Community Class Reflection Paper

There are several concepts we learned about in my community class that apply to my service work. We Care Arts strives to not only stabilize members of the community with disabilities, but they also recognize the need across the entire community and travel to schools, nursing homes, and even hospitals to give art lessons. In this way, We Care Arts strives to help develop the greater Dayton community and not just their clients. In class, we learned about what it means to work towards community development. While some people believe that community development is strictly an economical choice, developing a community also requires getting citizens to care about the future of their city. In Better Together, I learned that areas with better social capital are more successful in creating a growing community. …show more content…
Similar to my community class, lots of the material covered in my Faith and Justice course relates to the service work I performed and the other volunteer work core students participated in. In this course, one of the biggest doctrines we analyzed was Essential Catholic Social Teaching which is the set of guidelines the catholic church follows to ensure they carry out the work of God. Bernard V. Brady, author of Essential Catholic Social Teaching, advocates that life should be oriented around protecting the common good and human dignity. Catholic social teaching proclaims that all laws and rules created through government or in a household should enable citizens and give them opportunities to advance. The catholic church thus advocates to end racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination that tear down certain groups of people. One major theme outlined in catholic social teaching is that the rich and educated individuals should not live in excess. Rather, they should look out for their fellow community members by volunteering and donating in order to fight the large economic disparity that has been growing in