Community Involvement Related to Women: Fund-Raising for a Shelter for Abused Women, Essay Example

In looking for a way to combine community involvement with gender studies, I decided that fund-raising for a shelter, one to assist abused women, would be an excellent course. The process would accomplish more than one objective: it would enable me to understand better community perceptions regarding abused women; it would inspire me to find creative means of both increasing awareness and generating support; and I would be helping to establish a needed and important community asset. Abused women are still very much an invisible dilemma in society, as factors of shame and financial circumstances keep them in a victim state, and I felt that the community needed to show real support in this area.

Choosing a single course of action to raise money for the shelter was not my plan, in a sense. I realized that I had to be open and try different approaches, and the success rates of each would inform me as to what direction to stay on. I knew that students with similar goals often canvassed local shops and businesses, to gain donations and support. Others took the opposite path of setting up booths in high traffic public arenas, such as malls, and distributed material while asking for financial assistance. I would do whatever worked best.

To my mind, also, community involvement for this cause needed to be more active, and less random. I decided to organize a marathon race, with the volunteers then being sponsored by friends and local businesses. It seemed to me that this approach would generate more awareness, as each person then getting involved would be turning to the other people in their life for support. Then, even those unwilling to run, I discovered, were listening, and there could be no such thing as too much awareness for this cause.

In signing up runners, I felt that the race should not be too intimidating, and a 2K seemed like the right distance. It was long enough to require commitment, but not so long as to take up a whole day. Also, as there is sensitivity regarding the issue of abused women, I believed that asking too much of a physical commitment might put people off. With a 2K limit set, then, and the timing established for a Sunday morning in a public park, I began canvassing in any way I could. What I found most effective was simple conversation, with people in coffee shops and at the school itself. I was able to get commitments from several dozen people, all of whom had sponsors donating five or ten dollars per kilometer.

The race itself reinforced what I believed, as people spoke about the issue. Many people prefer not to think about the fact that women down the street, within their own communities, may be trapped in abusive relationships. Abused women are at the extreme end of an ancient, and still existing, damaging perception of gender roles. In raising money to help these women, the runners  and their sponsors came to better understand how no woman is really safe from the potential of being abused. The event made all the women involved think about how a woman can so easily be trapped as a victim, and I was especially gratified by the awareness expressed from the men involved.

Another benefit of the event was how my own awareness was raised, and not only in the ways the men and women of my community view gender roles. As I moved through the neighborhoods and interacted with the people, I began to get a better sense of how my own education is a tool I must take into the world around me. What I have learned in gender studies may not be revolutionary, but I saw how certain, crucial issues within it must be brought out into the open, or people will tend to set aside those, like the abuse of women, that are painful to think about. This is part of my responsibility, whenever I take my place in my community.