CASC Minor/EDJE Fellow Spotlight: Diara Navarrete
I’m Diara Navarrete. I’m a first-year Psychology major with minors in Art and Community, Action, & Social Change. My service-learning class this semester was Social Justice and Ethical Action with Dr. Leon and I was able to continue my work with the Canal Alliance as a social service assistant. I started with Canal Alliance in my first semester at Dominican while in Jennifer Lucko’s Cultural Anthropology class. In this position, I typically help community members apply for job opportunities, translate documents and look for housing opportunities.
When working with community members my main priority is to listen to their needs and find ways to meet those needs. Even when we weren’t working on stuff, we were able to hold conversations and create connections. This is just really special for me as we’re able to learn from each other and just see how our similar ethnic backgrounds, have similarities and create stronger connections through those similarities. They allowed me to guide them on what they wanted to achieve whether that was translating documents for them or helping them apply for specific job applications like Target and Marshall’s.
I worked with the community members to highlight their strengths and work experience when making resumes together to have better opportunities for those jobs. I made it my goal to help the community members reach their goals, as I wanted them to succeed. I’m privileged to offer my skill set in order to support the Canal community. Using my bilingual skills, I have the ability to help translate information on job applications. I can use my digital literacy to navigate websites and complete job applications with the community members. But overall I had a great time working with the community members at the Canal Alliance. They were super inspiring, and everyone was very motivated to meet their goals and gave me the opportunity to help and reach those goals.
