Application of Knowledge

Application in atlanta

Isabella Dietrich, Kate Yoder, Al Palensky

Week One: The Triangle of Quality Service

All three components are necessary to have a quality service learning experience and Hawkeye Service Teams focuses on all components of quality service:

Education

Weekly class discussions covering Food Insecurity
Discussions around the importance of volunteering
Discussions with the founder of The University Food Pantry and food insecurity in Iowa.

Direct Service

We partnered with The University of Iowa Food Pantry and helped them move into their west side location. We were able to help assemble shelves, purchase food, and stock the shelves.
In Atlanta, we partnered with 4 organizations, all of which focused on a slightly different component of food insecurity.

Open Hands

Our team assembled individual meals for clients that were specifically created for client needs such as Hypertension, High Blood Pressure, and Diabetes.

Southwest Ecumenical Emergency Assistance Center, Inc. (SWEEAC)

Our team helped set up a Grocery Store style Food Pantry and served clients. We aided in ensuring that the proper number of items were taken, helped clients in and out of the building, and even helped unload the trucks of food from the Atlanta Food Bank. We were able to help restock the shelves at the end of the day as well.

SafeHouse

This is the community partner we stayed with throughout the week. We were able to assist them in serving a meal, talking with clients that were experiencing homelessness, deep clean both floors, organize donations, and go on a walk and meet individuals who are experiencing homelessness and have a conversation with them.

Atlanta Food Bank

On our last day, we were able to help rescue food and package it into banana boxes to be distributed to food pantries. We were able to sort and package 22,837 pounds of food in a short 6 hours!

Reflection

Each evening we reflected and debriefed the day. We discussed what went well, what we learned, and things that were difficult to encounter. We wrote in journals our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs throughout the trip as well.

Week 3: Simple Living

Simple living is a way to express a lifestyle built around intention. This type of lifestyle places less importance on physical items and more on relationships with others. This lifestyle differentiates living simply from living in poverty. Below is a list of a few types of simple living

Choiceful simplicity
Compassionate simplicity
Frugal simplicity
Soulful simplicity
Uncluttered simplicity

Changing your attitude and making positive decisions about your priorities will lead to getting more joy out of life. When you waste less of your time on things that are unimportant and you are happier, then you will be better able to spend time focusing on issues central to the community you reside in. On our trip to Atlanta we applied simple living to our work by limiting the amount of clothing and technology we brought with us. By making the decision to reduce our normal levels of media and instead focusing on passionately serving the Atlanta community, we were all able to gain a new living experience that we could bring back with us to our everyday lives.

Week 4: 8 Components of a Quality Break

Break Away and ASB Philosophy

Pre-Break

1) Strong Direct Service- Food Pantry West prior to ASB

2) Full Engagement- Education on Simple Living and expectations for behavior and experiences on the trip

3) Diversity and Social Justice- Class discussions on identity, privilege, and historical antecedents to social problems

On-Break

4) Orientation- focusing on the Atlanta area, the assets within the community, the programs already established and community partners currently working together.

5) Education- We met with the founder of the University of Iowa Food Pantry prior to leaving to get a better understanding of issues faced here on campus as well as a base line of knowledge about challenges surrounding food insecurity such as food deserts.

6) Training- each organization we worked with gave us specific training on food safety, nutritional requirements, and their sustainability practices.

Post-Break

7) Reflection- this website, presentation, and in class discussion and papers.

8) Reorientation- recommitting to serving our local communities and ourselves. Some of us plan to focus on learning more about food justice, volunteering with local organizations, and keeping in contact as a group to remember the lessons we learned on the trip.

Week 5: Deprivation Trap and Forms of Discrimination

Deprivation Trap

Our trip focused on Food Justice but we came to see that many social issues including food insecurity are interconnected with homelessness, poverty, isolation, vulnerability, and physical limitations. When working with Open Hand we learned about the isolation and physical limitations seniors face and their vulnerable medical conditions. Open Hands works to make nutritional meals crafted by dietitians and delivered to seniors to help overcome the obstacles they face.

SafeHouse offers meals to individuals facing homelessness and treats them with dignity and respect to build confidence and help them reenter the workforce. The main mission of SafeHouse is to provide community and help build up individuals so they can build up themselves. SafeHouse also acts as a resource in connecting individuals to whatever resource they need. Even if SafeHouse is not equipped to help they will connect the individual with organizations that are able to provide that resource.

The Atlanta Community Food Bank offered classes to teach individuals how to make nutritional meals with the primary mission of providing to local food pantries and increase efficiency of their service community.

SWEEAC provides for basic needs such as food and clothing. SWEEAC rescues food that would have been thrown away otherwise and provides them to community members. SWEEAC is a ministry driven organization that also offers community and help connect individuals to other resources.

Each organization understood the deprivation trap and the compounding challenges faced by those in their communities and worked to create a multifaceted approach to create effective change.

To learn more about the organizations we worked with please see the links below.

https://openhandatlanta.org/

https://www.safehouseoutreach.org/

http://acfb.org/

https://www.sweeac.org/

In class we discussed the different forms of discrimination and witnessed policy discrimination within the city of Atlanta.

Attitudinal discrimination- actions taken against a subordinate group based on individual prejudices or biases.

Institutional discrimination- systematic methods, policies, or laws, that limit a particular group. This form of discrimination is long lasting and far reaching.

We also visited the Center for Civil and Human Rights where we learned about the historical precedents in the United States civil rights movement and discrimination faced by people of color within the U.S.

Google Maps mix up and Walmart

On the trip our two vans accidentally got separated and ended up at different Walmarts. The result was a wake up call to inequality and realizing that we seeing the results of redlining practices which occurred fifty years ago but still define communities.

To learn more about redlining watch this video and view this interactive map to see your community:

Week 6: Ethical Service and Levels of Oppression

Ethical actions in atlanta

Team members respected those experiencing homelessness and did not ask to take photos and post on social media.
Members worked together to further the goals and missions of the organizations, not individual needs.
Members asked staff or long time volunteers for assistance and guidance in handling difficult situations that we were not fully comfortable handling on our own.
Members used inclusive language and tone when talking with clients, volunteers, and those experiencing homelessness.

Ethics

~ Moral principles that govern a person or group’s behavior

ethical standards we must abide by

~ Doing no harm.

~ Respecting people as ends, not means.

~ Respecting participant's ability to play a role in what they need.

~ Respect everyone's human, civil, and legal rights.

~ Doing what is best for everyone.

~ Do not abuse your position.

~ Don’t attempt an intervention in areas in which you’re not trained and/or competent.

~ Actively strive to improve or correct, to the extent possible, the situations of those you serve in your experiences in the community

levels of oppression

individual

Personal beliefs and attitudes that perpetuate oppression

Team members encountered sexism by numerous individuals and being instructed that there was "men's" work and "women's" work to be done. Members reflected upon these encounters during our nightly reflections and gained strength to overcome the adversity that we faced.
Members encountered individuals who chose to use demeaning terms in regards to those experiencing homelessness. Individuals were came off as arrogant and not accepting. We discussed in length during our reflection about our word choices and how this can affect our work. We made conscious decisions to talk in a positive and inclusive manner.

institutional

Social Institutions (media, health services, government, etc.) that perpetuate oppression through laws, practices, policies, and norms.

Members visited the Center for Diversity and Inclusion and learned about several institutional laws and policies throughout the years in American history, including Jim Crow Laws, Anti-gay legislation, and sexism.
We discussed human rights and how those in government should adhere to our basic human rights - that everyone is equal in our basic human rights.
Members became enlightened to view a raw and emotional historical account of desegregation in the south.

societal & cultural

The values and norms of society that are viewed as acceptable and normal that perpetuate oppression.

Our words matter and as a team we determined that we would be inclusive and accepting of all individuals in our group and who we encountered throughout the week. Our lessons leading up to our trip aided in knowing acceptable terminology and how to handle situations on our trip.
Even though sexism was exhibited by multiple individuals we encountered, we discussed in depth how to best approach it and how to help decrease this mentality in the future.

Week 7: Asset Based Community Development & Types of Community Assets

Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) focuses on the positive aspects a community possesses in order to solve local issues. Counter to traditional community development models that focus on community deficiencies, ABCD draws attention to the concerns, skills, and gifts already present that can be used for beneficial purposes. There are six specific types of assets under ABCD that any organization or community can have. Below are these six assets and examples of each with facts from the city of Atlanta.

Physical
- Atlanta lies in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains
- The city has the 8th largest rapid transit system in the U.S.

Human
- The city has more than 30 colleges within its limits
- Located downtown, Emory healthcare is home to the largest healthcare system in the state

Social
- Home to the National Center for Civil and Human Rights
- Demographics: 54% African American, 38% White, 4.7% Hispanic, 3% Asian

Environmental
- The city straddles the Eastern Continental Divide
- Along the northern border of the city is a conservational protected 48 mile stretch of the Chattahoochee River

Political
- Atlanta has historically been a stronghold for the Democratic Party
- Every city mayor elected since 1973 has been African American

Cultural
- Roughly 13% of the city's population identifies as gay, lesbian, or bisexual
- Atlanta is the nation's 4th largest majority-black city

On our trip to Atlanta, every one of our community partners used an ABCD model to empower organizational stakeholders. In the positive environment that ABCD nurtures, staff and volunteers could feel and see their service impacting the city. Those utilizing any of the organizations' services also received benefit from the ABCD model because they could feel properly supported instead of having labels cast upon them.

Week 8: Social Change Model

Social change is the transformation of society over time, arising from apparent disconnect between injustices perceived in the lives of concerned community members and an ideal social environment. A Social Change Model describes how anybody, when working in conjunction with others, can improve the environment around them. This model focuses on the power of working together to achieve a common good. To the left is a visual representing the different values that contribute to change. Community values require awareness of issues, active service engagement, and a capacity to care about issues. Everyone who participated in an Alternative Spring Break demonstrated a level of awareness into issues afflicting communities across the United States. Everyone also enrolled in a course that emphasizes active citizenship. Group values consist of collaboration of individuals who share a similar vision while allowing for discourse in opinion on how to achieve solutions. In our trip to Atlanta, our group's primary focus was food justice. However, as we saw during our week in Atlanta, there are many avenues to address this giant topic. Some organizations focused on assisting individuals who may be afflicted by physical limitations, while others narrowed in on helping those with limited financial means, and one even narrowed their scope to aiding those experiencing homelessness. Individual Values require awareness of one's personal values and acting in a manner that aligns with those values in order to invest yourself in problem solving. These values differed for each person on our trip, but thanks to the formation of our close relationships during our trip to Atlanta, it became apparent how everybody chose to invest their problem solving efforts.

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