Participating in Serve! have been both challenging and learning experience for me. I felt I have learned tremendously. So far I have been involved in two different workshops, one on assertiveness and the other on anger management. Also, I have been doing something productive everyday just by completing assignment tasks and did research homework on projects i.e. White Ribbon Campaign “Violence Against Women” and “Don’t Just Sit There”. Now, I’m looking forwards to camp in January!

It’s our 5th week at serve! We are involved in 4 projects so far. The ”Don´t just sit there” project is about educating the general public about homophobia- we are making a zine, and probably some sort of presentation at the end of the project. We are also involved in the white ribbon campaign (men against violence against women)- we are not totally sure what we are going to do, but we are thinking in doing an “entertainment showcase”. We are doing recreation/activities at a senior citizen´s home- yesterday we had a christmas party for them! And, finally, we are helping in an afterschool program at a school. Yeah, it´s a lot of work- plus, we all have our own personal development projects- but it´s really worth it!

You might have noticed that we haven’t had a lot-- well, any!-- blog entries for a while. That’s because the blog was primarily designed for our full time youth team members and we’ve had a longer-than-expected gap between teams.

That’s about to change. Next week, the new Experience This! team begins and in a couple of weeks, youth participants--and others-- will begin to post to the Serve! blog on a regular basis.

As we’ve reported elsewhere on the site, the team will be involved in a new initiative, Don’t Just Sit There, Stand Up Together which will include initiatives by youth, for youth, designed to prevent discrimination and hate-motivated violence/crime targeted to the LGBTTTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, two-spirited, queer & questioning) communities. It promises to be an exciting six months. Stay tuned for more news!

The community would be stronger if people would speak out and be heard, just like Martin Luther King did. I feel that world wide issues like prejudice, discrimination and hate crimes still exist and will never disappear, until Jesus comes back for this world to judge us. No one can judge anyone, God didn’t make anybody on earth ‘perfet’ but himself. My conclusion is for people of colour to stand up for yourself and stop the stigma and stereotypes about racism because it isn’t right. I am not trying to point fingers at anyone but the racism issue exists every day and I can see it, even if it’s not noticeable. Why be a hypocrite about it? This community can make a difference but we need to stand up and say that it is not right.

It’s not so hard. We can make it, if we try.

Something great that happened today was doing an ‘outreach’, sending out posters to agencies from the White Ribbon Campaign, although the partner agency couldn’t be there with us to help support us because of a change. At least Team A and Team B were split up into groups and we were there to support each other.

Support can be in different forms and it can be without presence too. I felt that I helped make a difference in the community centres that my group sent out posters to. I feel that once these posters are up and ready for a ‘show and tell’ then it will definitely create ‘awareness’ to society and youth especially who want to learn and change.