Chinquapin students in their Junior/ Senior Seminar class have to research ideas for a project that will help the community. Through the project, we have to choose a topic that we are passionate about and will want to eventually like to research and create an impactful project. The research is the first part of the project that we do in our Junior year. In our Senior year, we complete the second part of our project which is by using what we learned in our research and creating a project from it that will help serve our community.
Junior-Senior Projects presents...
Guest Contributors!
When we first began brainstorming topics we had no ideas in mind while our classmates thought of influential topics such as climate change and deforestation which had personal importance to them. Before our teacher set us off to brainstorm she assured us to pick a topic we are really interested in and are able to work on for the next two years. As we sat there wondering what we would like to do the first thing that came to our minds was immigration. When we learned of our classmates' topics We both learned that our interests in topics were the same and decided to work together.
During this time immigration has been a popular subject throughout the years as it is a controversial issue. Recently it has gotten even more popular through President Trump's proposal to Americans that he will build a wall to keep immigrants from illegally coming into America. Trump’s idea to “Make America Great Again” by removing immigrants from the U.S has been put into action through the border wall, ICE raids, and lastly putting immigrants into detention centers where they are being treated unfairly.
Our initial goal was to create a community service event within the Interact club from our school through “Catholic Charities''. The event we wanted to participate in consisted of volunteering in helping refugees from Latin America who have arrived in the U.S and are struggling to adjust. The event involved sorting and organizing donated items, creating family packs that will greatly benefit families in need. We believed that participating in an event such as this one would have given us an opportunity to make those aware of the struggles of these individuals in obtaining a a better lifestyle for themselves and their families. This event had emotional importance for us to participate in.
Our personal passions for this project are because of our family members who have gone through these difficult situations. They arrived in the U.S with nothing but the desire to work to support their family back home. We want to be part of a meaningful event that supports individuals going through this challenging time. These are issues that many people are not aware of. That deportation can lead to a chain of effects most specifically causing traumatic experiences for children seeing their families be torn apart.
Due to Covid-19, we faced many challenges in making our project possible. We had to be realistic and realized that our project needed to be changed in order to be effective. Since we weren’t able to host our volunteering event at Catholic Charities, we still wanted to inform others about immigration and the effect it has had. In order for us to do that we decided writing blogs would help inform others during the circumstances, we face currently with Covid-19. Our main goal in these blogs is to inform how the deportation of a loved one brings long-term traumatic effects to children since it impacts their life.
-WB & AR