学进去

I started a Facebook page in July, and it’s steadily growing! The best part isn’t the number of its “followers” but its comments — I love reading about what people do, their ideas and views and get some feedback (反馈) on what I’m doing too.

In April of this year, I was invited by a friend to join her Social Change group. We were eight women from all walks of life, but we had one thing in common — we live in a fantastic country and yet we can see homeless people on the streets asking for money. We have a generous welfare system and a social housing scheme — but it’s a problem that is getting worse. We asked ourselves: What happens to homeless women?

Therefore, we volunteered at shelters. We met with social housing providers, shelter managers and social workers, and began to think what else we could do. We researched on which programs were having success. We had guest speakers at our meetings and began to get a clear picture about what we needed to do.

As luck would have it, we have been gifted a building in the city center. It’s old and needs a lot of work to bring it up to the standard. We want to provide more than just shelter to women in need. We aim to have six self-contained apartments providing full social services for women to stay in for up to two years. Thanks to the building provider, we have got our project off the ground.

I’m an ordinary person. If I can do this, anyone can. You can change the world. Look for the opportunity and just do it.