Capstone Ideation: Societal Promotion and Activism
Because of my passion to learn, understand, and help people, I would like to create a capstone that reflects activism in helping people socially, and potentially economically as well. Although I have not had much of any experience in activism, I feel like my drive to help and understand people helps me to analyze root issues quickly that are hidden and made to divert attention away from said rooted issues. However, I am concerned I might create a capstone within the activism space that reflects a tone-def message, or something that in theory would be beneficial, but in practice wouldn’t work for a long time, if ever.
Although it might be nearly impossible, I’d like to find or create something that can challenge the way people narrowly see people. I have heard so many testimonies of different people from all walks of life that don’t believe they “fit in” due to the way they look, dress, talk or act, over things they can’t control, over things they can that they shouldn’t have to, etc. For example, I remember looking at homeless people as a kid and thinking that something had to be “wrong” with them if they were homeless. Now I seem them as just another person who had issues within their life and was never given enough help to prevent homelessness. I grew up learning not to interact with homeless, not to trust homeless, not to give homeless money because what if they spent it on drugs, and a few other seemingly rational reasons for a kid to understand. However, it then took me 20 years or so to begin to realize that homeless people aren’t any different from other people with problems, except they have probably even less money and they are without a home. I also didn’t realize the background stories for most of the homeless aren’t outlandish, only-if-you’ve-messed-up-that-bad kind of situations; they are daily problems that arise like unexpected loss of job, mental health issues (which everyone faces, whether extreme or not), medical issues, financial issues, drug issues, or a combination of all of these. If we can change the way we perceive people and teach people to be more open-minded to change their assumption-based judgements, I feel like we would all be a little more capable to understand one another’s problems so that we might better understand how to fix our societal issues.
