The Walk That Made The Change

Hey it’s Kai Payton again. In my previous two post I introduced my You & The World Project. For my topic of the project I chose to focus on premature births. In my first blog post I gave basic information on premature births. I also discussed some of the more serious topics of premature births. In my second blog post I discussed stories of other families that had premature births. I also included the major parts of the interview that I had with my aunt where she talked about how she got through the experience.

In this blog I’m going to be talking about the Agent of Change portion of the project. The Agent of Change portion of the project is where you go out and do something to make a change to your topic. So since my topic is premature births I did the March for Babies walk. The walk was on April 30th and it was ran by the March of Dimes Foundation. For the walk there are teams that raise money for the foundation to help with premature births. My aunt’s team raised a little over a thousand dollars to go to the foundation. I love doing these walks every year because it’s a good way to see family but because it’s for a good cause.

At the walk there was so many people from different walk teams and I thought it was so cool that so many people support premature births. Each team gets a custom shirt to represent their team. This year my team's shirt said “Fight Like a Preemie.” In my opinion that’s another reason to go to the walks every year because every always has cool different shirts. My team is called “Chasing Jase,” and it’s made up of family and friends basically whoever comes out to support Jase. From this walk it got family members to come together to support Jase. During the walk they gave Jase a purple cape and it was really funny to see him run around in it.

- Picture of Jase with his cape

-Picture of the shirt

- A picture of the walking team

While doing the walk you meet a lot of other families that share a similar story to yours. The experience creates a way to be active and meet new people who all support each other. There was a lady we met and she had a daughter that was the same weight as Jase when she was born (1 pound 11 ounces). My aunt and her had a heart to heart in a way because their children were in the hospital for about the same amount of time. I wish I had a way to thank the March of Dimes Foundation personally because the walk is always a great experience when we do it.

Before we started this project I didn’t know what direction I wanted to go with it. In the beginning I was thinking about choosing littering as my topic. Then as time went on I realized that I could choose premature births a topic that people know about but don’t know the major facts or how they can help change it and I had a better connection with it. This project helped me gain a new understanding of premature births because before I did this I didn’t know too much myself.

So in conclusion, I want to thank Ms. Giknis for allowing us to do this cool project. It helped us go out in the world and make a change big or little to a problem we connected with. It helped us learn more about each other and connect with our classmates on a deeper level.

You can check out my Annotated Bibliography here