Doing it for the Love in San Antonio

Hassan Barzani shares experience as a college student serving as an AmeriCorps at San Antonio Youth.  Listen Here.

 

Excerpts from Hassan’s written story:

“My story begins less than an year before I was born on September 10, 1987. My parents got married on November 9, 1986. Then a month later my parents came to Houston, Texas, from Erbil “Hawler” Iraq-Kurdistan. My parents came from Kurdistan to Texas avoiding Saddam Hussein’s regime, a regime that resulted in the assignation my aunt, uncle and cousins on both side. Saddam’s use of chemical warfare against the Kurds and Iraq’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons, had not only harmed my family’s life but many others. In addition, they came to America with a dream that when I came onto this earth, I would succeed. I am Kurdish-American and born as a United States Citizen. At 5 years of age my parents became US citizens and we settled into my hometown of Richardson, Texas…

Doing the AmeriCorps program this past year, I was privileged to prevent the students to drop-out from school and keep youth focused on getting an education and preparing for the world of work, and keeps low-income children from across the San Antonio huge Hispanic population highly distressed neighborhoods achieve life success through hard work, determination and opportunities to excel made me proud coming from a Kurdish America background and making this children having wonderful dreams later in life after high school and college.”

Change Maker Fest 2013

USDChangemakerworkshop

NGS (the Next Generation of Service) launched our services this past Thursday, October 3rd, 2013 at University of San Diego’s (USD) Change Maker Fest.  USD has a campus mission and spirit that inspires young people to make a difference by working on innovative solutions to social problems; it is a great place for NGS to being the pilot of our mentorship program.

In the morning we hosted our “Introduction to Vocation” Workshop, where we explored the relationship between work and life calling and the difficulties of balancing money with finding our passions.  We talked about what the world would look like if more young people considered participating in service as part of their career path.

In the afternoon we had a table at the “fest” where we met with students and let them know that we have mentors available to help them uncover their passion and learn more about year long service opportunities.

We are excited and grateful to be working with USD to develop and improve our services.