Today I submitted my application for TFA. Here's my letter of intent that went along with it...
The entire course of my life was changed when I heard the wisdom of Frederich Buechner for the first time. I was sitting in chapel completely unaware that the direction I had been craving was soon before me. These were his words, that our calling is the place where our great gladness and the world's greatest need meet. And these words are still changing me today. It is my ambition to offer my joyful endeavors to ease the pain and brokeness around me.
Social injustices abound beyond that which I can comprehend. There truly is great need all around us. Thankfully through providing education we can treat more than the symptoms that surround, but the heart of the illness. If I could devote myself to one cause that is truly effective, this would be it, for this is where my great joy meets a great need in this world.
My great joy is genuinely found in seeing beauty and greatness in others before they can see it themselves, helping their eyes to be opened, and their potential to be reached. I have found that for real change and growth to happen it takes more than imparting simple knowledge or information, it takes teaching skills. Underprivileged children have not grown up with the resources necessary to develop into a successful and contributing citizen. They most certainly have the capacity, but because of their lack of resources they are missing critical life skills that many of us take for granted. But by providing resources and teaching the necessary skills to manage those resources we can close the gap that poverty creates, and destroy the injustices that ignorance sustains.
I have seen the value of education and relationships in a very personal way, as I grew up in a single-parent home living at poverty level. Through relationships and role models I was able to make the shift from a mind set of lack to one of resources. It is my desire to be that role model to others, to encourage and lead children into the skills that they need to find personal success. I want to teach them knowledge, but I also want to impart the skills necessary to comprehend, retain and use that knowledge. It is my hope that as a Teach for America Corps member I will continue my goal of learning to serve and to love people well.
It would be my great joy to continue to learn from those who have gone before me. I hope to continue in my calling by offering my joy to meet the need of this world. I have only begun to understand the wealth of resources that underprivileged children grow up with out and I have only begun to learn how to fill that emptiness. But I hope as a Teach for America that by offering myself I will be able to fill a small part of that need.
