One contribution that I have made to my community is a food pantry that I have started working with my church. Every week we pass out food to people both who attend our church, and in the community surrounding the church. This food pantry is a benefit to people in the community around us because there are many homeless people living in the area surrounding our church, and having at least one guaranteed meal a week is impactful. One of my biggest long-term goals is to continue the church ministry and be able to have the benefits reach out and bless more people outside of our small community to others such as people that don’t necessarily have a church home that they can receive these benefits from. Another long-term goal is being able to provide people with more than just breakfast food and enough food to last them until the next week of services. When the program first started, we were able to do that. We had frozen meals, meats, cheeses, fresh fruit, and all types of other food for people to take home with them. There was no limit and all of it was free, however we had to stop due to problems with our collaboration with the food market providing us with these foods. I want to work on collaborating with another company to help us bring this back so that families in need can have guaranteed meals for the rest of their week, until they can get more. One immediate goal that I want to achieve is helping to get more of the other youth to help us with the program because I want us to still be able to continue and have multiple people available so that if some people can’t come, we’ll always have other people ready to help. This is an immediate fix because the pastor of our church is a close family friend and his children, whom me and my brothers grew up with and are extremely close to, and my brothers are already helping me and my cousin every week to pass out food to the people. Another short-term goal that I can easily see to immediately is using the weekly church announcements so that people who ae members of the church know about it also. There are around 80 people in our church, and around 60 of them are elderly people who mostly live by themselves. Without working, some of them are living in precarious financial situations and I believe that as a church we should work together to make sure that they know they have an available way of being able to feed themselves every week. By making the people aware of the opportunity available to them, we can help give them a little more ease.

One way that I have persevered throughout my life is by staying strong despite being bullied in my childhood. When I was younger, I was bullied a lot, and I had an extremely difficult time making friends. Throughout this, I tried to stay strong by immersing myself in my schoolwork in order to escape what was happening around me. After a while, though, everything became too much: my grades started slipping, and I struggled with my schoolwork. Everything was changed, however after we moved to North Carolina. I moved to North Carolina in 2022, and I decided that I was going to try and start over and do my best to make friends around me. Although this proved to be hard at first, everything changed when I started doing track, both for my middle school at the time and a club team. Through track I found something that I was good at, and I made a lot of new friends along the way. I found a new community where I could completely be myself and through this, I was able to start healing from everything that was affecting me before. One thing I'm extremely passionate about is psychology. By going through such a hard time in my life, psychology and emotions, as well as how the brain works began to interest me. More recently, I have found an interest in specifically criminal and forensic psychology. Criminal psychology is the study of how criminals' minds work. In an applied field, criminal psychology can be used to understand criminal patterns, which would allow you to build a criminal profile. Criminal profiling uses pattern recognition to predict what a criminal's next move could be, thus allowing you to prevent it. Forensic psychology is used to bridge psychology and law. A criminal psychologist would be used in a courtroom to assess the people involved and determine whether they are competent enough to testify, apply expert testimony, and evaluate the people involved in a case. Although I'm not completely sure if I would rather become a criminal psychologist or a forensic psychologist, in either field, I would be able to help many people every day. Both jobs are dedicated to helping people and protecting them against criminals, both in the courtroom and in real life. As a criminal psychologist, I could help people by learning criminal patterns in order to prevent crimes from happening to innocent people. With this job i would work closely with law enforcement in order to help them solve and prevent crimes. As a forensic psychologist, I would be helping people by evaluating people in the courtroom in order to help a trial run more smoothly by offering my expert opinion and ensuring that everything is fair.