SOME offers outreach and education services to help usher in a new generation of community leaders, philanthropists, and advocates.
What are the pillars of SOME’s outreach programming?
Identifying the problems or challenges of our community members and addressing them.
Educating the community on issues and empowering it to tackle them independently.
Working for meaningful policy change will help alleviate the challenges community members face.
Throughout 2022, SOME had a handful of organizations and schools visit SOME’s Dining Room and even had students from as far as Portland State University visit to learn about where the roots of poverty in DC stem from and how the perpetual cycle of homelessness that our neighbors experience on a day-to-day basis. Since 2021, SOME’s strategic plan has encouraged a renewed focus on outreach and community involvement. This outreach programming is the culmination of that, as the desired outcome of SOME’s outreach efforts is to offer people the tools to take hunger and homelessness into their own hands and make a lasting change.
During the fall and winter seasons, more than 40 community organizations either visited SOME to learn more or received a visit from SOME’s outreach team. Six of these organizations were local high schools and universities in the DMV area. The participation and willingness displayed by local high schools and universities is encouraging to SOME, because learning about poverty and homelessness is often something that students have to seek out themselves. In this case, schools and local organizations have been highly proactive in reaching out to SOME. There has been no age barrier to SOME’s educational resources, as middle schoolers have been involved with SOME, and so have seniors in the DC community.
The topics taught in SOME’s education sessions include point-in-time counts of homelessness in DC, social justice reflections, equity vs equality, income and poverty rates, per capita incomes by ward, racial inequality education, affordable housing and fair market rent education, food insecurity numbers, key factors that lead to homelessness, and our SOME mission and how we seek changes that will eliminate the root causes of social justice issues.
For more information on getting connected to SOME’s outreach and education programming, contact SOME’s SVP of Community Outreach, Daryl Wright, at communityoutreach@some.org.