William Flenner Capstone (The Invisibles (Film))

In the few years before I started my capstone project social justice problems and the wellbeing of people were prevalent on my mind. This is because I had been spending my life living in cities — Denver, Orlando, Beijing, and then Philadelphia — for about ten years straight, which made me aware of and witness a variety of human rights issues. This included poverty, lack of access to a good education, lack of access to affordable food, lack of access to affordable healthcare, racial inequality, gender inequality, and inequality based on disorders. When it was time to work on my capstone I had already participated in organized feeding the homeless events and I had created several projects related to human rights for my high school History and English classes. So I was very passionate about the subject and I had already gathered enough knowledge in the subject to prepare me for a related project. Living in Philadelphia in particular made me very conscious of a variety of people groups that were underappreciated or underrepresented in society, so I based my project on inquiring how to address these people and the existing community service projects that are helping them so everyday people can join them to make a difference for the greater good of society. As part of doing the work for the project I did research on the work of different community service projects and I collaborated with one organization by delivering meals to a senior center to elderly people stuck at home due to the pandemic.

For my senior capstone I created a documentary film highlighting community service projects and what they are doing to help different communities. This film was made with the intent of raising awareness of groups of underrepresented people and groups of essentail humans, to entice the viewers to finally get up and join the community service organizations to finally become proactive in serving their communities.

Link to my film on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDOyuYPRtTU

After finishing the project and having time to reflect, I realized, that I learned that the reason why the lower class people typically in the outskirts of cities. It turns out that the article says in the United States early years (as a country) the lower classes lived in the city outskirts but when the industrial age brought factories close to the centers of cities the upper classes started moving out to the outskirts. The new jobs in factories and urban sprawl started to draw the lower classes towards the center of the city. This helped me realize that now the majority of the lower class people are currently not in the city outskirts, like I originally thought, and are very close to the center of cities but have completely made it to the center. In addition I found out about a lot of community service organizations in Philadelphia that were new to me and I learned a lot more about the ones I already knew about.

Right now, I am not completely sure what the future holds for my film, but I do know that I will continue to share it with the people I know and the world through putting on YouTube so I can always be encouraging people to start serving there communities, uplifting disadvanteged people, and be an essentail human well after the Coronavirus pandemic.