My community needs…

The most important issue that I see my community struggle with is letting people know about resources that would help make their lives better. I say this mainly because as I was talking to a few of my coworkers, that aren’t from Tallahassee but have lived here for a few years and are currently struggling financially, that no one told them of all the resources that are available to them especially as a college student.

The most recent instance of me encountering this situation was just this week. A little information about me is that whenever I hear useful information especially about ways to make people’s living situations easier or things that would help them, in general, I like to let them know of easier ways to get out of their current situations. I attribute this urge to inform mainly from simply hating to hear complaints because as soon as I hear one I automatically feel a strong urge come over me to solve their problem. In this situation, I was telling them that City of Tallahassee Utilities and Community Action has a program in place that would help you pay your utility bill or rent in the case of emergency if they qualified. Usually, I would have been surprised that no one ever told them about this before me or that they never saw any information about it before. In this case, however, I wasn’t surprised especially since I just found out about the program in March.

This is not the only time this occurrence has happened. Many students that attend Florida State University don’t even know about the resources at their disposal. Something I found out this summer was that FSU has a food pantry that is regularly stocked to help students in need. If a friend of mine had not told me of this, there would have been quite a few days where I would have passed out from hunger. I originally thought everyone knew about this oasis except me, but after asking around at work and talking to friends I realized no one else knew of it either just like most of the resources available to us on campus that is never advertised or talked about.

So for sure, I strongly feel like my ecosystem needs a better way of spreading information instead of relying on word of mouth or trying to navigate through a website where the needed information is never where it’s supposed to be.