Volunteer work at Friday Feast Community Meal

Summary
I will help prepare and serve food to 150-200 people and interact with the meal recipients. Friday Feast expects me to cultivate a better understanding of homelessness in the Seattle area and realize that I am helping to make change for the better. It is also intended for me to allay stereotypes about the homeless population.

Explain how your project fits the provided Honors Program definition of the Experiential Learning area you selected:
This project will help me discover more about how the world works in regard to privilege and power structures in America. I hope to cultivate a deeper awareness of the different types of people and lifestyles that exist around me. This awareness will prevent me from becoming blind to the problems of the world and assuming that everyone in the University District is a well-groomed college student. Since this service learning will be conducted in conjunction with Anthropology 101, I expect to use tools of anthropology to learn about homeless youth culture with an accepting, yet critical eye. In turn, the skills I gain from my service work should provide a new perspective through which I can assess the concepts of subculture that are taught in lecture.

How and why did you select this engagement?

I chose this form of service learning because I feel a connection to my peers and an obligation to help those who may need it. Helping my peers obtain access to fulfill their basic needs such as adequate shelter and nutrition are of top priority to me. Beyond the basic labor skills that I will acquire by preparing and serving food, I will learn how to interact with individuals of different backgrounds and learn about subcultures of America. I hope to find out more about the different situations that lead to homelessness, especially the causes of homelessness by choice.

How does this project connect to your concurrent or past coursework? How does it speak to your broader education goals and experiences?
I hope to learn more about the subculture of homelessness in America, especially in terms of the homeless individuals' self-perceptions as well as their views of American cultural systems. I would also like to find out about how our society can better serve disenfranchised populations. This knowledge should be useful for application in my intended career of global health. In many nations, dysfunctional health systems cannot provide adequate coverage for its citizens. Even worse, homeless populations are rarely the priority in terms of health care reforms. What I learn from this

project might help me advocate for the health of the homeless throughout the world in years to come.

How will your project contribute to the larger goals of the organization or those of your partners?
I will help Friday Feast to maintain its ability to function. Although the shelter receives grants, it still depends upon volunteers to make their efforts run smoothly and efficiently. By being present to serve homeless young adults, I will help provide them with them not only with a nutritious meal, but inform these individuals about how Friday Feast can provide help in other ways. On top of this, I hope that these meals increase the publicity of this organization so that more people in the area become more familiar and proactive about issues such as homelessness.

Final Reflection
My main goal with volunteering at Friday Feast was to understand more about the subculture of homeless individuals. Although it feels trite to say, I not only learned more about that topic, but was also presented with a few novel perspectives of self. My findings in regard to serving "street people" combined with my post-service musings taught me that as informed and open-minded as I considered myself to be, I harbored unsupported ideas about the people to whom I served. Working during Friday Feast forced me to come to terms with assumptions that I made about people who come to get free meals. Although embarrassing, I believe that admitting to my ill-informed assumptions might just prevent me from forming similarly infelicitous notions in the future. I've realized that I expected the people that come to eat to be homeless, which does not appear to be universally true. I presumed the diners people to be skinny due to a lack of resources to allocate towards food, but this definitely not true. As I continue to work at this weekly event, I have no doubt that I will come across many more false assumptions of which I was currently unaware. The power system of America has put many of the diners at a disadvantage. Unfortunately, they do not have control of many resources, and selling of their labor appears to not be sufficient to support themselves. What learned about this subject in Anthropology 101 has made me very curious about the self-perception of the diners. In the weeks that I have volunteered, though, I have not had much of a chance to hear what their take on their position in Marx's theory of market economy. I hope that after a few more weeks, I will have established enough of a connection with some of the diners so that I might ask them more about this. Nevertheless, I have made some inroads in connecting with others at the shelter. I find dinner is an excellent milieu for relating with people in general, and this situation is no exception. The servers are encouraged to eat the food that we make and serve, which shows that we have faith in the quality of the food that we serve and demonstrates our unity with those to whom we serve. A wide variety of people pass through the doors every Friday. Some are grateful, some appear

ashamed, some have only a slight grasp of reality. I have worked on my ability to please all who come through the food line, a skill that I already find myself utilizing in other settings. The hungry, cranky ones are balanced out by the affable, and the manic are tempered by subdued that stand next to them in line. It is necessary to quickly switch to cater to each temperament. Some of the other volunteers grumble about the attitudes of the diners, but it is all a matter of perspective. Everyone gets a turn, everyone eats as much as they desire. Just because we are behind the service counter does not give us the right to pass judgment. I appreciate this weekly reminder. I truly enjoy the time I spend at Friday Feast, and plan on volunteering there throughout my time in Seattle. I have the privilege of interacting with people whom I would normally have the chance, and I have attained a sense of community with both the volunteers and the diners. Contributing to those around me is now my preferred Friday activity, and I hope others are impacted positively because of this.