Coaching Corps

For my practice experience I will be working with Coaching Corps, an organization that uses the power of sports and service to improve educational, health and social outcomes for underserved youth. They are partnered up with many organizations across the Bay Area, looking for assistant coaches to help run youth sports teams as well as serve as mentors for these kids. The partner organization Coaching Corps assigned me to was Berkeley Youth Alternatives, a non-profit, community-initiated organization located in Berkeley, CA, that provides a multitude of counseling resources and after school programs for troubled youth, including sports fitness. I am currently an assistant coach for a 5^th grade girls basketball team, where my responsibilities extend not only into the realm of basketball instruction and sports discipline, but also into the role of a mentor and guiding figure. 

One of the aspects of my organization I love the most is Coaching Corps strives to utilize their students volunteers beyond the couple weekly practices they attend and carry out larger events to directly address other areas of these children's lives like the importance of education. One of those events will be occurring this Sunday, April 13. Coaching Corps will be hosting Take Your Team to College Day. This event will bring the kids we serve to the Berkeley college campus and will give them an opportunity to explore the possibilities of higher education. At this year's event, we have kids coming from Bears Youth Basketball, Willard Middle School, and MLK Jr. Middle School. This is the agenda they provided us:

10:30AM-11:45AM Volunteers Meet Up & Introductions

Help with any set ups/preparations and receive a tour guide map with talking points to review; participate in an ice breaker and form a buddy system when the kids arrive; interact with the kids!

11:45AM-12:45PM Campus Tour

Give a tour of the UC Berkeley campus! You will not give a tour alone; you will work with a buddy of your choice as well as a student-athlete. All tour maps, stops, and talking points will be given to you so no prior knowledge is necessary at all.

12:45PM-1:15PM Scavenger Hunt

Help out with a Scavenger Hunt that includes Sather Gate, Campanile, and more! 

1:15PM-2:10PM College Student Panels

Be a part of a panel with student athletes and discuss college life, give advice and info about staying active. 

2:10PM-2:45PM Activity & Pick Up Game

Participate in a quick activity and a soccer pick up game with the kids!

2:45PM–3PM Closing

Closing remarks, hand out goodie bags, answer any questions, and take photos.

As you can see it's a packed schedule filled with many positive experiences and provide these children with opportunities to learn about higher education as well as do the things they love, like sports. Juxtaposing the two in an event like this is a great way of teaching these underserved children to associate the fun they have with sports with school.

The reason why I bring this up is not only because this event is quickly approaching, but because of our discussion of visual documentation both in class and discussion. Many of the photos on Coaching Corps's website display exactly these sort of events of youth empowerment and support. That is how they market their cause and receive funding. In our discussion when we were looking and analyzing each other's photos (from our respective organizations), we discussed what our organizations were trying to get across. It's nice to see those pictures come to life and witness what they were trying to get across first hand through this event.    

CSEC and Systems of Oppression

In addition to my PE, another meaningful thing I’m engaging with this semester is called Project HONEY, which stands for Helping to Empower Oakland and Neighbors’ Exploited Youth. Project HONEY is a supplementary program to a local non-profit in Oakland called MISSSEY (Motivating, Inspiring, Serving and Supporting Exploited Youth). MISSSEY is a safe physical space where survivors of sex trafficking can go for after-school fun but also provides various forms of social support. The goal of the DeCal is to understand sex trafficking of minors in the Bay Area so we can eventually act as advocates and mentors for the children. The main class activity in the DeCal is to create a workshop to present to the children at MISSSEY to add to their after-school activities program as well as give us base knowledge for a future of working with at-risk youth. I can't even begin to scratch the surface at how much this class has taught me, but I'll try to speak a little about it.


In the DeCal we often discuss the use of language when talking about the clients of MISSSEY. The term that we feel best describes the clients are CSECs, or commercially and sexually exploited minors. We feel like this is an all-encompassing term because it highlights the struggles that these children face: being just a middle-person in a monetary exchange in which they receive no benefit, and being part the process which exploits them sexually. We refrain from calling them “child prostitutes” because we feel that this phrase connotes a level of choice in their situations and lives, but this choice is simply not there. It is true that many girls go back to their pimps after they escape the life, but we must consider that the average age of entry into commercial exploitation of a CSEC is 12 years old. It’s clear that there’s a connection to the return and their own trauma, PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome as a cause for this relapse. When you’re baseline for normal is abuse and exploitation, it requires a lot of counseling and social support to have the courage to leave for good. We are also careful to call them “survivors”, not “victims” because we believe that they are strong and can take an active role in going forth with their lives.


Through this class I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Minh Dang, a survivor and advocate for the movement as well as a new Cal graduate from the MSW program. Minh gave us a very interesting lecture about domestic human trafficking. Why, in a society that supposedly works to protect children, are CSECs not getting the help and support that they need? Minh asserted that our society creates the conditions for this type of slavery to occur, and many systems of oppression are in play to create these conditions. Racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty, and many more all play a role in the commercial and sexual exploitation of minors. To rid society of this system of exploitation, we must also examine issues that appear to be separate because they do in fact play a major role. Minh blog about these issues very eloquently and I’d encourage everyone to check out her blog: http://minhspeakstruth.tumblr.com/

Organization Promotional Videos versus Picture Documentation

In the light of this week's topic about visual documentation, and the power and problems it presents, especially when portraying human suffering, I wanted to share a promotional video for the organization I'm working with (Coaching Corps).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44pTRVsdrxA

I really want to hear what you all think of their portrayal of these low income children and their suffering.

According to Coaching Corps there are over 21 million children in the U.S. living in low income circumstances. The video really attempts to draw on the viewers emotions to make us sympathize for these children and Coaching Corps's cause. What is different about this form of visual documentation versus what was discussed in the articles for the week is that this is a video and not simply a picture. Schonberg and Bourgois go into the great benefits of pictures, but also there drawbacks as they are open to interpretation. The "thousand words" they express could be a "thousand lies" depending on who in the public is viewing the image. That's why they emphasize the importance of context and a small line of description below the image. However with videos, that context is inherently embedded. Thus it is more effective. The only issue is pictures are much more accessible and easier to advertise on a large scale, which videos are a more complex form of media.

So can a technological movement towards videos help correct the faults within the portrayal of suffering through pictures? Or do videos introduce a whole other set of issues in the depiction of human suffering? Is the way this video uses children, music etc. to make us feel sympathetic an even larger wrong or simply a part of the context?

Looking for the Hidden Signs

For my practice experience, I am working with the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant (EBSC) located in Berkeley, Ca. Essentially, the  EBSC, "provides sanctuary---support, protection, and advocacy-- to low-income and indigent refugees and immigrants."

In preparation for this blog, I went searching for a multimedia link that would be able to show all of the great services offered by the EBSC. The sanctuary does so much to serve its client database and quick video only touches on the diverse group of people that come into our office. 

I actually started my practice experience about 2 weeks ago; every time I go into the office there is always something new that I am learning and new people that I am interacting with. 

At the 20 second mark, the video begins to describe the hand painted mural that, "greets visitors with colorful and moving scenes of military persecution, displacement, and sanctuary". I have seen this mural each time I have gone into the sanctuary, but I did not think much of it and did not realize how much significance it held for the sanctuary and the message it is attempting to convey. I am only starting to appreciate its meaning and what it means for the organization that I am working with. 

As we embark or prepare to embark on our PE journeys, I challenge all of us to keep our eyes peeled for these murals, signs, or other physical objects that give us more insight into organization and people that make our practice experiences. 

The Emergency Room as a Place of Change

"If airports can become shopping malls and McDonalds can become a local playground, surely we can reinvent the clinic waiting room."

Above is a Ted Talk by Rebecca Onie, founder of Health Leads. The goal of Health Leads is to connect low-income hospital patients to basic needs and resources such as food, housing and health insurance. The idea behind Health Leeds is to put "health" back into the healthcare system by viewing it in a holistic. In her Ted Talk, Rebecca Onie discusses using a hospital waiting room as place of social change and cites a man named Dr. Jack Gieger as her primary influence. In 1965, Dr. Gieger founded one of the first two community health centers in the United States, located in some of the poorest areas of the country and he noticed that although many of his patients came in with a variety of symptoms and ailments, most were suffering from malnutrition. He began to notice that the root causes of most of their illnesses went back to being starving; he began prescribing food as a result. The patients would then take these prescriptions to the grocery store and the pharmacy budget would be charged to cover the cost. After his funders got upset and told him he was supposed to use the budget for medical purposes only, Gieger responded "Last time I checked my medical textbooks, I read that the cure for malnutrition was food." Dr. Gieger's powerful words laid the foundation for Health Leads: that good health health starts at basic needs and hospital visits should be about more than making basic clinical diagnoses.

Health Leads as it exists today trains doctors and other healthcare professionals to recognize the social determinants of health and incorporate them into traditional models of care. When physicians treat someone that has health needs that go beyond the parameters of biomedicine, they refer them to the Help Desk that situated in the hospital waiting room. This way the patients can work with a volunteer advocate at the Help Desk to get other aspects of their health situated while they’re waiting for their "traditional" prescriptions to be filled. The volunteers, typically undergraduates interested in a career in health care, connect the patients out to the existing landscape of community resources. For example, doctors might treat asthma by prescribing a medication for it but people at the Help Desk would try to instead identify a cause; perhaps the patient has mold in the walls of their apartment, so in response we would try to find them better housing and get them a lawyer to advocate for their tenant rights. These sorts of Help Desks exist as a two-fold: to make a positive impact on people's lives in the waiting room, and also to train the next generation of healthcare professionals to recognize health needs beyond a basic clinical diagnosis. Help Desks aim to treat the cause, not the illness. Health Leads is currently working on providing a business case as to why the healthcare system as at large should pay for this type of care in addition to what they already provide in addition to policy work.

Help Desks like Health Leads are gaining ground across the country and more and more every year are being incorporated into traditional models of care. My PE at Highland Hospital is modeled after Health Leads except it is run on a purely volunteer basis, whereas Health Leads has paid employees as overseers. Berkeley students reached out to Health Leads in 2012 to start help desks in the Bay Area, but at that time Health Leads was not ready to expand so the Berkeley students did it themselves through Big Ideas at Berkeley [http://bigideas.berkeley.edu/winners/highland-health-advocates/]  Highland Health Advocates is just a part of the Bay Area Regional Health Consortium, which is a team of doctors, lawyers nad undergrads devoted to helping those in poverty acheive good health. According to their Big Ideas at Berkeley page,"The goal of this interdisciplinary approach is to improve the health of low-income patients, enhance the patient experience, reduce emergency room utilization by high frequency patients and ultimately lower healthcare costs in outpatient clinics and the emergency department." The pilot Help Desk through the Consortium was founded at Highland Hospital in Fall 2012 with 8 undergraduate volunteers and has since grown to over 60 undergraduate volunteers in Highland Hospital, Oakland Children’s Hospital, and San Francisco General Hospital.

If anyone is interested in volunteering with us, let me know! We require a minimum of one semester. We’re also looking for summer research interns.

I have recently been reading a book by Hava Rachel Gordon, “We Have To Win: The Inequality and Politics of Youth Activism” which has been really interesting for me because even though I’ve read a lot about activism, protesting, and non-violent civil disobedience, I didn’t realize the importance, the impact, and the differences of youth activism within the larger scope of activism.
 In her book, Gordon talks about her experience working with several groups of youth activists, and also about how youth activism became a movement, specifically here in Oakland. One of the many things I found fascinating was that even though these student activists didn’t share similar backgrounds, they worked hard and cohesively as a collective. However, movements in the past, such as the 1960’s counterculture movement, and even activism today such as Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring have fallen apart, because partnerships dissolve as the average age and size of the movements grow.
 I know, I know: some people would see these as staunch claims. And you know what?
I would agree.
 Yet I ask you to hear me out. Youth movements tend to be more cohesive and thus successful, however, I would argue that it’s the number and location of active participants that play a crucial role in determining (to a good extent) the their success. A lot of youth activism is school-, school district- or small-government targeted, and this means that they have a smaller scale within which they have to be effective, in order for their movement to be successful. And even though youth activists obviously tend to be younger than the average activist, and because there are fewer youth activists because of this, leaders within the movement remain easily identifiable and thus their demands remain clear and identifiable as well. In comparison, larger activist movements that affect and are adopted by larger groups of people tend to be their own undoing: because the reach of the activism itself is so far, the deeper causes within the movements in different locations has a tendency to change, and the larger movement’s social fabric undoes itself.
 I’m doing my practice experience with a not-for-profit organization that acts within the Bay Area called 100 Strong, a leadership and mentorship program for high school girls, especially those from marginalized and historically-disadvantaged communities. We’ve just started our pilot year and are currently acting within Oakland, which has a rich and vibrant history of social movements of its’ own. Though we don’t deal with these student-activists specifically within our program, important skill sets for engaging at such levels see, and even be, the change that they want to see in their communities. Sustainable change anywhere has often come from those who experience these struggles, and understand the systems, relations and institutions at play, and thus also the changes that need to be made. In building leadership and mentoring skills, teamwork, organization, management and other such skills, there are investments and knowledge being integrated into a community, through the individuals who are a part of them.

Urban Agriculture in the Bay Area - Documentary

For my PE I will be working with urban farmers in the Dakar region of Senegal. My curiosity, interest, and passion for food and the system it lies within has been ever-growing as a student in Berkeley, and as a resident in the Bay Area - rightly accredited as one of the epicenters of the food movement in the United States. Being able to see urban agriculture in the works and how even a small farm can make a difference in an entire community gives me a lot of real hope for changes in our food system so that a more just system can, and will happen.

This documentary, though reminiscent of other food documentaries in the beginning, developed into a very good representation of all the different kinds of efforts around the Bay Area, while also showing how all of them were aiming towards a common goal - to get food, healthy and yummy food, to people, especially to those that don't have access to it because of various political, economic, and social factors. It is a well-edited film about the urban food movement, where it is, and where it intends to go.

It's inspiring to see how many different people - in regards to their age, their race and ethnicities, their class, their gender, their backgrounds, their experience in farming - can fight for a common cause. From   food and environment all-star scholars such as Miguel Altieri and Nathan Gimenez-Holt, to young kids and teenagers from poor communities that have to go to special schools for not being able to handle/"behave" well in a typical school, people have united to fight for a better food system, to fight for access, and to take change into their own hands when change doesn't happen. This movement is active participation.

Even though there are similarities between the Bay and Dakar, such as guerilla urban farming (farming on land that one doesn't own because they don't have the power or resources to buy the land, or the land is open and would be otherwise neglected) and urban farming to lower food insecurity, it has been perspective-opening to me to learn about urban farming in another region of the world. Here in the Bay it is very much a social movement of access to the community and equality, whereas in Dakar, much of urban agriculture is aimed towards economic support of farmers. Unlike in the Bay where many people in the community are learning how to farm from a few experience gardeners to do urban farming, in Dakar, people who are farmers by trade, or subsistence farmers by necessity, are working to keep a living.

And as a trailing off final though... I've been pondering the pattern to return to traditional farming features as a solution to modern day problems of the food system. It really makes me question "development" that has occurred in regards the the food system, who was driving this "development," the intentions behind it, and how much it was thought through.

Michael B. Katz in relation to LIFEhabits

Yesterday in class we discussed the six problems of poverty that Michael B. Katz addressed in his essay “What kind of Problem is Poverty? The six different problems are: persons, places, resources, political economy, power, and markets. After a short discussion of how each different problem is important in its own way, the professor had us get into our groups to discuss how our group projects related to one or many of the six problems of poverty. My group’s project: Learning Important Fun Eating habits (LIFEhabits), will be focusing on looking at obesity rates in a school district and more specifically focusing on 8^th grade middle school students. Our goal is to educate students about the importance of eating healthy.

As we were discussing where our project’s goals would fit under, we came to a consensus that our project problem solution fell under resources. In Katz essay, his explanation of poverty based on resources focus a lot on money, and how poverty is the absence of money. In our case, our group felt that resources for us meant something more than money; it meant having the knowledge to understand what is happening, or why things are happening. The levels of obesity in middle schools might be the result of lack of education on nutrition. There is no real solution to this problem is all we do is give people money to try and change things without really analyzing the problem, and why it keeps happening. Like one of my classmates mentioned in class. It’s like giving homeless people money to go to the doctor, you re giving them the resource (money) but they will not go because they will either spend the money elsewhere or not be informed on where to go. The solution would be to taking them ourselves. Same thing will happen with middle school children and their schools. We can give them the money they need to change the lunch menu, but unless the students are aware of why it is best to eat healthy foods instead of Burgers and pizza every day, they will not eat during lunch, instead they will continue their eating habits outside school. Is all about knowledge. At least that is what many of us though as we started thinking about our projects.  But is it really? Professor Talwalker left us thinking about a question she wrote “is knowledge most likely conceived as a resource, or not?” on the board.

We also said that our project fell under people. The only solution will not only be informing students about the benefits of healthy eating habits, but also outreaching to them and trying to change their way of thinking. Many students do not like fruits and vegetables, and that is understandable because most of us went through that phase. But the only way to have these children change their way of thinking when it comes to choosing between healthy foods and junk food, is by motivating them and once again informing them about nutrition. At the end of the day this could be our biggest problem, having children understand.

Finally the third category in which our project falls under is places. For this category we are still debating whether it actually does fall under places or not. In class our group we had agreed that it did because where someone lives also affects their way of thinking, but after discussing as a class, our group said that maybe it did not because we were not focusing on a certain race, we wanted to apply our project to multiple school districts, wealthy or not, and finally we were not going to solve this problem by moving everyone out of their neighborhood. But when we presented our project to the class, a classmate and professor Talkwaker both mentioned that place might actually be a problem. Yet we are debating whether place is a solution to our problem.

Overall Katz essay was in my opinion a well-written essay that helped us start thinking about specific problems and solutions for our group projects that we are going to encounter along the way.

Practice Experience and Participation

Recently, I began my first day at my practice experience with the Ethiopian Community and Cultural Center. I knew I would be meeting with the volunteer coordinator and expected a run down of what my responsibilities would be through the span of my work there. If the time came to share my own original ideas that the Ethiopian Community and Cultural Center (ECCC) should take on, I had already prepared a list of ideas I would like to see implemented. The list highlighted a number of action plans that would serve a sector of the population that tend to be overlooked as a result of their financial limitations.  Such programs that target the refugees, elderly, and youth segments could serve to fulfill their needs in terms of support.

The Ethiopian Community and Cultural Center (ECCC) in Oakland was founded with the purpose of assisting the growing population of Ethiopians resettling in the Bay area as refugees. The underlying basis for the output of services of the ECCC is clear in their mission statement to “coordinate educational and social services that empower and support Ethiopian immigrants and refugees to become self-sufficient.” Thus far the center is more known in the Ethiopian community for the Ethiopian New Year’s Celebration that they host, elder services, refugee case management, housing assistance services, and translation and interpretation services. The ECCC also hosts a number of outreach events that span from protest to toy drives. Located on Telegraph Avenue the apex of Ethiopian restaurants

Upon meeting with the volunteer director, conversation flowed many of my ideas were well received and our hopes for the organization were similar. The question of how to implement our goals for future success was the question of how to implement these goals into a formidable action place takes into consideration the issue of participation. “Have Participatory Approaches Increased Capabilities?” discussed the elements of the Capability Approach that has evolved the agents of development to include participation from people. Cernia defined participation as “ empowering people to mobilize their own capacities, be social actors, rather than passive subjects, manage the resources, make decisions and control the activities that affect their lives.” This growing transition to the bottom up approach would be more fruitful to the implementation of many programs now in place. One of the programs that the ECCC is further developing immigrant/refugee training that is limited to computer and language skills training at this point.

While learning English and computer skills training are going to serve measures in an acculturation process, there are many effective options that branch away from these two efforts. In the case of expanding immigrant/ refugee resources need to come from “effective involvement of people in their own development requires a clear understanding of the requirements for effective participation, and the limitations of this process.” (Duraiappah. 2) The ECCC could decide to launch programs related to employment training, but there needs to be an incorporation of both opinions and stated needs of the immigrant/ refugee community. By definition the bottom up approach uses the target community to formulate the most effective program plan in order to effectively create a participatory development process. This format of participation is important in this case since it allows the ECCC to become “good facilitators and catalysts of development that assist and stimulate community-based initiatives and realize their own ideals.” (Duraiappah. 26) With the utilization of techniques found in the participatory development process the ECCC is bound to implement more programs with the greater support and participation from the target immigrant/ refugee group.

                                       

Microfinance in the United States

            For my practice experience, I will be an intern at Kiva.org, the microfinance organization that allows anyone with a computer make small loans to poor entrepreneurs mostly in developing countries. The other day, as I was browsing borrower profiles, I came across one that surprised me. The profile featured a picture of a young man named Nicholas who wanted money for his apothecary shop, where he sells herbal tinctures. What caught my eye was that Nicholas is in Oakland, CA. Do people in the United States actually need the same services that Kiva provides in the developing world?

While microfinance in the United States isn’t new (one of the most famous organizations, Accion USA, was founded in the early 1990s), Kiva’s program seems to be a part of something more recent. Muhammad Yunus (who many call the pioneer of modern microfinance) founded a branch of the Grameen Bank, originally in Bangladesh, in Brooklyn in 2008. Kiva quickly followed suit, and launched its United States program in 2009. In one article, the author tries to explain the timing of the launch: “Kiva’s U.S. micro loans come at an interesting time, with the global economy shifting precariously and unpredictably, and government rescue plans aimed at huge banks and corporations. Through its person-to-person economic stimulus plan, Kiva is giving individuals a new way to decide where and how to put their money to work helping others” (Heim, Kristi. "Africans Loaning to Americans? Kiva Expands to US Borrowers." The Seattle Times 10 June 2009). What seems especially interesting is that Kiva’s United States program is understood in a specific economic context. Heim seems to think that the program will be successful because of the slow economic recovery after the recession in 2008.

The ideas behind using microfinance in the United States also seem reminiscent of current feelings about government actions. Heim’s idea of a “person-to-person economic stimulus plan” could pass as an Occupy Wall Street slogan, along with “we are the 99%.” Both suggest an understanding that the United States government is not providing enough of a safety net to protect its low and middle class citizens. In other words, Kiva’s program can be thought of as an alternative to poor government decisions.

But can we really compare the poverty in the United States to that in the developing countries Kiva was created to serve? Some say yes—even the “Obama administration is throwing its support behind micro-lending. Under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009, $50 million was set aside for the Small Business Administration to lend to microenterprises” ("American Offshoots: Will Microfinance Ever Really Take Root in the U.S.?." Knowledge@Wharton. The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, [17 June, 2011]. Web.). But I wonder if Americans like the idea of microfinance in the United States not because it is really necessary but because they are frustrated that the government is not doing enough to prevent current inequality—the inequality that Robert Reich talks about in his new documentary Inequality for All. In other words, Kiva’s program seems to act as an alternative to a frustrating lack of policy in favor of poor Americans.

San Jose State University's successful campaign to raise the minimum wage in the city of San Jose

http://blogs.sjsu.edu/today/2012/ktvu-2-35000-sign-student-petition-to-raise-the-minimum-wage/

This article talks about the successful student campaign at San Jose State University to raise the minimum wage from $8 to $10 in the city of San Jose last year. What started as a class project became a mass movement and the students involved in this campaign managed to get 35000 signatures and put the issue on November ballot.
This is amazing. I think campaigns like these really expand our ways of thinking about WHAT IS POSSIBLE FOR THE STUDENTS TO DO? and opens up new space for discussing how we can tangibly tackle poverty. What I mean by the former is that socioeconomic statuses have shaped what is possible and not possible in us (echoing Bourdieu's idea of Habitus...) At Cal, a majority of students have grown up in privileged areas (In my fraternity, it is really not difficult to find people who have grown up in Westlake, Calabasas, Santa Monica, New Port Beach, Danville, Palo Alto and Cupertino). Studying hard and getting into good schools, this linkage between one's individual effort in academic achievement and one's obtainment of social and economic benefits - good jobs, high pay, cozy apartment in San Francisco and a new car, is patent and embedded in us. We may think this is the best way to succeed. We may think that this is the best way even for the poor to succeed. "Work Hard and it will pay off". But the article has demonstrated that there are more issues at stake - minimum wage may not be enough. Despite this, students can change the circumstance for the poor by changing the law.
       Currently, Asian Law Caucus, my PE organization is deeply involved in the employment issues in San Francisco. The city's minimum wage is $10.55 and it will increase again next year and so. The city also has various employment regulations. To name a few, 1. workers must be paid extra after working more than 40 hours 2. workers must get at least 30-minute lunch breaks and breaks every four hours of working (I think... the essence here is the guarantee of resting time and lunch time).
On these grounds, the East Bay, especially Alameda (largely Berkeley and Oakland) lack these measures. The minimum wage is still $8. Governor Brown signed the bill that will raise the California state minimum wage to $10 by 2016. This is not enough. Julia and I are doing our group projects on raising the minimum wage in Alameda to at least $11/hr because a family of 4 needs at least $22/hr wage to live adequately in Alameda (if both partners in the family work then $11*2 = $22, hence enough wage)

       But, what I envision in a change is the model that San Francisco city has in that the worker's rights program is not limited to one-time raise in the minimum wage. There are measures for the worker's resting time and measures for the continual raise of the minimum wage and many other measures. These measures show that the minimum wage is not the only issue for protecting workers' rights. They are more expansive. Putting together the case of San Jose State University's success in raising the minimum wage in San Jose and the significance of expansive protection for workers' rights, I  believe Cal students should also carry out these reforms here in Alameda county. A lot of students volunteer to teach, to feed the homeless, to protect one's rights by working in legal services organization or to work in a hospital. This is absolutely better than doing nothing. However, this is not the only way of alleviating the poor. Some students here tend to think that (according to my observation based on being at Cal for four years) the poor are usually lazy or lack skills for jobs and therefore need education. Some students blame the Republicans. A lot of students are annoyed or horrified by such large number of homeless people on the street. My worry here is that students here cannot think outside the box of piecemeal reform.
     However, GPP 115 class has taught me policy, not charity. Poverty will never wither away unless the society (here the city of Berkeley and even Oakland) takes steps to change the structure. I'm glad that I am working in the legal services organization because I get to protect the rights that any individuals deserve and are entitled to. Still, this is not the best or ultimate solution. Maybe the law is not fair. Maybe we should change the law. This article and GPP 115 class have taught me that we, Cal students, are capable of changing the structure. My question is who will..? Will you?

My Encounter with Poverty in Berkeley.

This time, I want to share a rather hard experience I witnessed regarding hunger, and my exposure to poverty. Going back to GPP 115 material about middle-class everyday interaction with the poor, ‘zones of interaction’, and the visibility of poverty, I was presented with a rather uncomfortable visible image of the struggle of poverty recently. Anaya Roy explained how poverty in the U.S, tends to detach us away from it, because we feel uncomfortable and distanced from it, unable to understand or acknowledge our own space and relation to the problem. I thought I had a had a rather critical perspective about that notion, that I could experience and perceive everyday poverty because I myself experience some sort of financial/social struggle, and have seen and worked in Mexico’s slum towns. But I had never witnesses such an uncomfortable image about the struggle of poverty until recently. I was walking down Bancroft with my cousin, near Urban Outfitters around 11:30pm, when we both saw a homeless person bend down, eating dog shit off the sidewalk. As we passed by him, he kept eating it, telling us to “stay in school, or shit you will eat.” It was a really hard sight for both of us. At that moment, I could not even judge or look down on him, how could I? I just felt great sorrow and guilt. Guilt that I, unlike him, had the option to go to a cozy home and fix myself a warm meal. I had the urge to go to a store and buy him food, but nothing was open at that time, so I just walked away. I still feel horrible, knowing I didn’t not so anything, and worst, about my own privilege. I still do not know where I stand in this encounter, but know I cannot judge what he was doing because I have never been forced to such a combination of human suffering. I just wonder what the man perceived that act as:  luck ‘having found food’ to feed his hunger, or suffering, degrading himself to eat animal excrement because of his economic situation, or perhaps something else to hard to understand