One Love One Community Week

No, I’m not amazing at math, and no, I have never eaten a dog. Being Chinese, I have faced stereotypes such as these throughout my life. The Chinese community played a major part in my overcoming the obstacles these stereotypes set in front of me. Communities can play a huge role in understanding culture, along with developing thoughts and opinions outside the stereotypical.

Community can be found in churches, cities and even schools. This sense of community in GBN is evident in our clubs. Clubs, such as the Jewish Learning Club and the Helenic Club, celebrate and embrace differences in ethnicity and culture.

Even with these clubs, I find that as a student, cultural acceptance is a major issue in high schools beyond our community. People tend to react through discrimination and hate when they don’t accept ideas that they don’t understand. With these exclusive views, many people do not take the time to even attempt to understand different cultures and ideas.

However, every person should be able to obtain cultural acceptance rather than face discrimination. Misunderstanding creates discrimination, and this can easily be avoided if people actually take the time to better understand diverse cultures.

Listening to foreign music that may not be mainstream, eating foods with funny names and learning about little details of an unfamiliar culture are all small actions that can be used to help achieve the bigger goal: cultural acceptance. People are much like mismatched puzzle pieces; every person has a different story and life, but when people start to understand each other, the different pieces come together to form a whole and completed puzzle. This just shows that when people learn to love and accept each other, a more unified and supportive community can be created.

I believe that GBN has great potential to be one of the first high schools to break away from the norm in order to promote love and acceptance for a closer community. Already, the GBN community has faced hard times, but the student body was able to come together stronger through it all. Light up the Darkness, for example, was a walk created by a few students who wanted to help combat depression.

Another example of the community coming together in support of one another is GBN Compliments, a page on Facebook that was recently created to show love and acceptance for people who aren’t necessarily the most popular or the most well-known. GBN also has an incredible variety of clubs to offer for students who are looking for a place to fit. Clubs differ all the way from Fellowship Club, DECA, to even Juggling Club. Each club has a range of people that all are willing to share their interests and accept newcomers. These clubs make up the different personalities and ideas of the GBN community, yet many students don’t even know about most of them.

An idea that I find to be beneficial to the community is One Love One Community (OLOC), a campaign sponsored by a couple students from DECA, the competitive business club. This project is based on the idea that though there are many negative stereotypes and misunderstandings among people, everyone has different interests and cultures that should be explored rather than shut down.

Through this OLOC campaign, we are planning to create understanding and a stronger union among students, faculty and parents with a key event called Community Week. Each day of Community Week will be dedicated to a different subject (Monday for religion, Tuesday for ethnicity, Wednesday for music, Thursday for awareness and Friday for personal interests/activities). By having multiple clubs participating for this week, students will be introduced to ideas and cultures they may not have been exposed to, and clubs will be able to give an accurate portrayal of how they see themselves. Clubs will be given the chance to show their unique identities and also the chance to interact with students through booths or performances.

GBN is truly an amazing school that is fighting to be different. When students are able to fully understand each other and learn to accept each other, the community will be at its best: one big green and gold family.