Hometown by Kieran

Hometown by Kieran - May 2019 Scholarship Essay

I live in Jacksonville Oregon. It is a small historic town with all kinds of stories from the Western Gold Rush. Located in Southern Oregon, it has a lot of opportunities for hiking camping and other outdoor activities not too far away. One of the greatest parts is with a small town, there's for the most part only small problems. However, only a couple miles away is the town Medford. Medford has a lot more problems than Jacksonville, one of them being the number of homeless.
The winters are cold in Medford, the temperature hits single digits at least once a year. With such a high population of homeless the current shelters cannot keep up. With a $10,000 grant I would start off the donations to purchase a large building, similar to a warehouse. With this, a lot of the homeless community could get the shelter they need during the cold months. Too often the homeless are forgotten, or even worse ignored. In my personal opinion, it is wrong for us to not care about someone who may have had some bad luck or made some bad choices. With $10,000 a lot could get done to at least spread the word and get the ball rolling. It doesn't take much for the community to help one another, and sometimes it just takes a little bit of a nudge.