Helping Minors Stay Home

Hello again. In my first post I discussed how my topic changed from the dc girls crisis into minors running away.  In my second post I discussed my original research. I conducted my original research by putting out a survey about what people knew about running away. In this post I will be sharing my third part of my project and my agent of change.   

Continuing my research about minors running away I found some organizations that try to help. Basically what they do is, they run a 24 hour service where teenages can reach them via text , call or email to express their thoughts. This is a good way  to help the problem because it's not a lot of other options someone could do to prevent minors from running away and putting themselves in danger. Youthline is a great organization for not only minors that are running away but other things issues too. Adults and teenagers will answer on the Youthline. I think that is great because sometimes teenagers want to talk to other teenagers because they don't fully trust adults.

For my agent of change I decided to make posters with the numbers to contact runaways hotlines. Before I came up with that idea I didn't know how I was going to reach teens without overwhelming them with facts. By talking to my peers I came up with the idea to make posters. The first obstacle of making posters was that they could not be boring they would have to draw somebodys attention. Secondly I had to decide what information I was going to put on the posters to help. Lastly where I was going to put them up. On the posters I put two numbers on the posters, National Runaway Safeline and Youthline. I was effective in making a change because by me posting the posters teenagers that might be considering running away will see them and call the number.

When my teacher introduced this project I was excited because I got to choose something that was important to me. Also I really liked the fact that we would be doing the project on or own without having to meet a lot of deadlines. I've not only learned a lot about my topic but myself over the course of this project. Something I've learned about myself is that I enjoy helping others. My whole project was to prevent people from putting themselves in danger. Discovering this about myself could be the first step to figuring out what job I want to be when I get older. Doing this project I've listened to my peers and what was important to them. Seeing the topics my peers chose showed me that everyone was different and has been through different experiences. Overall I feel as though it brought my whole english class together. And  was a great miniature version of the 12th grade capstone that I will have to do in the future.

For more information check out my annotated bibliography