Perspective of Day 1 by Alec Yen

Today gifted our team with a very positive start to our week-long adventure in Louisville. As the week progresses, we will continue to learn about wealth distribution so that we may develop our own understandings and bring these perspectives back to Knoxville. From serving breakfast to performing yard work, our first-day experiences have been extraordinarily eye-opening and rewarding.

To start off the day early at 6:30a.m, we began our day cooking and serving breakfast for Jeff Street Baptist Community, an organization that prepares breakfast meals for the homeless. Our mentor was a retired schoolteacher who regularly gave his time to help prepare these meals. We cooked breakfast burritos, efficiently delivered food, and learned a great deal from a very wise mentor. His insights toward the helpfulness of the Jeff Street community demonstrated how powerful of an impact that even a small group of people can make. Their small group's selflessness benefits such an enormous population of the disenfranchised. For example, they serve dozens of individuals who have been disadvantaged or wronged in their lives. By being able to give them a warm breakfast, they are able to brighten their days even just the slightest bit. I saw this firsthand, as many offered genuine gratitude towards our work in preparing breakfast, emphatically expressing their appreciation.

After serving breakfast, we volunteered across the block at the MaryJane Toney House, a housing unit made for the homeless and funded by Choices, Inc. Our team was split into two groups, one of whom painted the house while the other cleaned the nearby yards. I worked in the yard, clearing out dead branches and transporting them to nearby dumpsters. While this experience did not give us direct interactions with the homeless, we were privileged with the opportunity to work with Brian, a man affiliated with these housing units. In many ways, he served as an inspiration to us, as he spoke to us about his viewpoints toward helping the homeless, especially during and after a first-hand experience with a man on the street suffering from drug overdose. As we watched him helplessly struggle to stand and walk, I felt a strange instinct to look away and tense up, ready for any potential threat. But in my anxiety, Brian took the initiative to call the police - not to arrest the man, but to assist and inspire him. He explained that by getting him to a hospital, his life could turn around by waking up sober and healthier in a comfortable environment. He explained that while the man’s position suffering from overdose was not necessarily his fault, the experience of being helped by emergency personnel was his chance to take responsibility for his life. This was truly inspirational, compelling me to think about my biases and perceptions toward the homeless.

Growing up, I have been raised with an instinctive distrust and fear towards the homeless. Today’s experiences have exposed me to a completely different world from the one I have lived for the past eighteen years. The world is too vast to be secluded to one’s own biases. There are too many people, perspectives, and possibilities for volunteers such as ourselves to merely scratch the surface on the topic of wealth distribution. I look forward to the rest of the week as I not only work to learn more about socioeconomic inequalities in Louisville but also stimulate my personal development as an informed and active citizen in wealth distribution awareness.