I believe for most of my life I have been a very introverted person. I believed that talking to people wasn’t very natural for me and I would rather perform something by myself rather than with other people. But in the past year, I believe that I have grown in many ways, for example in my church and school. So in the scholarship, I will be telling you the different ways I have explored my community and met more people. I will also show you how these opportunities have impacted my life for the better. The first step I took to be more involved in my community is attending more of my church's events and services. This opportunity helped me grow in serving others and meeting new people. In serving others I learned that can help a person grow as a human being. I also learned that meeting new people in my church helped me become less introverted and more comfortable when other people talked to me. Which has prepared me when I have to talk to new people in my job. The second step I took to get involved in my community is to join my school's DECA program. DECA is a program for young students who are interested in getting jobs in the business, marketing, finance, and hospitality field. This helped me meet even more people who are interested in a similar field of study that I will learn out of college. DECA showed me how to stay calm in presentations I do for my role play. It also helped me learn more about how I can do better at marketing to prepare me for my career in the future. So I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to do this program because it has really helped me grow intellectually and with other people. So these are the things that helped me overcome the shyness that didn’t help me to grow my future. Of these things, I would encourage other people who are not in the community to do and there is so much more! I believe being in a community is one of the most important parts of your growth as a human being, so I encourage you to get involved in things in your community. There is so much out there you can do to explore and know more people because it can benefit you in the long run.

I believe that community has been a large part of my life with my family, friends, and church for most of my life. I have always been involved in a town event or church event to help me draw closer to my friends and family in my community. A community has helped me grow in my life. For example, if I had a hard time with something I could go to the people in my community to help me through it. A community has also helped me get more opportunities for jobs and internships. Before I go on about how my community has impacted me in my life, I want to talk about the actual definition of a community. A community is “a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common”. I feel like the part of the definition that says having characteristics in common is like our community. We are similar in so many ways and I believe that is why I think that our community is so great, because we all are going through similar circumstances. Which is what I believe makes us so close that we can help each other through those hard times. I think our community means helping each other through the hard times because we are so similar. For example, through our town's struggles with money or our new political campaigns. I also believe that a community means sticking with others when there is a challenge. Lastly, I think that a community means talking to others a growing a relationship with other people. For example, having a meeting with your friends to catch up with each other so the community can grow stronger in their connection with each other. These are all the things that I believe make our community and what even makes a strong and healthy community. Helping each other, growing with each other, and sticking with each other even through the hard times. These things that I have talked about in a community can help heal a bad community and help even grow a good community. I believe in being with each other, growing, and loving each other shapes a community and all of the people in it. So this is what I believe a community is and what it can be an impact on every person in the world's life including my own.