Community Garden

April 2010

La Vozes Members and the Wahluke school district have partnered with the FFA and WSU Extension 4-H Master Gardeners to establish a community garden to raise food for local food bank. The ground for the community garden was donated by the Wahluke school district, across from the high school. Students will be maintaining the garden during the growing months of the garden.

WSU Sociology Students at Work for You!

Sociology 433, an undergraduate class at Washington State University, has been researching options and resources for topics that are important to your rural communities as you work to reduce poverty. Topics include: affordable housing, neighborhood safety, youth activities and much, much more.

Your community may be in contact with one of these teams, but all of their research may be relevant to the issues you are addressing. Click to the Horizons website http://www.horizons.wsu.edu/project/horizons3/community.html to read about their work.

Community Survey

Students assisted the North Columbia Community Action Council in distributing and acquiring the 2009 Community Survey. The survey a pamphlet 15 pages long consisting of 45 quetions gathering knowledge of community members experience, participation, invovlement of thier community and people's ideas of how to improve poverty in their region. Students acted as interpretors for those who spoke and/or read only in Spanish. The students handed out 250 surveys in the first round. In return North Columbia Community Action Council sponsored 14 studetns to attend the 4-H Summer teen Connference, held in Pullman.

Student Cultural Exchange

La Voz de Los Jovenes was invited to attend a 2-day student culutrual exchange with some youth from Eqaudor at Washington State University in Pullman. Six students from the program were selected to represent Wahluke High School and meet with the equador students to discuss poverty and what it looks like, what can be done and how to find some common ground to dealing with poverty issues even from across the world.

During the workshop students were given the chance to particiapte in a wall climbing exercise, some were more than happy to particpate, some were happy to provide the much needed encouragment and moral support.

Part of the workshops was to teach students abouts creating documentaries.

Study Circles

After completion of the facilitator training and the several community meeting the following action items were identified:

• Establishment of a Horizons Club at the Wahluke High School
• Improve and/or increase local Public Transportation
• Increase the understanding that higher education plays in reducing poverty, and how it can be accessed
• Increase participation in local governmental agencies by youth.
• Increase knowledge of the gang presence (and preventative measures) to the community
• Increase knowledge of how parent can access local educational establishment.
• Increase community knowledge of existing social service programs and how to better access their services
• Increase the communities knowledge and prevention efforts in teen pregnancy, domestic violence and other factors that contribute to generational poverty.
• Increase the knowledge and provide the skills that help in the communities grant writing and fundraising efforts to increase community sustainability.

Poverty Labels

Please do not delete this post. NWAF and WSU Horizons requires labels to be added to each post.