The Faces of Change Project
Dalya, Lazslo, and Marisol's team, the Action Faction, is currently doing a project called Faces of Change where students are working with six different communities in the South SD area to design and implement with locals a long lasting, human centered service project. My cohort of nine people chose National City as our community because we love the local pride, the feeling of connection between residents, and the rich historical background of the area. So In order to get the best outcome for these projects, we are using something called the Stanford Principles of Design. The first of these principles is “Empathize”. In order to make a project successful and tailored to the needs of the user, in our case the people of National City, we must have the change happen from within. To do this, we took a field trip to ARTS, a reason to survive, a non profit organization that offers art classes and programs for youth, and creates community art installations. Along with starting to work with this program, we interviewed several local students, business owners, government officials, and adult residents to get a feel for what was going on in the community. These interviews really showed us the pride for the city and connection with neighbors that people from National City have, but it also showed us some of the needs that had not been met.
Our Mission Statement
Our mission statement is to not just better National City, but to create a long lasting impact that will bring people and businesses into their community, starting with the youth. The youth want to make a change but do not feel like they have the ability to make the change that they want in their community. To help them, we want to involve the youth in our project to give them motivation. We want to show them that even though we are students, we can still make a long lasting, positive, impact on anything we put our mind to. We would love for the local youth to know that they were involved in a great project that helped the community that they live in, and hopefully get them dedicated to maintain and stabilize the impact that we have on their community.