Hi! This blog post marks the beginning of my and my partner’s, Vicky’s, action project! In brief, we had both decided to give back to our community academically, and help with school or classroom activities and tutoring with a local elementary school as we both had felt strongly about the topic of accessibility to support and resources in early education.
To begin, I had completed an activity to explore my values more profoundly. I have a good sense of the general ideas I feel strongly about, but I found that it had been helpful to have the many values narrowed down to merely a few. The top three values I found most agreeable with me were equality, compassion, and justice. These are all very broad and intense values, though no less important. I feel very fiercely about these topics, and though equality, compassion and justice may be difficult things to achieve perfectly in our society, they become even more important to fight for, as every person deserves it.
Moreover, I had to choose my least important values as well as my most important ones. This hadn’t proven to be an entirely easy task, but I had found some values that I do not align with. The general categories of these values were tradition, belonging, and power. The prompt given for tradition had been: “I believe we should respect an established way of how things have been done.” Though, we should definitely still respect tradition and culture, I like to believe that tradition can be balanced, so as to not completely close the door to new opportunities, experiences and even to form new traditions.
As I chose my values and checked my results, I had been feeling tentative, especially about the answers of my “least” important values. Like I had mentioned previously with tradition, it’s incredibly important, though it shouldn’t seize and disregard every new thing in our lives, not allowing to live and experience new or future events and traditions. Then, I had gotten belonging, this one I hadn’t entirely agreed with. Not every time is it necessary to be liked, especially by everyone, it’s most likely impossible actually, but I still believe people definitely deserve to be liked, to feel being wanted and have connections with others, to posses that sense of belonging, which mentally, can be essential. For as the value of power, this had been something that didn’t feel generally appealing to me as power is precarious and complicated. Though, usually mentors and inspirations may come from those in higher positions, even those of power that we look up to, but, there are times in which power is corrupt or taken advantage of, and sometimes it’s necessary to be wary.
The United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals are goals created as a global call to protect our planet and ensure peace by the year 2030. There are seventeen unique goals, each valuable and important to ensure a better planet for us in our present and the future. A few of their goals that I feel very deeply about are the zero hunger goal, gender equality goal, peace, justice and strong institutions goal, and the quality education goal. Similarly to the goals, my passions align fairly well with the goals I mentioned. I’ve always been interested and passionate about equality, and I’ve explored women’s rights and equality throughout my life and I’ve discovered I feel deeply about the equality and justice for girls and women, but even for people in general. Also, tying into this project, I value a fair and accessible education system for everyone, as well as accessibility for quality education for everyone, for careers, futures and passions.
To help address the goal of quality education, my action will be to visit local schools, like Baker Elementary, and help provide free, low-stress, optional supports to students with tasks like homework, projects and tutoring in general, or either education and academic related topics, and even help teachers with activities or school facility tasks and chores! My partner and I hope that by creating a friendly, and open educational opportunity we can help a few people, even just a few times. Notably, I chose this specific action because reflecting on certain parts of my early education, I remember even then having struggles. Whether those struggles be with math homework, inaccessibility to supports, or other social or personal problems, these are all real and prominent things even young and “carefree” children may deal with.
Thank you for reading my first blog post!💕
