What does community outreach mean to you?

Ragan C.

Before this year, I had always just considered outreach as giving back to the community around us and worldwide, but I had never thought to look up the literal definition of the word, outreach. Community outreach can mean something different to every individual, but the most basic definition is that it is an activity of providing services to any population who might not have access to those services otherwise. It also says that a key component of outreach is that the groups who are providing are not stationary, but mobile. This actually makes a lot of sense to me and is something I learned about in my Servant Leadership class last year in school. In fact, we learned something called the Upside Down Principle of our culture versus what our world should look like. The three ones that stood out to me and relates to this community outreach are:

1. To become a leader, you must become a servant
   
2. You have to lose your life to find it (you must learn to sacrifice)
   
3. You must give generously to receive.
   

These principles actually come straight from the Bible but are so relatable to our current world and its problems. Many affluent people in our country frequently donate money or resources to different causes and never meet or see the people who they are affecting. In my opinion, this is not necessarily community outreach or servant leadership. Outreach is when you meet the people where they are and connect with them face-to-face to give them something that you have so graciously been given yourself. This is something that the Bulldogs actually do quite well and is probably going to learn how to do even better this year. There are so many people in our community, right in our backyards that we can give back to. My hope is that we can all learn how to communicate better with these people and instead of feeling like we are doing charity for them, we are becoming friends with these people. Sharing our jump rope skills with people is an excellent outlet to connect with people, but most importantly is the relationships and hopefully friendships we are going to build through the process.