Owen Sayre
Capstone Project
Owen completed his capstone project by partnering with Johnson A. Johnson Elementary School & Opportunity Neighborhood Ames Lake.All quotes used below are from Owen's final Capstone presentation.
About the Location
"I was working at Ames Lake summer camp within the Ames Lake Opportunity Neighborhood, which is a low-income community-run organization, trying to make sure that people who are at risk of being unhoused are getting housing.”
"The community itself has poor white and black Americans, Somali immigrants, a lot of Latinx immigrants. I was working mostly with Mexican American first-generation students who were bilingual and primarily spoke Spanish. I thought one of the biggest divisions that I overcame was definitely a language barrier between me and the people I was working with."
About Community
“An important thing to keep in mind when we talk about larger successes and putting police resources into communities in helpful and sustainable ways is that some people are still being left out in certain ways that maybe aren't effectively communicated to action forward for groups like us. "
Mosaic at the Community Center that Owen did the majority of his teaching from
Project: National Night Out
Check out the page for National Night Out here.
Each participating community plans its own chapter of National Night Out, which occurs on the first Tuesday of every August.
"To see the police diverting their energy towards this event was really encouraging."
Takeaways
"As Move for America fellows, we're coming from a very intentional background with our mission statement. It's an important question to consider, how we are supposed to best reflect what successful dialogue and mutual understanding are when we are being intentional about our actions, but the people that we are bridging divides with are just living their lives within their communities? How do we best communicate with them?"
