By Brian Lau
It’s my last day at The Working Group and after nine months of meetings in school after school, agonizing over emails and blog posts, and making the hour-and-a-half commute from Sunnyvale to Oakland, I think I’ve earned the right to get a little nostalgic.
And what a crazily wonderful nine months it has been. Since mid-September, I’ve been working at The Working Group as a Not In Our Town/Not In Our School organizer through an organization called Public Allies, an AmeriCorps program that places young adults in different nonprofits and provides them with different training opportunities and service projects. And with the end of our Public Allies year just around the corner, I wanted to reflect on what I gained from this experience.
I’ve been able to tackle so many different and new things, and I think the biggest thing these past nine months have given me is a better appreciation for what community means. Coming into the year, I didn’t have a good grasp on what the word meant, but both Public Allies and The Working Group place a high priority on recognizing the strengths each community has. And so I’ve come to realize what it means to have community, the way that it extends beyond considerations of geography but into the relationships that people have with those around them.