested in poverty studies and policy research surrounding class and SES-based policies and I hope to get involved with organizations that will allow me to conduct this type of policy research in the future. This all comes back to this event because a large portion of the students at this particular elementary school come from low SES families. To make matters worse, the district actually has a large disparity in wealth, so this particular school actually has students some of the wealthiest families in Columbus and some of the poorest families in Columbus. Thus, I felt very passionately about finding a way to serve the students of lower SES, who are objectively at a disadvantage as compared to their peers of high SES. While this service project was great, these students need continued support throughout their lives, and I’m excited to continue to work towards developing policies that help to do so.