A New Sense of Community by Jessica

A New Sense of Community by Jessica - November 2019 Scholarship Essay

During high school,I heard the phrase “tight-knit community” and envisioned what I wanted the Black community at my school to be—a community where we loved and accepted each other, helped each other excel and achieve our goals, and solved disagreements peacefully. This wasn’t what I was introduced to when I began attending Dymally High. Instead, there was hostility and a lack of motivation among them. “The Black kids don’t even get along with each other,” is what one of my peers once told me. This mindset is what made my heart sink for the first 2 years of high school. The Hispanic/Latino community bonded very easily, but a big part of that was their Hispanic Student Unions. When I realized that, the idea to create a Black Student Union sparked.

After a year of my friends and I requesting a Black Student Union, a teacher finally decided to sponsor one. We met on Monday’s after school, and there were only six members. I convinced a couple of my friends to come to at least one meeting, promising that it would be worth it. The goal of that specific meeting was to share our feelings about how we wish the Black community could be, and we found that we shared a lot of the same opinions—a need for motivation being the theme. From there, my friends spread the word, and increased the interest of others.

I became a part of the creation of cultural and social events, providing mentor-ship for my colleagues that wanted to be successful academically but couldn’t find their way, and by thinking of future solutions to issues in the neighborhood (such as gang violence). Even during the days that the number of members in a meeting was low, a large amount of us had improved our communication skills with one another, so most of us could still connect easily. Being a founding member of this club had given me new hope for the upcoming Black underclassmen who were worried about feeling alone as our new sense of community would have left its mark.