Citizenship & Civic Engagement

So on Wednesday, I went to volunteer at Angel's Flight in Los Angeles. Angel's flight is a place where teens are welcome with shelter, food, clothing, mental health care, counseling and education. The program includes a drop-in center an outreach component, reaching at least 3,000 adolescents each year, with services focused on emotional healing, growth and empowerment. Substance abuse treatment and recovery, mental health counseling, food and toiletries, job search guidance, gang prevention and intervention, tutoring, art, dance and music instruction are important program services they provide (from website, a lot easier to put into words than what I gathered and learned from the guy working). The experience was really great and perfect timing for what we learned about citizen knowledge because I feel I gained a great insight into the lives of these teens after talking with them and hanging out with them. It was great to see how the program is helping their lives but also how our assumptions are very wrong about these kids. Most of them have goals after they finish school, I spoke to one in particular about his life after he graduates this year. He is going to go to design school in Florida where he got a scholarship, and knows he wants to own his own store in the future. Another girl wants to be a police officer and has already been a cadet with the LAPD for quite some time.

I think citizen knowledge is widely used through out my issue. A lot of these programs are based out of non-profits a majority of the time. There are hardly any government funded programs, although they can apply for grant money. People that work in these organizations definitely develop knowledge in the area, which can be used in the future as they continue to go to other jobs in the same field. I think because this is such a tough issue that the use of public knowledge is used all the time. People share ideas and organizations are created through out all of the United States. I think that Fun and Wright's model is important in my issue. Who is considered the expert though? Someone who has worked in organizations with lots of experience around at risk youth, or someone who has done research? That's a tough call, sometimes experience is a much more useful kind of knowledge than research or having a degree in psychology. This is where I find Fung an Wright's model a little challenging because how do we measure who is an expert? Isn't it different for everything? I think while we gain experience after a degree we also can gain it in other ways. In this situation, I would take the word of the people who work at Angel's flight over someone who is fresh out of college with a B.S in Psychology focused on juveniles.