Ways to Provide More Safe Housing for Runaway and Homeless Youth
Authors: Lindsay Scarbrough and Emily Mason
Faculty Supervisor: Jessica Melilli-Hand, Ph.D., MFA
Community Partner: Safe Harbor/ Zach’s Place
Abstract:
Our service-learning project was collecting items by a donation from my community for Zach’s Place, which is a local shelter for homeless and runaway youth. We put boxes in areas we visit weekly to help raise these donations, as well as vocally spread the word about our fundraiser. Once the items were collected, we went to the shelter and dropped off all of the donations.
The ladies that accepted our donations were extremely grateful and explained how much it meant to them to have people care about this issue. That is why we now see the importance of funding shelters like these so that more youth can get the help they need. We also created visual argument flyers and had them printed out by the center for service learning. We put these flyers out in the community to spread awareness. This whole process has helped us with the writing process because as we were planning and preparing for our papers we had to plan when to do our service-learning project and how that could fit into our writing. This process has also taught us how much of an impact we can have on others as well as how giving to others can have an impact on us.
