FIU Community Service Blog

My Reflection

Welcome to my informative blog about community service. My name is Carlos student from ENC3213 at FIU.

The meaningful objective is to help the community, but first, we must know how and what we are facing to optimize our help.

For more than a year, there has been a considerable increase in people going through difficult times, immigrant communities, people affected by the economy and inflation, and natural disasters. In this blog, I would like to show how we can help effectively in the community and how we can actively help online.

The next video is of excellent recommendation; you will have an idea and orientation of the importance of the work of being a volunteer, in this case, in a Food Bank's Warehouse.

An excellent method to help online is https://www.gofundme.com/. Over the years, this website has been of great importance to me. Here I have been able to help unknown people going through difficult times. And not only for strange people, but it has also been crucial for close friends who have needed to seek resources through this website.

Why is it so essential to help our communities?

Nowadays, it is common to see homeless people on the streets or have some personal experience where you have the problem firsthand of not having a place to live. An article shows this, carried out in 2018 by the Clinical Neurosciences Division of the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and in collaboration with the Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration, and Office of Research and Development. This article shows that in 2016 a survey was conducted nationwide in 47 different states of the U.S., where 78% answered that homelessness was a problem in their communities, and 60% believed that this problem would increase in the next five years.

These figures are alarming; my personal experience agrees with most of those surveyed. It only takes going out and driving a couple of miles in my community to find a homeless person, a situation that increases every year. That is why we must act to help and pressure the corresponding authorities to help improve the situation and help the people in need. You can leave a comment on this blog about your personal experience.

Link to the article: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcop.22100

Article PDF format: https://www.researchgate.net

Authors: Jack Tsai, Crystal Y. S. Lee, Jianxun Shen, Steven Southwick, Robert H. Pietrzak.

A homeless encampment at NW 17th Street beneath I-95 in Overtown.
https://www.miamitimesonline.com/news/city-of-miami-doubles-down-on-homeless

A tent encampment along Alhambra Boulevard. DENNIS MCCOY | SACRAMENTO BUSINESS JOURNAL
https://www.bizjournals.com/

To help, I created a gofundme campaign to support the homeless Emergency Project, Inc.

Here is the link for this fundraiser https://gofund.me/f229d716.

Please share with your family and friends.

Goals

Simply put, our goal is to break the cycle of homelessness for any individual or family who comes to us for assistance. HEP monitors its programs to measure progress against stated goals and to make necessary refinements. Program outcomes and data such as the number of clients who secure and remain in housing and other measures indicating success and effectiveness are rigorously tracked and analyzed to inform the design of new programs and provide an evidence base to HEP’s policy views.

Vision Statement:

While serving our local community, HEP will be recognized as a national model of excellence providing comprehensive solutions to homelessness for individuals, families, and Veterans in our community.

Core Values: