Cherry Willow Apparel

  The System Is Broken My first experience volunteering came when I was in my youth. I was raised Catholic and my mother was very passionate about giving back and helping others. She came from a lower middle class family where things were never easy and she had a lot of responsibilities around the house and caring for her younger siblings from an early age. She was very involved in the Church and involved her two youngest sons (my brother & I) in ger efforts. My first volunteering experience that I remember was serving food for migrant workers. If you are unfamiliar with migrant workers, they are typically people who move to a new country or region to find work and save money to send back to their family. Imagine the level of sacrifice that requires to move to a completely new country just to find the opportunity to provide for your family all the while not getting to see them or communicate with them outside of an occasional phone call or letter (before the days of cell phones &

  Numbers Don't Lie Homelessness in the US increased by 12% in 2023 reaching a total 653,104 people on the streets or in shelters. There are over 15 million unoccupied residences (either home or rental units) in the US. One solution I can think of would be to house the homeless individuals in the unoccupied residences and have the government guarantee the rent to the homeowners (similar to section 8). This policy would incentivise property owners to find homeless tenants for their unoccupied dwelling so they could start making some money in the form of rent from the government. Doing this would enable the homeless people to not have to worry about finding shelter and how they are going to make it through today and perhaps give them the opportunity to build a life for themselves from a stable foundation. In Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast & Slow” he highlights the increase in happiness that an individual receives when their basic needs (food, shelter, healthcare) are met i

Biking Coast to Coast It’s my goal to bike across the country staying in as many homeless shelters as I can to raise awareness about the people in the shelters. Biking is a passion of mine and it's also one of the main ways that homeless people get around. My goal in biking and staying in shelters will be to illustrate and capture the conditions that hundreds of thousands of homeless people experience every day. I want to tell their stories and show people that almost anyone could find themselves on the streets. Oftentimes the homeless people I encounter are some of the friendliest, most positive people I meet. Their ability to maintain positive attitudes despite their circumstances leaving them with little reason to be is inspiring! The idea to bike across the country was inspired by one of my college friends who rollerbladed across the country to raise money for No Kid Hungry. At the time I had no idea how he could do it, let alone think I could do it myself. One thing I did

Lightbulb Moment I find myself addicted to my phone, just like many of you reading this article probably are. My specific vice is Instagram Reels. Thankfully I made a promise to myself that I will never download a new social media app so I won’t do TickTock. I set daily limitations for Instagram in screen time in an effort to control my usage but those don’t always work. It’s too easy to click “Extra 15 Minutes” and get sucked into the dopamine dump which so many social sites represent. The screen time limitations have helped me get my daily usage down to a reasonable 30 minutes a day on average. My goal is to get down to 15 minutes and then hopefully escape the social media matrix altogether at some point. While I was battling my addiction I thought “how could I make the most of this screen time?”. The answer for me came in being mindful about the content I consumed while on social media. I started to follow a lot of creators who were posting about philosophy, psychology & mi