YATW Blog Post 1: Do you Care?

What Are We Doing To Help The Forgotten of Philadelphia?

Hi my name is Kai Burton and I attend Science Leadership Academy. As a ninth grader in SLA and a student in Ms. Dunn’s english class I was asked to write three blog posts about a topic that I care about. I’m choosing to write about the overlooked citizens in Philadelphia who needed help and turned to the leaders of our state.

   (Mayor Nutter “caring” for his citizens)

But instead of feeling secure, relieved, and helped they feel helpless and unimportant and overlooked. I want to  hear the stories if these citizens and help them feel like somebody still cares. I’m choosing to help out through the Germantown Avenue Crisis Ministry, a ministry devoted to helping people who need it most.

The Germantown Avenue Crisis Ministry is a private non-profit organization committed to helping families and individuals in the north west who find themselves in                crisis. The Crisis Ministry helps people by supplying them with food, clothing, food, and other emergency assistance based on that individual’s emergency.

(The Crisis Ministry is run out of this church)

The clients of the Crisis Ministry have turned to people like Eileen Jones, the director of The Ministry, to seek assistance. Although programs such as the Crisis Ministry are great and can really be asset to the community it’s not the job of the kind hearted citizens to protect and assist these people. Our city has failed by overlooking the people who they feel aren’t immediately important to the city. What others fail to realize is that some of these people aren’t always educated and don’t know how to be important to the rest of us. So instead sectioning them off into places like the projects we should be helping them and encouraging them so they can be a real asset to the community.

Education is key if we want this part of the community to join the community. I’m not saying that we should drag everybody to school  because that’s just unrealistic. I’m saying that we should educate them on how to help themselves. Although the Crisis Ministry helps people settle down there is so much more to it after that. We should be teaching people how to: paint walls, tighten pipes, how to deal with your toilet overflowing. Skills that people can actually put to use. The greater germantown area is falling behind. Germantown is place with so much potential, but we just have to care a little.

Our leaders don’t care enough about us. Men like Tom Corbett haven’t walked in their shoes, and neither have we. But we see it everyday as citizens of Philadelphia. We need to care or our city will suffer. I want everybody to listen and hear the voice of overlooked and forgotten and remember that they need to be heard, and they need our help. Obviously listening to them isn’t the government’s priority, so it needs to be ours. Together we can help to take back our city.

Please visit My Annotated Bibliography to view more photos and learn more about the ministry as well as Philadelphia.