Opportunity Northeast Summer Fellowship connects students to Spokane | news

Gonzaga University student Emily Shiraishi never expected meals that after this summer she would enjoy sitting in a garden picking weeds or cooking for over 100 individuals. But, after nearly 10 weeks of working for GU’s Campus Kitchen — a university-run food outreach organization — Shiraishi said her passion for food outreach has grown and she hopes to continue this work in the school year.

Shiraishi was a fellow this summer for a service initiative organized by GU’s Center for Community Engagement (CCE), called the Opportunity Northeast Summer Fellowship. This community-based, service initiative gave her and seven other GU students in the program a chance to work for 10 weeks in northeastern Spokane.

The fellowship program is centered around GU’s commitment to community outreach in the surrounding community and has the goal of supporting regional efforts focused on combating food insecurity and educational inequality — both serious issues in the northeastern Spokane neighborhoods.

Students participating in the program are divided into four service positions related to these issues: Food insecurity fellows, Hillyard Youth Collaborative fellows, High School Transition fellows and John R. Rogers High School Postsecondary Summer Outreach fellows. They then serve with a variety of community partners related to these issue concentrations.

“There comes this impression that we’re there to help them help themselves [at these service placements], but honestly, it’s just being there for them and creating those relationships with Gonzaga and the community,” Shiraishi said. “We’ve done a lot of meeting people where they’re at, showing people that they are seen and that they are a person.”

This year, eight GU students participated in the summer fellowship program. These students held a broad range of responsibilities, from making meals from recovered food waste to counseling middle and high school students to helping local teachers with specific projects.

The summer fellows also worked a weeklong summer camp on GU’s campus for high school students called the Catalyst College Immersion program — an event organized by CCE, admissions, the College of Arts and Sciences and Diversity, Inclusion, Community and Equity (DICE). Fourteen students attended the camp and participated in activities designed to help them prepare for life after high school.

According to Shiraishi, Allison Salvador and Jessica Childress, the Catalyst College Immersion program was a particularly meaningful moment of their service experience because it was allowed for the summer fellows to model in a concrete way what life in college could be like for these students.

“One of my favorite moments was working with this kid [at Catalyst],” Salvador said. “He came into Catalyst, saying ‘I don’t know what I want to do with my life. I don’t know what I’m passionate about.’ During that week we saw this huge improvement in him. By the end of the week, he was like, ‘I want to be an engineer and I want to go to Gonzaga University.’ ”

While an initial purpose of the fellowship was to serve at specific volunteer placements, Salvador, Avery Kain, Childress and Shiraishi said that the experience evolved into being focused on building community relationships coupled with a reckoning of the systemic issues affecting the region.

Salvador and Shiraishi, who both volunteered at Campus Kitchen for their fellowship placements, said that the fellowship challenged them to think critically about the issue of food insecurity and the many ways that it affects the Northeastern neighborhoods. They said that when they put on a nutritional summer camp, they were shocked to hear how these children did not have vegetables and fruits in their daily diets.

“We had to be mindful of the community that we were serving,” Salvador said. “These kids, they didn’t have access to these organic, non-processed foods, so we had to show them how to eat and live a balanced life while also being mindful of their situation.”

Childress, who volunteered at a series of public schools in the area, said that the experience of working in the public schools with their students made her rethink how she sees the educational crisis in Spokane. She said that she thinks of schools now in this region as being under-resourced and avoids labeling these schools as “bad,” which she says society tends to do.

“[We must] know that it’s less about the test scores and more about the kids and the lives they’re coming from,” Childress said. [We must] learn about what it takes for a child to feel comfortable in the classroom, to turn off the fight or flight mode and be able to pay attention and focus. This kind of knowing that there’s so much more going on [in these schools] is something that I wish we could really find.”

With the Opportunity Northeast Summer Fellowship finishing in two weeks, Childress, Shiraishi and Kain said that they hope this fellowship helps bridge the gap between GU and the surrounding neighborhoods.

They said that they valued the relationships that they gained from working in the community during this summer fellowship and that they saw this initiative as a sign of GU’s effort of fostering relationships with the outside community.

“[The summer fellowship] pushes you out of your comfort zone and pushes you out of that privilege that we have,” Shiraishi said. “The world is just full of people like us. We create such a divide, but we’re all human. We just want to be seen.”