Community Thoughts

     Since starting this class and focusing on community and community work, I realize that I have never, even once, taken the time to think about the community I grew up in. I have not considered the history of where I come from or how my own ideas and bias may have been influenced because of the environment I grew from. I am a kid from a blue-collar family who had very little money. I had MaineCare, food stamps, free hot lunch, and I even lived in a single-wide trailer or two. But, I never considered myself worse off than anyone. But like most communities, its residents know who the poor families and poor kids are. In Oxford Hills you were either well off, poor, or extra poor. There was no in-between. For this blog, I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on what I know now of my community after reading the Burghart chapters.

     I come from South Paris, Maine. One town out of eight that make Oxford Hills. You can imagine, with that information how spread apart and minimal resources are, and how, due to being a rural area, there would be challenges with accessing resources, being active in a community, and having to deal with dual relationships. Heck, I just learned recently that I and my mother have the same PCP. Some teachers you would have several times, gym teachers may have been community sports coaches, and other people’s parents definitely filled the roles of many alternative community/school positions. While growing up, I remember there were limited resources to access for mental health, medical, community resources like food pantries, and access to elderly care such as in-home support. To this day there are a few centrally located mental health providers in the most central town out of the eight, and only one small hospital, and a few nursing homes. Otherwise, you are were, and still are, looking to obtain resources and providers in/from surrounding towns like Lewiston/Auburn and needing to find a way to get access to them and literally get to them. As it is, you could live in one town in Oxford Hills and it could take up to 45 minutes or more to get to the other side of Oxford Hills alone. Imagine needing to go to Lewiston/Auburn or even Portland to meet basic needs. When it comes to community, I don’t recall ever being aware at a young age of things going on around me to enrich the community. I know local churches would do dinners and there would be auctions here and there to help raise money for this or that, but I never participated in any sort of community work or was exposed to anyone doing community work, definitely not community social work. As far as my knowledge of  “community social work” growing up, I was familiar with hearing the letters DHHS. I grew to have this idea instilled in me that DHHS equals negative things and MaineCare and food stamps were shameful. I remember my mother struggling to get decent medical care for me, forget about dentistry and vision (which I started to struggle with in second grade). In the bigger picture, I never knew I was surrounded by poverty, domestic violence or substance use. I first began to identify these elements of my community very clearly after going back and forth from undergraduate school for four years. I remember having my first “How the hell am I from here?” thought. Since taking this course, I have really taken a deeper dive into thinking about and analyzing the community that makes me who I am.

    I am from a declining resource-dependent area. My community and the surrounding communities are mill towns and were dependent on mills. Oxford Hills was a very industrialized area and started to decline after the depression. I can’t believe I never questioned how the ONE old railroad stop left in the middle of town got there, but Oxford Hills also had working railroads that supported the mills. Since I was from a blue-collar family, most of the men in my family did mill work and railroad work. Today, none of the mills are active and I truly wonder how people survive and what they do for work. Oxford Hills is 97% white. I was in a graduating class of over 200 people and had only 2 people of color in my class. Out of the whole high school, grade 9-12, with each class having over 200 kids per class, during my FOUR years there, there was a total of maybe 6 people of color. Even foreign exchange students were white. The median income in the households in Oxford Hills is now 38,000ish. There is a large population of 65+ and a clear divide between the folks with money, which are a small number compared to the folks in deep poverty. There are high levels of drug and alcohol use and DV and child neglect. The education is sub-par. Therefore, I feel community social work is needed so badly in this entire area. 

    I’m trying to wrack my brain around what I would do or what kind of social work programs I would want to see or even encourage in the Oxford Hills area. One thing I would love to see is more interactive support and programming for the elderly. This is simply because this is a large population in the community and there are so many and who are completely isolated. I would love to see more farmers' markets utilized where people can use their food stamps to purchase healthy and nutritious foods. I first saw this happen in Portland several years ago and would like to see it migrate more into isolated towns and food deserts. In Oxford Hills, there are so many different landscapes that could be used for environmental social work and could tie nicely with micro social work. I do feel, especially in this area, engaging the teen population in meaningful activities and work would be incredibly useful. I think there would be a good social work niche with teens here. As a teen, I grew up either doing theater, music, or a few sports- those that did not do anything off that menu usually engaged in drug and alcohol use. There was never a real in-between. Of course, this is a community image still stuck in my head from growing up. If I wanted to really make a change in the communities I grew up in I would need to do some serious community assessments and evaluations to see what is really truly needed instead of what I think is needed. If I were to do community-based social work in any community I would love to be in a position to do both grassroots work and possibly be head of my own created program. I have the same reservations similar to other people where it's scary to think about stepping away from the groundwork into a less involved, higher responsibility position. But I think if I could combine the two I'd be OK.

If anything, coming from my type of community humbles me and makes me grateful to think I developed skills to be resourceful and quick thinking when it comes to meeting needs and being self-sufficient. I think these developed skills help me understand and relate better to clients I encounter in various programs. I also think my experience helps me have insight into how being from an impoverished community can affect people.