I really enjoyed Michael Lindsey’s talk. He posed a lot of questions that really made me think more about the world. One of them being if you live in a community with drugs and no access to fresh groceries and your housing isn’t secure, how does that make a person feel about themselves? In my opinion, a lot of us take these things for granted. Especially in the world right now, not everyone has access to groceries and a stable income. I also didn’t know about the McSilver Institute until today. I think it is amazing that their mission is trying to find new knowledge to identify root causes and address the consequences of poverty. I also think that the Step Up program is amazing. I find it so interested that they don’t say Mental Health, instead they say Mental Wellness. It’s great that they create training and tools to help enable service to provide research-based interventions as well. You can really tell that there are a lot of people involved in this cause by seeing how many partners they have. I also think its great that they have university-wide initiatives, Strategies to reduce inequality, that brings faculty together from different parts of the university to think about ways to lessen inequality. I definitely think this should be talked about more because it is such an important cause for people to know about it. When he showed the chart that shows all the schools and institutions involved in the initiative I was so shocked.
Uzoma Orchingwa’s talk was also super informative. Ameelio is a way to send free letters and photos to someone that is incarcerated. The signup process is super easy and it is really easy to do. You can even track the letter to the facility which is amazing. It takes the cost away from postage stamps and mailing. It was also interesting to hear that over 70% of incarcerated people talk to their children through letters. There is also no barrier to entry. It was really cool to see the background of how their company worked. The fact there were over 500 letters written within the last few weeks is amazing. It was also interesting that they weren’t funded mt major corporations and really had a vision for the company. They are doing amazing things!