The book “Finding My Way: A Journey Along the Rim of The Catholic Worker Movement”, by Toni Flynn really hit home for me. I think that anyone who grew up in a major city has had similar experiences and felt a similar sense of confusion with as to what their role is in regards to helping those less fortunate. Sometimes it’s hard to know when the right time is to step in or help someone out, but this book did a great job of really sending the message that a situation is what you make it. Helping people needs to be something that comes from a place in your heart that wants to help. The incident with the homeless man trying to get food out of the trash can was really one that stuck out to me. That moment was so significant because it was able to change a perspective. That is what I feel so much of this course has been about. You need to see that the way that things are is wrong to finally understand your own reason behind changing yourself and your own views. My mother ran the Hollywood Mental Health Clinic for most of my childhood. Even as a child she would bring me to work with her sometimes and introduce me to the people she worked with and assisted. After watching my mother work with people from all walks of life and try as best she could to help everyone, I was fortunate enough to find my personal connection to wanting change through that. This book was a great way of showing someone else’s experience of discovering their own want and journey for that change. It highlighted an experience that was in no way similar to my own, yet the desire for change and wanting to help was very similar. These are the connections that this class has been providing us with. For everyone who didn’t have the experiences that I had as a child, the volunteer work that we did really did provide many of the student in this class with a new perspective and incentive to help others in a way that I believe this book highlighted. It promoted a new and real understanding of homelessness and then sent all of us out into the community to work for change with that knowledge as the driving force. I love this book and I love this class. It is clear to me that our perspective have been shaped through legitimate facts and empathy and that each one of us has a new found respect and desire for all of those who have been or are homeless to have the lives that they deserve. Not only is this view going to help us in understanding poverty and homelessness, I think it also instills a new faith in humanity. To have to really look at structural issues and potential failures before blaming a person for their faults or life circumstances is a added perk to the lessons taught in this class. I am happy that through the readings (especially this book) and our discussions, I now have the knowledge and perspective to properly talk about homelessness and poverty and can knowledgeably do my part to change the discourse that currently exits in the United States about homelessness.