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DukeEngage

Seattle 2016

DukeEngage empowers students to address critical human needs through immersive service, in the process transforming students, advancing the University’s educational mission, and providing meaningful assistance to communities in the U.S. and abroad.

Why Seattle

Poverty Simulation

8/23/2016

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Eight weeks in Seattle just ended so quickly that I can still imagine sitting in my small office at Solid Ground. During this period of time, I was deeply influenced by my working environment, group reflections as well as community involvement activities. They provided me with completely new insight into social issues such as poverty, hunger and homelessness.
 
One activity that really impressed me was the poverty simulation held in Seattle University. All the participants were assigned to different roles in a variety of “families”. My role was a 36-year-old mother. Before the simulation, I had never thought about family budgeting, not to mention budgeting while in poverty. I rarely thought from my mother’s perspective about how to organize the things needed for a family to continue. The poverty simulation designed a four-week experience where each family’s goal was to survive in each of the four fifteen-minute sessions. It was not hard to imagine that parents with jobs had to work, children had to go to school, and grandparents had to be taken care of.
 
As a mother with no job in the simulation, I almost had to do all the things (other than bringing in income) in order to make our family survive. Those things included buying transportation passes for my whole family, buying food at the beginning of each month, making mortgage payments and other necessary payments. There were just so many tedious things that I needed to do repeatedly each week that I felt under high pressure. If I forgot to do one of those important things, my family could possibly fall apart. Therefore, I was highly responsible for organizing all the tasks in a way that I could finish them one by one, on time. The most difficult part was to coordinate between weekly income and monthly expenses. In the third “week”, we ran out of funds due to making all the payments except for mortgage payment. Due to this delay, we were almost kicked out of our “house”. I could almost feel the anxiety of being homeless at that point. After we finally succeeded in survival at the end of the last week, I was so relieved. However, I was also aware that the what I have gone through in the simulation was nowhere near what’s really like to be actually experiencing homelessness or housing instability.
 
The very first thing I learned was the difficulty and responsibility of being a mother. This reminded me of my mother, who has flexible working schedules. Since my father has to work from nine to five on workdays, almost all the banking, food, and clothing things are done by my mother. I was surprised to realize that my mother did all the things in a well-organized way under the condition that she had a job. Secondly, in the simulation, everything became much harder with a limited budget. It was so cruel that I felt desperate when we had no money to pay for mortgage or buy food. Overall, the poverty simulation brought me new insights into family roles, budgeting and dealing with limited household income.  
 
By: Coco Sheng
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Language Behind Oppression         

8/19/2016

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The worst thing you can tell someone is that they can’t.  That they can’t get a job; that they can’t go to college; that they can’t support their family; that they can’t raise themselves out of poverty.  Unfortunately, we live in a world where certain people are told that they can’t from the day of their birth based on factors that they cannot control.   At my time at Year Up, I have witnessed firsthand the power of empowering people who have been previously oppressed.  Year Up takes an individual approach of giving their students a high amount of support but also demanding a high amount of accountability.  A common theme at Year Up is that the students are told it’s up to them to take the opportunities that Year Up provides; that their success or failure is on them or only them.

I think this rhetoric is incredibly powerful.  Systemic inequality ensures that many don’t have equal opportunities or opportunities at all.  Just because someone doesn’t have the same opportunities, doesn’t mean that they don’t have the same talent.  I think that too often we enjoy looking at everything that is wrong in our society without actually doing anything to help the individuals who are actually oppressed.   The students at Year Up don’t want endless intellectualization about their circumstances or excuses to be made for them because of where and to whom they were born.  What they want, almost unanimously upon speaking to them, is to be given a fair shot—they want an opportunity. Year Up provides students with a six-month intensive skill-training program in a high support, high expectation environment.  Students are then placed in an internship with a Fortune 500 company. This effectively gives students opportunities that they were previously denied.
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So, in conclusion, I think that it is important that when we converse about the systemic oppression that certain groups face, we make sure that we are also doing something that will tangibly help them—tangibly give them an opportunity.  Because the reality is, most people don’t want a handout, they want a hand up.
 
By: Sam Furlong
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Exploring the dichotomies of Seattle 

8/11/2016

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​  Seven weeks in Seattle have provided me with the opportunities to explore various locations in and around the city. Throughout the last few weeks, I have had the chance to travel to the beautiful Mt Rainier, a unique Bavarian style town known as Leavenworth and the hipster city of Portland. Throughout my journeys, however, two places resonated with me and both of these places are related to Bill Gates. During one Friday, a local friend and her father, who works at Microsoft, were kind enough to give me a tour in and around the stunning Microsoft campus. Microsoft, similar to a college campus in many ways, consists of modern buildings scattered in a massive area. In total, the whole campus is able to house 30 to 40 thousand employees, with over 50 cafes and large sporting facilities. The campus can easily function as its own community and with such a large number of employees, the Microsoft campus almost seemed like a medium sized township. 
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​  In the subsequent week, I had the fortune of visiting another facility deeply related to Bill Gates: the Gates foundation. As I walked into the visitor center, I was awed by the technology in place and the amount of money that Gates has put into his foundation. The visitor center showcased the various technologies that the Gates Foundation has produced to solve rampant global issues such as hunger, poverty and tuberculosis. The Foundation was a cutting edge and brilliantly engineered facility containing cafes, green plants on roof tops and contemporary art deco. 
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  Both Microsoft and the Gates Foundation illustrated the importance of Seattle in America, and perhaps the world. With important facilities and companies based in the city, Seattle has become one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas around the globe, attracting tens of thousands of immigrants and workers per year. To put things into perspective, Seattle’s population has grown by more than 50,000 within this decade.  Over the past few weeks, I have been interviewing housing experts as part of my work at Futurewise, to gain fresh perspectives into the problem of housing affordability within the region. A major factor that has caused the housing prices of Seattle to inflate rapidly is the sheer amount of tech employees moving to the city as Seattle has slowly become a more viable alternative to Silicon Valley for fresh tech start-ups. Not only has the large population influx caused a rise in housing prices as demand heats up, but also displacement of local lower-income families, contributing to a rise in homelessness within the city.

  As I explore the contrasting scenes of technological innovation and homelessness in Seattle, I realized the importance of my work at Futurewise and the importance of organizations such as Futurewise. Despite the city’s commercial expansion, it is important for more non-profits such as Futurewise to be created in order to benefit the burgeoning local community. The last seven weeks in Seattle have been extremely meaningful as I was able to gain a greater understanding in working for NGOs and how they are operated. Furthermore, I was able to hear fresh perspectives in regards to the complexity of affordable housing and homelessness. Under the back drop of Puget Sound and the Cascade mountains, Seattle is a vibrant city and I have cherished every moment I spent here. With policies such as the Seattle Housing levy, the city’s capacity for innovation and a large variety of non-profits, I am hopeful that the serious issues of unaffordable housing and homelessness will be ameliorated in the future. As I leave Seattle, I only have one thought: see you again.

By: David Zheng
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Unwavering Strength and Persistence 

8/9/2016

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For past 7 weeks at OA (OneAmerica), every day I have been more and more impressed by the breadth of meaningful work that this organization does and their unfailing commitment to the communities they serve. I have been particularly moved by their persistent optimism and refusal to let disappointments slow down their work, especially when they seem to be fighting an uphill battle that only grows steeper by the day.

When the US Supreme Court failed to rule in favor of the DAPA/DACA expansion a few weeks ago (a program to protect parents of US citizens and undocumented children who were brought to the US at a young age), personally impacting several OA employees, the Organizing Team made some posters and put together a last-minute press conference on the steps of the city courthouse. Rather than wallow in defeat, they took immediate action, called various allies together, and united to publicly show their community members that they refuse to be silenced.

As Donald Trump spent this summer continuing to exclaim anti-immigrant rhetoric, hateful and racist insults, and push for devastating policies, a group of OA employees calmly got together to develop a slogan and campaign plan for the November elections. The focus immediately centered on positivity, unity, love, and creating a “Washington for all.” There was no question that their campaign would embody these principles; it would have to convey the importance of voting (especially in local and state elections), but it would also emphasize that voting is a right that comes with citizenship, and a dream that many people have made incredible sacrifices to achieve.

OA has been generous enough to include me in these events and introduce me to a wide range of key players in the non-profit, government, and cultural landscape of the Pacific Northwest. I marched alongside OA in the Seattle pride parade, attended a roundtable discussion on immigration policy with a Washington Congresswoman, and toured a new low-income housing and childcare facility. I traveled to Olympia to meet with different government agencies, attended several public hearings on a Seattle transit initiative and statewide climate change rule, and interviewed a former immigration enforcement officer. I traveled to Camp Murray to meet with employees of the State Military Department. I attended the press conference mentioned before, where the Mayor of Seattle spoke about his city’s commitment to welcoming immigrants and refugees. Finally, I met with many other nonprofit organizations and individuals who helped shape my policy recommendations, among other incredibly unique and valuable opportunities.
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As a sort of culmination of these experiences, I have produced a white paper on how we can improve emergency preparedness and disaster relief policies at all levels of government to better serve immigrant and refugee communities. I am proud of how my report has turned out, but above all I am incredibly grateful for the opportunities I have been given and experiences that I have had this summer. My perspective on immigration policy, environmental justice, and inequities in America has been greatly altered, and I am now working to figure out how I can carry this new perspective back to Durham with me in a few weeks and continue to be an advocate for positive change. Perhaps most importantly, I am going to take the optimism of OA back with me. When I read news headlines that seem heartbreaking and hopeless, I will remember their unwavering strength and persistence in the fight to pursue their motto, creating “one America, with justice for all.”

By: Emily Nagler 
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    Experience DukeEngage Seattle through the lens of our 2015 student participants. Stay tuned.

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