Alternative Spring Break

Here's the lowdown on my alternative spring break this March:

Alternative spring break is organized through Mizzou. I applied to go on a trip last semester. On the application, I prioritized different issues that each location would be addressing. I chose "health" as my first choice, followed by environment and Habitat for Humanity/urban issues. I was chosen and placed on the Louisville trip!

In Louisville, we will be addressing food access issues that effect children. Here's the issue that downtown Louisville is facing: as the city has grown, the middle class has increasingly moved away from the city toward suburbs, taking all of the grocery store businesses with them. What's left in the inner city is fast food restaurants and convenience stores, leaving more low income families without healthy options and increasing obesity rates. This is especially hard for young children, especially when they grow up thinking the only places you can get food is McDonalds and KFC. Many of them don't even know what a well-balanced meal looks like.

It's a pretty daunting issue to take on, but what we'll be doing is working hands on with kids at one of the middle schools. We will be going to an area of downtown Louisville called "Smoketown." It is a predominantly African-American community that faces gang problems alongside their food access problems. Many of the kids as young as middle school-aged are involved in gangs. There are two gangs in this area. The younger kids are in a gang that call themselves the "Goonies" and the older high school kids are in a gang called the "Taliban." Both are divisions of the Bloods.

Specific activities we'll be doing are the following:
-Working on a farm to grow produce. It's called "Oxmoor Farms" and we'll be taking the kids out there to teach them about fruits and veggies.
-Making dinner at "Gilda's Club." Gilda Radner once said "Having cancer gave me a membership in a elite club I'd rather not belong to." We'll visit the "Gilda's Club" in Louisville to make everyone dinner and socialize with the visitors
-Painting a mural. One initiatives that Louisville has taken is to create corner stores called "Healthy-in-a-Hurry" which are accessible to kids in the community. We are going to paint a mural with the kids on the walls of the one closest to their middle school.

I know there are some more we'll be doing, but we haven't been given a copy of the itinerary yet. We will also have some free time and we'll be spending that at Churchill Downs and a baseball bat factory. Our accommodations for all 12 of us for the entire week came to $57! We were really fortunate to find this lodging. We're staying at a hotel built above a women's shelter and they gave us a really good deal.

To pay for the trip, everyone in the group made two $100 payments. For the rest of the fundraising, we sent "Adopt-a-Breaker" letters describing our trip and asking for donations. Our trip quickly met our goal. I feel particularly blessed and received a lot of support from my friends and family and even a few businesses in Frisco, my hometown.

Our group meets every Thursday to discuss the issues we will deal with on our trip, go over our itinerary and bond as a group. Our first two meetings were the definition of awkward, but now we are pretty close. All of the ASB groups got together for a retreat several weeks ago and each group had to perform a skit. Our skit had a rap to the beat of "Fresh Prince of Bel Air." It was pretty awesome. The trip is going to be a lot of fun. 

Other groups are going to Colorado, South Dakota, North Carolina, Detroit, New Orleans, Nashville, Minnesota, and Dallas. I know several groups will be working on conservation, one with a childrens hospital, and one with Habitat for Humanity.

It should be quite the adventure! I was a little hesitant when I signed up, but now I feel like I have no regrets! Hopefully, I will be able to blog every night while we're on the trip, depending on what the internet situation is.

Again, I would like to thank everyone that donated and given their support. You have helped us reach our goal, and very quickly at that!

To learn more about Mizzou's Alternative Spring Break visit: http://asb.students.missouri.edu/