Why Do I Support NYCUP - Brooke Adams

I support NYCUP financially and prayerfully because, quite simply, it changed my life.

I attended the Spring Break Plunge in 2005, during my sophomore year of college. I had planned to come for the week, learn a few things, serve a few people, and go on my way. I was planning to go to Scotland for the summer to visit some friends. Then God changed my plans.

He called me to return to the Bronx for eight weeks that summer. I resisted. I shouted and stamped my foot. And then I went.

At NYCUP I learned hard lessons: how the color of my skin impacts my relationships with those around me. How my sins affect my community and hurt my brothers and sisters in Christ. At my internship, as I became frustrated with what I perceived to be a lack of organization and objective for the summer camp we were trying to run, I learned that in the Latino community in which I was working on the Lower East Side, my supervisors placed more value on the relationships I was developing with our teenagers than on how smoothly my creative writing class went. I learned the hard lesson that I would sometimes mentally "check out" of my internship during the day, until I could leave the projects and return to the NYCUP house, where I felt safer. And I realized that the kids I was beginning to love couldn't leave at the end of the day. And that broke my heart, and made me pay more attention.

When I went back to campus I began taking urban studies and education classes in addition to the literature courses required for my English major. I wrote a photographic essay for an urban studies class on structural racism: how the literal fabric of the city reflects the value the city places on its residents. The route I chose to document? The walk I had taken every day that summer, from the Astor Place subway stop to Avenue D. As you walk, the landscape changes: from a corner with three Starbucks on it, down a street with mostly white young professionals. Then the houses become more decrepit. Halfway to the East River stands a police station that occupies a fully city block. More faces on the street are Hispanic or African-American. And then you run into a dead-end: the projects. The sense of appalled injustice I felt every day I took that walk stays with me, and it motivates me to act. I support NYCUP because I encountered God's call to justice there, and it changed my life.

Brooke Adams is a graduate of Vassar College, Class of 2007. She and her fiance, Simeon, met at NYCUP in the summer of 2005.