A Call to Action by Camille Okonkwo

A Call to Action by Camille Okonkwo - January 2017 Scholarship Essay

In this transitional period our country is entering in, media outlets have filled households with messages of hate and sparked fear in many communities. The constant negativity being streamlined into our minds has left our youth feeling defeated. It makes them question if their voices matter in a world that attempts to shut down youth who try to make a difference. This election season, I decided enough is enough. I was tired of feeling belittled by a system that benefitted everything I was not, and most importantly I was tired of seeing my community hurting from the negligence of its inhabitants.
Last July, there was shooting in Dallas over the growing racial tension our country was facing. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for President, saw the shooting as a “call to action for the nation” to start healing communities broken over the lack of empathy for one another. Clinton had a great team of organizers in Richmond who worked together to build my community up through servitude. Inspired by Clinton’s words, I decided to intern for the Democratic Party over the summer to ignite change in my community. For four months I tirelessly knocked on hundreds of doors, made thousands of phone calls, and scheduled hundreds of shifts for more volunteers to come in to help make a positive difference in their communities themselves. Out of the hundreds of shifts I scheduled, twenty of them were of my friends, who invited their friends and started a chain reaction of high school students volunteering in their community. Despite many of them being too young to vote, these high school students spent countless hours canvassing and talking to their local politicians in hope of a positive change in their town. In addition to the hard work, I developed so many positive relationships with my fellow neighbors. We bonded over the common goal of improving our cities, which inspired others to carry out their own acts of kindness like donating food to the volunteers in our office. Those small acts of kindness indicated to me that my community was changing for the better.
Though Clinton wasn’t elected, a fire was ignited inside of me and that I wasn’t ready to extinguish. Just like President Obama said in his Farewell Address, “change only happens when ordinary people get involved, and they get engaged, and they come together to demand it”. Through my experience at the Democratic Party I realized this: the only way a community can reflect and sustain understanding, respect, cooperation, and love is rising to action. To understand and love someone in a community means to listen to their struggles and have them listen to yours. Though each story is different, it makes up the patchwork a community, and each community’s patchwork makes the quilt of a nation. The difference in each patch is what makes our country great, and what makes it even better is the strong stitching of different communities loving, respecting and acting together to lift each other up.