Initial Proposal--what I talked about in class

Community Involvement, Spirituality, and Local Activism

As I tried to articulate the second week of classes, this idea of community involvement strikes a chord with me. When I began to think of how to get people more involved in things like town meetings and local activism, I faced myself with a question: What is keeping people that want to be active from doing so? And what can I do to help them?

I came up with some (scattered) ideas: money, time, circumstance, lack of childcare, intimidation, the feeling of not having an impact on one’s environment, language barriers, and many other ideas. So what can the community do…to help the community overcome some of these obstacles. I came up with two ideas. What if volunteers from school or organizations like High Country Amigos helped bring local latinos a translator to town meetings? What if local babysitters, church groups, etc, helped provide childcare for parents at these sort of things? I then began to think of the idea of the church involvement further.

I am not an extremely religious person, but I do believe that spirituality, God, a good conscience, and whatever else have a common ground as far as the environment, equity, and these sort of things go. Should not then institutions for each realm work together in attaining such ideals they ascribe to?

What does spirituality have to offer an effort for sustainability?

I thumbed through a few books about this idea, and realized:

I simply cannot come to a conclusion on anything new in one semester as far as this goes. (At least not one I can articulate well enough for my Senior Project)

I will probably continue to formulate my ideas on this topic for the rest of my life.

And so I decided to focus on something I have a little more experience with, something a little more tangible and attainable for me, right now.

Back to the drawing board