Community Interview: Shawn (NGS)
After interviewing Shawn, he answered a lot of the questions I had in terms of how Next Generation Scholars works and the backstory behind the organization. I mostly only knew about their services so it was nice to have Shawn go into more detail about his story in relation to Next Generation Scholars. Shawn really emphasized how much of a family environment NGS is to their students. As NGS makes a difference in their lives, many of them still keep in contact with the staff. A story Shawn shared was how a former NGS student asked the cofounder to officiate her wedding and this just shows how NGS embodies a strong family environment. Shawn also shared that the majority of their students are first-generation students from Mexico and South America. NGS has a long list of helpful services that are free to their students such as tutoring, hot meals, counseling, and even pro bono lawyers. NGS’s goal for their students is to teach them to be able to go against the status quo by using context clues. To address the structural issues that are impacting them and be able to make a change through the critical consciousness. NGS teaches them to not get caught up in the weeds of definitions and instead make up their own definitions as that will significantly mean a lot more.
The impact of the current crisis of self-isolation due to the virus has left many of the students as well as their families with limited resources. Right now, education is not the priority of many of the students. They are more worried about survival due to many of the students coming from a low-income background. Shawn mentioned how many of them are questioning when they will have their next meal and how some of the students have to leave their dorms when they don’t want to due to their family environment. Students that are part of the LQBTQ community have no choice but to go back to their home where it may not be the most ideal place for them. Some of the students are also worried that they are not able to follow the social distancing rules due to their families having to go to work and risk exposing the virus. NGS understands the difficult situation that their students are placed under and one thing Shawn pointed out was their efforts to keep it as normal as possible so there is no added stress to the students. NGS is still continuing its services, but just remotely. NGS is relying mostly upon the internet such as facetime calls for tutoring. Shawn mentioned that many of the students either don’t have computers or their internet is not the best because of possible siblings coming home from college. Through this crisis though, NGS is really trying their best to still provide their services to help their students where they still keep their locations open. They do follow the 6 feet apart rule where they only allow four people in at a time so that they are not harming their students.
NGS call to action is to teach their students from an education standpoint to recognize the difference and understand their place in disrupting barriers related to differences. Advocacy and change to NGS as Shawn stated started with the individual. The individual has to be able to connect and actually want to be part of the change. The individuals can have their own standpoints on how they want to be part of the change where then other people can join in and be a collective global change. NGS teaches its students about advocacy through conversations, relationship building, and examples. The staff helps them be exposed to different experiences rather than their own and shows them how those experiences play out in all their intersections. NGS challenges its students to recognize differences and to disrupt them while supporting the individuals who experience pitfalls due to differences. They encourage their students to hold the values of being empathic, sympathetic, as well as action-oriented because those are the qualities that are in a great leader.
