It's easy as college students struggling with rent and loans to find a handful of excuses as to why we can't help out the less fortunate.
Everyone sees the homeless throughout the town, and almost everyone has been confronted by them and asked for spare change. Now, if we knew the real percentage of those who have actually given money from their pockets, we might all be a little dissapointed in ourselves.
But it's not our fault. It's not that we don't feel bad for these people, we just can't understand how or why they've gotten to be in the positions that they are and we avoid the unfamiliar.
The majority of the student body is financially struggling and it's very easy to understand why we don't want to fork up that little bit of extra cash to donate to someone we don't know instead of putting it towards something we can personally benefit from.
While money is a legitimate excuse, time isn't.
Yes, we're all busy, we're all trying to study and pass finals, but there's always down time and in that down time, there are plenty of opportunities to help others.
Volunteer, volunteer, volunteer.
The Morgantown area has a variety of programs that are constantly looking for student volunteers, whether it be to help serve food at a soup kitchen for organize goods at a food drive.
The Multidisciplinary UnSheltered Homeless Relief Outreach of Morgantown, or MUSHROOM, is a West Virginia University student group primarily focused on reaching out to the homeless.
They meet once a week and wander the streets of Morgantown with supplies like water, food and socks (donated from community businesses) and offer them to the homeless.
One particular goal of the MUSHROOM group's is especially intriguing though. Its first and foremost goal upon locating the needy is something totally free: conversation.
The group's main goal is to offer friendship by having general conversation like "How's the weather?" and "Where are you from?"
I think the groups' idea is very touching and should speak to all of us. Just to say hello or offer a warm smile to help brighten someone's day more than we know and that human-to-human interaction is something we all take for granted.
You make a good distinction here about the different types of resources that students can give to address the homeless situation--time instead of money, particularly since the latter resource is in such short supply for so many students. Since part of the purpose of your writing this semester seems to be helping your fellow students get actively involved in addressing this issue, it seems like a good subject for your profile essay would be a student who is doing such volunteer work--your interview and essay could help fellow students what motivated this person to get involved, what activities the person currently does to help the homeless, what ideas he or she has for getting others involved, what he or she might do differently in the future, what understanding this person has about the causes and consequences of homelessness, to name just a few possible topics.
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