Pitch for Implementing Community Outreach a Community

¶ … Pitch for Implementing Community Outreach

A community outreach initiative should be implemented in which area high school kids who have struggled with their behavior will go to local nursing home, cooking for and eating with residents on a weekly basis.

This community outreach initiative will be an effective one because it will be mutually beneficial to both the elderly folks and the students, thereby engendering a sense of solidarity within the community. This project will be productive since the kids will gain a sense of compassion for the elderly; at the same time, sharing a meal and conversing with the kids will help maintain the lucidity of the elderly. Nevertheless, there are a number of potential challenges that face such a project.

First, it will undoubtedly be difficult to convince these area youths to help the elderly; the vast majority of those selected for the project will have a poor disciplinary record within their high school and as such, have been difficult to discipline in the past. To this end, the efficacy of this project rests on the belief that removing them from the context of the school will improve their behavior. Many students simply are not amenable to the classroom setting, and placing these students in the nursing home may distance them from their everyday environment and promote more virtuous conduct from them. The most difficult step in the project will most likely be simply convincing them to participate since I feel that once they have started, they will find it sufficiently rewarding to the point that they will be fully committed. To solve this issue, I propose that the students be awarded some form of academic credit (awarded on the basis of whether or not they actively participate, as determined by an adult supervisor) as this will hopefully entice them to participate.

My research strategy will involve a great deal of interviewing, online research, and studying similar community outreach projects from the past, be they successful or unsuccessful. I will interview the teachers (particularly the advisors) of the students who would participate in the project, as this will provide me with advance knowledge of their personalities and hopefully I will be able to pair them with elderly folks who are (to some degree) compatible with them. I will study library databases such as JStor and online scholarly articles from Google Scholar since surrounding myself with topical information will assist me in implementing this project in the most effective manner possible. In order to avoid biased research or logical fallacies, I must acknowledge any objections or counterarguments that might exist concerning my project. For example, one might argue that the students and elderly are inherently incompatible, and I will draw from research in past studies to explain how my project will succeed.

The "pitch"