By Morgan Chambers
This week we shared our community needs assessment reports. The class was divided up into five primary research groups: health, hunger, environment, homelessness, and youth. Each of these groups wrote a paper on their issue and prepared a presentation to give to the class. They provided information about the issue on an international scale, and a local, Missoula scale. We learned about who is tackling these issues in the community, and how. Perhaps the most important information each group shared was about what gaps exist when it comes to how the community of Missoula is tackling the issue. We as a class are hoping to fill some of those gaps with our grant.
I was impressed with the quality of research my peers did. Various groups did interviews with local nonprofits or watched TED Talks from local experts. They also delved into databases to get relevant statistics that helped us understand the magnitude of each issue. I have been a resident of Missoula all my life, yet I was completely unaware of some of the issues facing my local community. For example, there are 406 homeless youth in Missoula and 177 of them are high schoolers like I was last year. I had no idea that number would be so high.
On Friday after the final presentation, we began our initial funding priorities discussion. This discussion awed me. My peers awed me. It was so easy to get this group of students excited about making a difference. Everyone had issues they wanted to focus on, but they were also eager to hear from each other. The discourse was very civil. The other thing that impressed me was the connectivity of all the issues we were discussing. I now see how difficult it will be to narrow down our funding priorities. The environment affects hunger, which relates to homelessness, which relates to mental health, which affects youth, and so on. We have some difficult work ahead of us.
We got as far as cutting homelessness out of the discussion, and specifying that we’d like to focus on some mental health component. We discussed focusing on youth mental health but then also considered incorporating an intergenerational component in our funding priorities. The class is hoping to hear a little bit more about the environment in our next discussion, since we focused so much on mental health, youth, and hunger this week.
We are all eager to get our hands dirty and nail down our funding priorities as we discuss the details about what difference we’d like to make in the community. We have a lot of untangling to do, and I’m excited to help do it.
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