A graduation address on community service

It is rare I get an opportunity to speak before a group of such esteemed people, since usually I sit out there pen and paper, diligently recording what is said at such events. So with this opportunity, I will offer up a lot of thank you’s and then, a challenge.

First, to my colleagues and friends in the LEAD Polk Class of 2018, I say thank you for putting up with me. To Missy Kendrick, our leader and mentor through these past months, thank you for not duct taping my mouth shut. Thank you as well to Blair Elrod and April Welch for being of great help in making our journey through the class a success.

To our loved ones, spouses and children who have longed for us to be home on Thursday nights, or waited for us to return from a field trip out in the community, or listened to us go on and on about the class and our experiences in it, we also owe you a debt of gratitude for your patience, too. Please don’t let us forget it.

Also, to all those who donated to our cause, thank you as well. You might not realize it yet, but the dollars and cents you provided have already gone a long way to ensuring that our community’s children have a greater connection to the world at large.

We owe much of this success to our classmate, Ryan Robinson, who stepped up with the help of the IT department at Family Savings Credit Union, were able to provide the computers now up and running at Camp Antioch.

Everyone of us here did just a small part, from offering encouragement to doing the heavy lifting of installing the computers. All of this is worth it if we changed just one life.

During one of our first classes which seems like a thousand years ago, I was taught the importance our life experiences have on who we become as adults. I saw firsthand how I faced few challenges in life, how many gifts I was handed from those who came before me.

The experience left me shaken. It forced me to see the great privilege I experienced up that others didn’t. I was lucky my parents pushed my sister and I toward creative pursuits, into museums and Broadway musicals. We got to see the greater world with our own eyes.

So many children never get the chance to experience moments we take for granted. They may never see the great paintings from past masters, or walk among the ghosts that haunt our area battlefields. The lucky among us have woken to see the brilliant sunrise light up the sky along a sandy beach, but it is not to be for others.

I can’t do anything about those particular slices of life that generations before and after are missing out on. I can, and with the help of my colleagues have, taken a step to make sure they understand the world is not so small as the borders of our county, and might do something else to enrich their experiences.

The computers we’ve installed at Camp Antioch serve as a tool to give children who otherwise wouldn’t be able to seek out opportunities outside of our community to learn and interact with the wider world.

Already I’m happy to report the children are using those computers, and we’re making plans to hold classes for groups to teach additional computer skills and open their eyes to all the uses available to them with our donation.

This is just a start. We as a group can do so much more. We as a community should be doing more.

We face a lot of challenges as a community. There are people who still live in poverty right here in this county, who don’t know tonight where they might find their next meal. We’ve got people who are lost within their minds and suffer from addictions and mental illnesses. Polk County is home to blight, to crime... to all the problems we face in across our great country.

All of these problems are on the face of them insurmountable obstacles to greater prosperity. We all find ourselves captured in one way or another by the swirling storms these issues cause locally and abroad. I see all of this on a daily basis, am forced to in my position as the truth-teller to the community.

In that role, I must admit that we should be doing much more here, there and everywhere to tackle and solve longstanding problems. My leadership up to this point has been that of observer, calling fair or foul on so many of the problems facing us all. That is not enough.

I’ll commit to you here tonight that I will work ever harder to ensure that I do my part to help others, and not just sit idly by and use the power of my pen to write down what happens.

I wish to have skin in the game. I want you to do the same. I want you to stand up and say ‘we want something better’ and go out and work for it.

It won’t be easy. No pursuit that is worth the effort ever is, nor should it be. But I will say this: in just the span of a few months, Camp Antioch went from an environment where it’s leader Janice Stewart had only her laptop and a printer. Now the children of her facility have 10 to use, she has a desktop at her desk of her own and there are four more ready to go into use if ever needed.

We as a group accomplished that by committing ourselves to the effort in just a few months, only spent a few hundred dollars, and will forever have an impact on what Camp Antioch can now do for the children they serve. Imagine how far we can go if we continuously redouble our efforts, and bring new leaders into the fold.

That is my great hope for the future, and my challenge to all here today: get up, get busy, and find a way to help. It is the only way to get to a better Polk County, a better Georgia, and a better United States of America.