QuestBridge: Preparing for College

Your Very Own Outreach Project

Implementing an outreach project is a good way to translate your interests and passions into concrete action that can make a real difference. Starting your project requires you to use every skill you have at your disposal. You reflect your knowledge and your skills back to nourish your community. It takes initiative, follow-through, and commitment. Your community will appreciate you.

And for your own practical purposes, college admissions will look favorably on you. They know it’s not easy to start a venture and that it takes dedication. We say this last because rather it be a reason, we believe this should be a by-product of your actions born from your passions and desire to see some changes in your community.

Take a moment to reflect your motivation on why you would like to start your own outreach project. To help you out, we’ve outlined some essential steps to get you going on a path towards a successful venture.

The First Steps

The purpose of this section is to give you a concrete look at what it takes to start an outreach project and really make a difference. Periodically, we’ll post questions for you to answer yourself to help you get started thinking about your own outreach project.

The Importance of Community

The outreach projects are all about the community and the good that you can bring to your own respective one. In this context, there are two ways to view a community.

Immediate Physical Community
What you see everyday, what is close to where you live, what you can hear, touch, feel, smell. It may be easiest to work within these kinds of communities.
International Community
What you learn about on the news, in class, and in magazines. You may have no direct experience with this community but you are aware of it and its problems.

Your target community is simply a group of people in need of some kind of support

Having defined a community, there are two different ways to approach your project. You may start with a community or population and figure out where and how they can use your help. Some examples may include your immediate community, your neighborhood, a group you belong to at church, a group that’s meaningful to you or to someone that’s close to you, it may be an ethnic-based club at school, an interest group, etc.

Or you can start with specific skills you have or identify the type of help you want to provide and then figure out what community could use these skills. For example, if you have skills with the computer, you can help out an elementary school set up a computer lab. If you’re bilingual, you can start your own free ESL program for adults around your neighborhood. Each of us has our own talents. What are yours and how can you use them to help others around you?

To further help you, start identifying a problem. Don’t take too long. Once you start thinking, what are the issues that come readily to your mind? These ideas are worth exploring to see if they develop into something viable.

Defining the Problem

The next phase of the project is where your ideas start to become more concrete and relevant. No matter how much you already know about a particular problem, you can always learn more. More importantly, you need as much concrete information and hard facts about the problem as you can find. This will help you to not only narrow the scope of your project in order to make it more feasible, but it will also help you begin to think about ways to structure your project.

Starting with your own observations is important because this project is as much about you as it is the community. By using your own observations and experiences, you can also identify things that interest you and things that you are passionate about.

Question: What problems in your community have you identified? Which of these problems are you most passionate about? Working off your gut feeling, take just a second to write down which project you would most like to pursue and respond to these prompts:

Community:

Problem:

Solution:

Why this project is my PASSION:

It is important to ground your project. Begin to move from your general knowledge and desire to help to the concrete issues surrounding the problem. Defining the problem will also lend structure to your own project. Having an in depth understanding of the problem will enable your own project to help in the most efficient and effective ways possible.

Why does a need exist? Get the hard facts about the problem by doing in depth research: read newspapers, talk to community leaders, search for online statistics, figure out what’s already being done to alleviate this problem, or call your local government offices or go to their websites. Use any resource you can to learn what other people have to say about the need or problem you see

<<-- Part I: Community Service & Your Education

Part III: Organizating Your Project-->>