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 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 her efforts. My first volunteering experience that I remember was serving food for migrant workers. If you are unfamiliar with migrant workers, they typically move to a new country or region to find work and save money to return to their families. Imagine the level of sacrifice that is required to move to an entirely 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 & facetim...

  Numbers Don't Lie Homelessness in the US increased by 12% in 2023, reaching a total of 653,104 people on the streets or in shelters. The US has over 15 million unoccupied residences (either home or rental units). One solution I can think of would be to house the individuals experiencing homelessness in unoccupied homes and have the government guarantee the rent to the homeowners (similar to section 8). This policy would incentivize property owners to find tenants among the people experiencing homelessness for their unoccupied dwellings so they could start making some money in the form of rent from the government. Doing this would enable people who are homeless not to have to worry about finding shelter and how they will make it through today, and perhaps allow them 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...

Biking California Biking is a passion of mine, and it's also one of the main ways that people who are homeless get around. My goal in biking and serving in shelters will be to illustrate and capture the conditions that hundreds of thousands of homeless people experience daily. I want to tell their stories and show people that almost anyone could find themselves on the streets. Often, the people who are homeless 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 from Sacramento to San Diego, California, 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 plan a trip like that myself. One thing I did know is that I was envious of his purpose and his freedom. He found a way to help many peo...

Lightbulb Moment I was addicted to my phone, just like many of you reading this article probably are. My specific vice was Instagram Reels. Thankfully, I promised myself I would never download a new social media app, so I won’t do TickTock. To quit, I set daily limitations for Instagram during screen time to control my usage, but those didn’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 helped me get my daily usage down to a reasonable 30 minutes a day on average. Hiding the app from my home screen helped me get down to 15 minutes a day, and hopefully, I will be able to 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 of the social media content I consumed. I started to follow a lot of creators who were posting about philosoph...