Serve Beyond Cincinnati Volunteer Excursion to New York City, Dec. 2014
This past winter break, I was given the opportunity to travel to Sunset Park, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, to participate in a service trip with Serve Beyond Cincinnati. Sunset Park is an exceedingly diverse neighborhood, which has a significant population of Mexican-American immigrants. In partnership with nonprofit organizations Casa Hoy and Adelante Alliance, we helped paint the apartments of a few of the families in the neighborhood who have served fellow immigrants through their work with Adelante Alliance. Throughout this week, we were immersed in the Mexican-American culture of Sunset Park and learned a lot about immigration issues and tensions between the United States and Mexico. This experience was truly eye-opening, as I've never had the chance to work with a community like the one of Sunset Park. I was inspired by their unrelenting spirit and heart as a community, and they showed me the importance of global citizenship. Though it may seem that their challenges have nothing to do with the ones I face in my daily life, we share the fact that we are citizens of the same world. In that sense, I learned the significance of reaching out to communities beside your own and working together for the greater good of human kind and a greater connection of all living things on our planet.
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Throughout this experience, I kept a journal, which I later turned into a blog. If you're interested in more of the specifics of my trip, feel free to check it out here!
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