AEMP Blog 7/8/16 - Elody Dang
I’m Elody Dang, a senior at Balboa High School. I joined BAVC out of my interest in music production and have been in the BUMP track ever since. This summer, the Next Gen students are joining together to work on a social action project about gentrification.
Before I joined this project, I didn’t know what gentrification meant. I joined to keep in touch with the friends I had made throughout the year and to hang out with my BUMP instructor, Adam. However, upon started this project, I began to gain an understanding of what gentrification is and just how big the problem actually is. I feel that this is an important issue that we should raise awareness of because I witness eviction in the San Francisco community often. Especially in the Mission District. This is affects me because as someone who lives close to the area, I visit the Mission often for work or to visit my friends. Seeing people getting removed from their homes frightens me because I have friends who live in the area and I don’t know how I would feel if they had to move away or ended up without a home. To me, knowing this makes it all the more important to do this project so that I can help my friends and people in the community in so way, shape, or form.
For this project, I’m recording and editing audio interviews of my peers. We will be recording our opinions on the topic as well as stories about eviction that we have witnessed. This will help show that gentrification affects all people. Even youth. We are also hoping that it will help raise awareness about the issue in the Bay Area community. We are currently three weeks into the project.
Recently, we have explored the in depth definition of a community and what an ideal community contains. We did this by creating clay models of what an ideal community looks like to us. We then took those ideas of what a good community looks like to us and started inserting them into our community here, at BAVC. For example, we now start everyday at BAVC with a community meal. Community meal is a time for everyone in class to get together to share a meal and have conversation as a whole, versus just going off into little groups and having small side conversations. This allows us to get connected with everyone in class and build teamwork and strength as a whole. I believe this exercise is important because in order to bring change into the Bay Area community, we must first change our own community here at BAVC.
Next Gen’s Summer Social Action Project Blog Entry!!!
