Diante Hardy Essays - Community Building, Community, Free Essays

Diante Hardy Essays - Community Building, Community, Free Essays Diante Hardy Ms.Gormley/ Ms. Burdick Community Development Leadership Program (CDLP) 2 April 2015 Reflective Essay 3 What does it mean to understand the community? Does it mean what society thinks of their community? It could also mean the people of the community feel empowered enough to gain confidence to fight back, for what they believe in and their community of which they are a part of. I believe to understand the community; you need to build your community by enabling people to feel responsible for where they live. Chapter 5, "Understanding Community", there was a section in the chapter that helped me understand how to build the community. The reading discussed building community within your neighborhoods; if we build the community in multicultural settings, then smaller and larger cities will become diverse with different ethnic and language groups. Where I live, the Spanish culture is more common than different ethnic groups. In order to build communities within neighborhoods, you need to bring people together to discuss problems in their neighborhoods and how they can fix it. I believe that this will build towards a shared sense of community. I say this because it's good to have different ideas and perspectives from different types of people to help understand their community. Chapter 5, "Understanding Community", affects my life as well as others lives by giving some insight on how to understand the community as well as people coming together and discuss their ideas and opinions to build the community. The way we bring people together is by creating social bridges. Social bridges are to enable people to reach out for resources and information that are not available to them in their environment. A neighborhood may not have the same resources as another neighborhood may have so once neighborhoods begin to help each other out, then you can build up your community together. A community is a place, a neighborhood where people live and interact with one another. When problems begin to surface, it's because thes e people in the communities do not communicate with each other. In my community a lot of crime happens, but that is because my community doesn't create things to prevent crime from happening. Also there are hardly any programs to p revent young children from joining gangs, and that is also the parents fault as well. Once the people in the community start to understand each other as a whole, then we can build the community. I've learned a major point to help me understand the community. I've learned that in order to understand the community, the people within the communities need to be more interactive with each other to then be able to have a say for what needs to be done inside the community. "Community is the set of obligations and responsibilities that people assume when they are willing to help one another (Rubin Rubin p.9 7) ." When people work together, they achieve their goal. Understanding the community is about being strategic and getting people from neighborhoods to work together. Chapter 5, "Understanding Community" gave me some insight on how to build and understand the community. The point that resonated with me can enable the society to come together as one to understand their community and make it a better place.