My current plan for the last essay is to discuss a specific time when I was volunteering. I regularly attend a volunteering site called PBJ Outreach, where a group of people spend their Saturday mornings on an empty lot in Detroit distributing clothes and food to any and all who need it. Although it has become a monthly activity for me, PBJ Outreach continues to shape who I am as a person, and I love doing it to create relationships with the other people, volunteers or not, who regularly attend. The first time I volunteered with the outreach program, however, was definitely a major moment in my life when it came to my awareness of my privilege as a member of the middle class. One thing I specifically remember from my first time there (I was 10) was a man who rode his bike to the lot. He was homeless and needed a new pair of shoes because the only ones he had were too worn out to wear, and winter was quickly approaching. You should know that this volunteer program has been in place for many years and is very organized, down to the last peanut butter sandwich. In order to go through the clothes line and get shoes, for example, one would need to obtain a ticket from one volunteer, wait for their ticket number to be called, and then make their way through the fairly narrow pathway that contained all of the clothes they could choose from. This older gentleman with a bike had a ticket and his number was about to be called, so my dad asked him if he would like his bike to be watched and protected while he went to get the shoes he so desperately needed. I knew that every complaint I'd ever made was petty and trivial when the homeless man refused my dad's offer, returned his ticket, and rode away with his battered old shoes. That bike was his entire life and he couldn't risk anything happening to it, even if it meant having destroyed shoes for the winter.
PBJ Outreach doesn't define my social identity as a member of the middle class, but it has helped me to better understand how incredibly privileged I am to have socioeconomic stability. These people stand there on a street corner for hours in all kinds of weather to get a good spot in line to get food and clothes. Clothes that have been deemed too old or too ugly or too small to wear by more fortunate people. By being a member of the middle class, PBJ Outreach made me more aware of the suffering that the people there go through and the stupidly cushy life I have. Thus, my driving question would be in regards to how this experienced changed me- it didn't change my identity, but it changed how I thought about it.
Emma, this idea for an essay sounds really interesting. I really like how, if you were to write it, the reader would see a clear change in perspective from this one incident. It is always interesting to read something that has an identifiable moment that causes a change, especially from the perspective of a ten-year-old child. I can also relate to this idea because I was part of the "Midnight Run Club" in my high school. Basically, it was a similar concept; we would spend weeks collecting clothing of all different sizes and then, on one Saturday night, we would prepare food. That night, we would drive all the food and clothing to different areas where many homeless people congregate in New York City, and the people were given food and permitted to choose clothing. The main point of these runs, however, was to engage in conversations with the homeless people; these conversations completely changed my perspective every time I had one. I was actually considering writing my essay about these "midnight runs" because, the first one especially, they had such a great impact on me and shaped many of my views now regarding social issues. Good luck writing your essay, and thanks for sharing!
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