Hi guys! Thanks for taking the time to read this blog post. It’s my first time ever writing a blog, so I’ll try my best to keep this focused. My name is Jagan Doodala, and I’m a senior at the George Washington University. I am a pre-med studying Human Services and Social Justice (HSSJ). I chose this major because of the way it approaches service – we build communities together, not as individuals. As a student interested in pursuing medicine, I’m always looking for ways to increase my positive impact on society. Through an analytical understanding of the world from my science classes, I’m given the technical tools needed to brainstorm new solutions for the future. However, science sometimes fails to understand human nature and utilizing social elements to maximize positive outcomes.
HSSJ as a major focuses on building communities through an assets-based approach, rather than a needs-based approach. In fact, much of the Introduction to Human Services class was focused on understanding this mindset and focused on getting out of the “savior complex” to which it can be easy to fall prey to. An assets-based approach is tackling the needs of a community/region by utilizing its pre-existing strengths. For instance, a community that has a strong food culture might use that to deal with issues of food insecurity and hunger. This approach is so powerful because of its ability to empower those around us, and make people realize their worth, while also allowing them to impact their larger community network as a whole.
To be quite honest, at first I was pretty intimidated by all this – it seemed so high level and hard to imagine change on such a scale. How can one individual make a notable difference in a community? What if not everyone is on board with it? What if there are insurmountable obstacles? However, one thing I’ve realized from service learning at many organizations in the local community through my classes is that every positive interaction that a person has brings them that much closer to empowering themselves. The more we as a society collectively work together and continue to bring each other up, change CAN happen. And historically, it has: the Civil Rights Movement, LGBTQ+ movement, the Arab Spring. These all started as small-scale endeavors that over time made waves across the world. In the same way, our Capstone class realized that despite the small-scale nature of our project, our community has the potential to create real, tangible impacts in the lives of those who benefit from nonprofit organizations.
This brings us to the question: Why did we choose our mission and vision?
If there’s one thing that our team will take away from working on this project, its coming up with a problem to solve is hard. Like, REALLY HARD. Who has the right to say that one problem is greater than another? What if the problem we choose isn’t as prevalent in the community as anticipated? What if the problem is already being addressed by organizations effectively, and throwing more money into it is a waste of time? These are the kinds of questions our Capstone Seminar class wrestled with the first few weeks of school. We had to come up with an idea that would have synergy with all the passions that we bring to the table each and every day when we sit in our classes.
We first began by identifying what social issue we wanted to tackle. After intense discussion, we realized that we wanted our focus to be on education. Education is powerful because of its universal ability to bring an individual up, regardless of their background.
Since education as a whole is too broad for a potential grant application, we decided to identify a specific demographic in the DC Metro region that would benefit from educational initiatives. We identified that the regions in DC, Maryland, and Virginia that border one another are in fact very diverse and have high immigrant populations. Many of these immigrants are also living off minimum wage and/or near the poverty line. Given increased national security concerns and tightening immigration laws in recent years, these communities are being shaken up. As a result, it made the most sense to begin shaping our mission and vision around the empowerment of immigrant individuals and families seeking opportunity in the local region.
We hope that as we continue to progress on our “foundation” and learn more about one another and synthesize our years of Human Services learning into this project, we can make a positive impact for the people we have chosen to help.
-Jagan (A member of Team 1, the Founders)
Responses from our class:
Thanks for your input! I definitely agree that deciding upon one singular mission was a huge challenge for us. Like you mentioned, our class is diverse in terms of experiences and passions, so finding something for us all to get behind seemed like an enormous task. At the same time, HSSJ has given us a wide variety of knowledge about nonprofits in the area that serve so many different populations so we can easily see the value in missions that focus on different services. We have all served at many sites that work towards assisting those in poverty, adults and children wishing to advance their education, individuals with mental health struggles, and many many more. What I'm particularly curious about is how our mission and vision would change at a different point in time, especially since you mentioned the timeliness of our decision to fund sites that work with immigrant communities. Would we be still be as passionate about supporting immigrant communities if they weren't being threatened as they currently are? How much should we take into account the changing times of the world? Personally, I think foundations definitely ought to be aware of current policies and cultures that are disproportionately affecting certain populations due to the political or social climate of the time. This is how foundations stay relevant and effective in actively attempting to accomplish their mission and create the vision of the world they identify in their goals. All in all, I was glad to go through this process and reflect upon it afterwards as a way of understanding both myself within the class and our class within the worlds of foundations, DC, and America.
-Tanya
Thank you for this detailed account of how we arrived at our mission and vision. Your post reminded me of a term we often revisit in Human Services and Social Justice (HSSJ), “the oppression Olympics.” In essence, marginalized communities, when pitted against one another for resources and power, attempt to showcase why their form of oppression places a more excessive burden on their lives than the hardships faced by other communities. However, as you acknowledge in your post, the assumption that one community’s needs are greater than another is a futile endeavor. After all, how can one quantifiably measure the extent of oppression? How could we begin to weigh the hardships faced by LGBTQ people during the AIDS epidemic against the long-term trauma felt by Japanese Americans interned during World War II? The challenges that arise from inequities in our social, economic, and political systems manifest differently in each individual and community, and as human services professionals, it is not our task to crown one community the “most oppressed.”
Therefore, I agree with you that short-term foundations are well-served to design a mission based on pertinent issues that appear in the media and the community. Last year, the HSSJ capstone class responded to the groundswell of news about the #MeToo Movement by creating a foundation that funded projects related to sexual assault prevention. Likewise, our foundation was established in the aftermath of news stories about our national government targeting immigrant communities. Little more than a year ago, major media outlets reported that the Trump Administration separated thousands of children from their parents in border crossing detainment, and many of those families remain apart as of this past month. In addition, we also collectively knew that organizations in our local community were making efforts to assist immigrants coping with the recent state of affairs, such as Casa Ruby’s support of LGBTQ migrants seeking asylum in the US. As you put it, as a tight-knit unit, we thought about how to maximize our impact given our resources and time, funding the ongoing work of capable organizations dedicated to an urgent matter in the community.
In establishing our foundation, our class did not decide that immigrants were “more oppressed” than other groups. Rather, as a short-term organization, we focused on the potential to fund projects that addressed a noteworthy, current issue. Perhaps, if we were a foundation established in perpetuity, our process of selecting an issue area would differ. We would need to not only take timely problems in a given political moment into account but also need to assess the extent to which problems shape people’s lives on a long-term basis.
-Adam