MaCayla Jablonski, Staff Reporter.
A group of Delta students are taking an assignment to heart and applying the lessons learned to their surrounding community. Two of Lauren Smith’s English 111 classes have set up GoFundMe pages to help the undocumented people of Flint get the resources they need to survive.
GoFundMe pages are personalized web campaigns that accept donations from anyone who chooses to donate to the cause.
After researching the Flint crisis, Smith’s classes found that water was only being provided to documented residents. The class decided to turn their focus from donating to everyone in Flint, to donating only to immigrants that could not get to clean water or the resources they need to stay alive. They partnered with the Mexican-American Council of Saginaw to ensure the undocumented people of Flint will receive the help they need.
Smith brought up the water crisis in Flint to her students because the book they’re discussing, “Enrique’s Journey” by Sonia Nazario, draws parallels to the immigrants in Flint that are unable to receive the resources they need to live, due to lack of proper identification. “Enrique’s Journey” tells the story of a boy struggling with migration to get to the United States.
Courtney Casper, a student in one of the English 111 classes, came to Smith and suggested the idea of a GoFundMe page to help the struggling people in Flint. Impressed by the idea, Smith presented it to the rest of the class and put it to an anonymous vote. The decision to donate was unanimous—they’d be creating the page.
After the unanimous vote to raise money, the students spent time researching the crisis. What they found was shocking. “At first, it was mandatory to show an ID [to receive water] so that the city could track where the water was going,” says Klarissa Hartley, a student in Smith’s class. “Recently they started giving out water without showing identification, however, most places still demand to see ID. Immigrants are unable to receive clean water for fear of deportation.”
“I would like to stress the idea of empathy that we are focused on. . . We don’t want to look at them as undocumented, we just want to see them as humans,” explains Hartley.
Smith created the GoFundMe pages as English assignments for both of her English 111 classes. Smith had her students in both classes work together to write the summaries on the GoFundMe pages. Their goal was to persuade an unknown audience to help donate to their campaigns. “Part of why we did this was to give students hands on practice with writing, and so I wanted them to have control of the campaign in terms of the content of it, “ says Smith, “. . .[the summaries] ended up being relatively similar, but I thought it would be good to honor their separate expressions.”
The GoFundMe pages went live on Friday, Feb. 12. As of now, there is no specific end date for donations. Their personal goal is to reach $500 on each page. Donations of water are accepted, however, the class is mainly focused on donating money to their community partner in hopes to fix the long-term problems the immigrants are facing. Problems such as receiving water filters, financial help, replacing the eroding pipes, etc.
The students are relying on social media to get the word out to the public, and to get community members to donate to the cause. “Everything helps,” says Savanna Mack, a student in Smith’s class. “It’s going toward a good cause. Again, we talked about in class how people are donating lump sums of water, but that’s not going to help them in the long run.”
If you have any questions about the GoFundMe pages, feel free to contact Lauren Smith at laurensmith3@delta.edu. Both links to the GoFundMe pages are as follows: https://www.gofundme.com/hw652zpg and https://www.gofundme.com/5cmg2vxx
