Teachers Care for Students?

A few ways the teachers care for the students is "self and community" and "feeding the family." I chose these two because these were the two that I feel connected to through my youth work. I found "self and community" rather interesting because I love how open Sarah is about her queerness in the school setting and that she is opening herself up to her students to make them feel more welcome. I love "feeding the family" because I had the same mind set as Michelle once when I first started working with youth who are at a lower socioeconomic status.

Self and Community
Self and community is being demonstrated in my internship site because the staff demonstrates an open door policy and are encouraged to be themselves so that children have a positive role model to look up to. By having this open door policy, the staff sometimes get children going up them and having personal conversations about things that the children cannot normally talk about within their friend group or even with their family. What I have seen so far is that the staff member will start off with "what we talk about stays between us unless what we talk about is concerning and your family needs to know."

Feeding the Family
As I explained in a previous blog post, this recent summer the summer camp I work at went through a change where we brought in two other YMCA's to our campus. Along with bringing in 200+ more children, various amounts of cultures were suddenly mixed together. During the summer I learned that not all of the campers get full meals at home, sometimes no meals, and having that extra snack or two a day can change the rest of the day for them. They will be less grumpy, they will have a more positive attitude, and they will not be as hungry later on when they go home; if they go home to a food-less house.

My internship site could improve their open door policy and regulations on food/snack in a few different ways. For instance, we could have a curriculum that lightly touches on LGBTQ topics, as well as topics with other cultures. By doing this, more conversations with happen revolving around these topics that children are not typically exposed to. For the food/snack approach, having more options and quantities of food during the scheduled snack time would make a difference in their days because their stomachs will be full for a longer period of time as well as the youth getting the meal they might not get at home.