Social Justice

¶ … Community Analysis Describe The community that I am a member of is downtown Los Angeles. This is an incredibly diverse and vibrant community; it is one of the most diverse communities that I have ever been a part of. The community consists of young urban professionals who are unmarried or are co-habitating in large loft spaces. The spaces where most people live in downtown Los Angeles make this in part such a remarkable community: people have wonderful industrial spaces which are converted to living spaces.

This means that people have the pleasure of creating unique homes in massive open spaces. The fact that so many of the apartment buildings in downtown Los Angeles are loft spaces means that the community attracts a great deal of artistic types such as painters, designers, architects, actors and musicians. Another aspect of the community is its close proximity to skid row. The fact that it is located adjacent to where one of the poorest populations in the nation resides, makes it a very unique community.

This is because of the fact that the wealthy, young urban professionals have to constantly encounter some of the most forgotten members of society. These are drug addicts and the homeless and they populate the streets of downtown Los Angeles very heavily, asking for change and other handouts. Their strong presence has a marked effect on the people who live in this area of the city: they still give an atmosphere of "unsafeness" to the city at large and they create more of a renegade atmosphere in the downtown sector.

Furthermore, people who aren't prepared to deal with the sense of danger or lawlessness that the skid row inhabitants help to create; people who don't want to think about or see the problems of society each day will also continue to avoid downtown los Angeles because of this factor. This means that many of the inhabitants of downtown Los Angeles are deeply feeling, deeply caring people who understand the difficulties and imperfections that continue to plague society.

These are often members of society who are willing to do their part to make the world a more cohesive and peaceful place. Examine One of the primary ways of relating that occurs in the downtown Los Angeles community, is that people often connect and communicate through art. This remains to this day one of the fundamental and primary modes of connecting that people have.

So much of the sadness, disasdvantage and despair that surrounds so much of the downtown community has to do with the skid row population there: these are members of society who received the short end of the stick from the time they were borne. Many of these members of society were born to drug-addicted mothers, never met their fathers, were raised on the streets or in housing projects and never finished high school. They were often the product of untold forms of abuse and disadvantage.

It can be difficult for people who don't have a familiarity with those things to even begin to relate. However, what's so remarkable about the downtown population is that there is a desire to relate to those things and attempts made via art -- murals, sculptures, gallery shows and even chalk art on the sidewalks. Other modes of relating to the more disadvantaged members of downtown Los Angeles occur through traditional community functions of helping.

These take the form of clothing drives, soup kitchens, canned food drives, drives to collect sleeping bags and other forms of assistance. These drives can often be the bridge where advantaged downtowners are able to reach out to more disadvantaged downtowners and are platforms where communication and dialogue can occur. Articulate Learning One of the major things that I learned using this assessment is that relating and personal growth can and will occur as long as people desire it. Personal growth is truly up to the individuals involved.

In that sense, members of the downtown community really are able to grow and thrive in that they have a willingness to communicate and have dialogue and ultimately better understand members of their community that are different than them. The bulk of the learning that occurred was through intense observation. If one has a desire to observe things as they actually are there is really no limit to all that.