The piece of our group project that I believe was most essential to our learning was our team’s willingness and ability to communicate with one another. While this strength may obviously be conducive to the success of any group work, I began to consider how naturally impossible and frustrating it is to tackle any environmental cause when the relevant relationships do not or cannot communicate across statuses and identities.
I particularly appreciated our team meetings where we discussed what it means to stir valuable potential change in just a few weeks – a task that we frankly did not believe was realistic. As a result, we were able to contemplate together how to make this limited yet ambitious project meaningful, and we were honest about when we had no idea. We came to the conclusion that while “education” as we know it too often begins and ends within a person’s own brain, we could not deny how critical education is to organize intentional action.
When researching and interviewing Farestart, I was encouraged to hear Matt Kanter’s (Outreach aid and Retention chairman) humanizing perspective on combating hunger. He explained the importance of finding what a person is personally passionate about, then taking advantage of organizations that may be available towards whatever that passion may be. At first, I thought this was a very privileged approach. After all, someone who is food insecure is very likely not thinking about bringing their dreams to fruition when they are constantly thinking about where their next meal will come from. However, I realized that in order to tackle a problem that is affecting individuals holistically, individuals must be treated as such – that they are whole. Just because a person is starving does not mean they do not have passions. Of course there are other factors involved, for example, an organization related to a person’s passion may simply not be accessible. Nonetheless, I was able to learn something from Matt’s personal story and advice.