what my community means to me essay

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What Is Community and What Does It Mean to You? Essay Example

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While growing up, my actual definition of a community revolved around a shared neighborhood: “a group of people living together in the same locality.” I think this definition seems obsolete as it portrays how people used to live in pre-modern times. For most of us, our neighborhood is not the primary definer of our fellowship or identity anymore. Community involves people with mutual ties residing in a joint geographical location. The component uniting them is at the apex and is the meaning of the group. The word community is the origin and suffix of two words, namely ‘common’ and ‘unity.’ This means that a known thread ties a specific population. This paper discusses a review of Community-based on the modern setting.

Modernity ushered in the industrial revolution, including large organizations, factory production lines, and cities. Over time, the population balance has moved from rural regions to urban centers. Modernization and urbanization have affected the way people relate to one another. Furthermore, most humans in our modern world usually depend on a community for everyday determinations. It is evident that communities have plenty of resources; hence, the collective notion is presented. To me, community means nurturing human relationships for our well-being or survival. It also means a common thread that ties people as a single entity to back and support one another to overwhelm specific threats. We are members of diverse communities from school, neighborhood, family, work, etc., and humans repeatedly interchange based on the situation.

I know how the young generation, along with their families, have faced first-hand problems. They have been at the frontline fighting for a healthy and just community for everyone. I have the same perspective and use myself to keeping our dreams alive. I became a U.S dweller by being a student. Like many other community members and students who share the same class, my life became more tied to the social setting of communities of color in the United States. Community is where human finds comfort in challenging moments. People have the freedom to shift to another community when things are not working out where they reside. Personally, the community is where I find the balance between mental and physical well-being.

Community is vital to me because it saves us from the alienation and isolation that we fear. Going to school every day gives me a sense of connection and a safer ground around my colleagues. School is my other home, and community involves a place we can call home by finding one another. Furthermore, we are forced to shape community not just because we are merely survivors in our modern world sequence but to bring change to a society that deletes our differences. By tackling differences, humans confront economic and social foundations questions of our organization. Therefore, shaping community helps us put some order in an uneven world. However, there is a strange aspect concerning communities; a trusting, safe and comfortable community can be appealing that people can disremember other communities with understated prejudices.

Community workers deals with three types of community:

• Communities of identities: working with people who have a mutual sense of identity regarding attributes like disability, sexual orientation, or culture.
• Community of place: working with persons living in the same neighborhood

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How to Write the Community Essay – Guide with Examples (2023-24)

September 6, 2023

Students applying to college this year will inevitably confront the community essay. In fact, most students will end up responding to several community essay prompts for different schools. For this reason, you should know more than simply how to approach the community essay as a genre. Rather, you will want to learn how to decipher the nuances of each particular prompt, in order to adapt your response appropriately. In this article, we’ll show you how to do just that, through several community essay examples. These examples will also demonstrate how to avoid cliché and make the community essay authentically and convincingly your own.

Emphasis on Community

Do keep in mind that inherent in the word “community” is the idea of multiple people. The personal statement already provides you with a chance to tell the college admissions committee about yourself as an individual. The community essay, however, suggests that you depict yourself among others. You can use this opportunity to your advantage by showing off interpersonal skills, for example. Or, perhaps you wish to relate a moment that forged important relationships. This in turn will indicate what kind of connections you’ll make in the classroom with college peers and professors.

Apart from comprising numerous people, a community can appear in many shapes and sizes. It could be as small as a volleyball team, or as large as a diaspora. It could fill a town soup kitchen, or spread across five boroughs. In fact, due to the internet, certain communities today don’t even require a physical place to congregate. Communities can form around a shared identity, shared place, shared hobby, shared ideology, or shared call to action. They can even arise due to a shared yet unforeseen circumstance.

What is the Community Essay All About?             

In a nutshell, the community essay should exhibit three things:

• An aspect of yourself, 2. in the context of a community you belonged to, and 3. how this experience may shape your contribution to the community you’ll join in college.

It may look like a fairly simple equation: 1 + 2 = 3. However, each college will word their community essay prompt differently, so it’s important to look out for additional variables. One college may use the community essay as a way to glimpse your core values. Another may use the essay to understand how you would add to diversity on campus. Some may let you decide in which direction to take it—and there are many ways to go!

To get a better idea of how the prompts differ, let’s take a look at some real community essay prompts from the current admission cycle.

Sample 2023-2024 Community Essay Prompts

1) brown university.

“Students entering Brown often find that making their home on College Hill naturally invites reflection on where they came from. Share how an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you, and what unique contributions this might allow you to make to the Brown community. (200-250 words)”

A close reading of this prompt shows that Brown puts particular emphasis on place. They do this by using the words “home,” “College Hill,” and “where they came from.” Thus, Brown invites writers to think about community through the prism of place. They also emphasize the idea of personal growth or change, through the words “inspired or challenged you.” Therefore, Brown wishes to see how the place you grew up in has affected you. And, they want to know how you in turn will affect their college community.

“NYU was founded on the belief that a student’s identity should not dictate the ability for them to access higher education. That sense of opportunity for all students, of all backgrounds, remains a part of who we are today and a critical part of what makes us a world-class university. Our community embraces diversity, in all its forms, as a cornerstone of the NYU experience.

We would like to better understand how your experiences would help us to shape and grow our diverse community. Please respond in 250 words or less.”

Here, NYU places an emphasis on students’ “identity,” “backgrounds,” and “diversity,” rather than any physical place. (For some students, place may be tied up in those ideas.) Furthermore, while NYU doesn’t ask specifically how identity has changed the essay writer, they do ask about your “experience.” Take this to mean that you can still recount a specific moment, or several moments, that work to portray your particular background. You should also try to link your story with NYU’s values of inclusivity and opportunity.

3) University of Washington

“Our families and communities often define us and our individual worlds. Community might refer to your cultural group, extended family, religious group, neighborhood or school, sports team or club, co-workers, etc. Describe the world you come from and how you, as a product of it, might add to the diversity of the UW. (300 words max) Tip: Keep in mind that the UW strives to create a community of students richly diverse in cultural backgrounds, experiences, values and viewpoints.”

UW ’s community essay prompt may look the most approachable, for they help define the idea of community. You’ll notice that most of their examples (“families,” “cultural group, extended family, religious group, neighborhood”…) place an emphasis on people. This may clue you in on their desire to see the relationships you’ve made. At the same time, UW uses the words “individual” and “richly diverse.” They, like NYU, wish to see how you fit in and stand out, in order to boost campus diversity.

Writing Your First Community Essay

Begin by picking which community essay you’ll write first. (For practical reasons, you’ll probably want to go with whichever one is due earliest.) Spend time doing a close reading of the prompt, as we’ve done above. Underline key words. Try to interpret exactly what the prompt is asking through these keywords.

Next, brainstorm. I recommend doing this on a blank piece of paper with a pencil. Across the top, make a row of headings. These might be the communities you’re a part of, or the components that make up your identity. Then, jot down descriptive words underneath in each column—whatever comes to you. These words may invoke people and experiences you had with them, feelings, moments of growth, lessons learned, values developed, etc. Now, narrow in on the idea that offers the richest material and that corresponds fully with the prompt.

Lastly, write! You’ll definitely want to describe real moments, in vivid detail. This will keep your essay original, and help you avoid cliché. However, you’ll need to summarize the experience and answer the prompt succinctly, so don’t stray too far into storytelling mode.

How To Adapt Your Community Essay

Once your first essay is complete, you’ll need to adapt it to the other colleges involving community essays on your list. Again, you’ll want to turn to the prompt for a close reading, and recognize what makes this prompt different from the last. For example, let’s say you’ve written your essay for UW about belonging to your swim team, and how the sports dynamics shaped you. Adapting that essay to Brown’s prompt could involve more of a focus on place. You may ask yourself, how was my swim team in Alaska different than the swim teams we competed against in other states?

Once you’ve adapted the content, you’ll also want to adapt the wording to mimic the prompt. For example, let’s say your UW essay states, “Thinking back to my years in the pool…” As you adapt this essay to Brown’s prompt, you may notice that Brown uses the word “reflection.” Therefore, you might change this sentence to “Reflecting back on my years in the pool…” While this change is minute, it cleverly signals to the reader that you’ve paid attention to the prompt, and are giving that school your full attention.

What to Avoid When Writing the Community Essay  

• Avoid cliché. Some students worry that their idea is cliché, or worse, that their background or identity is cliché. However, what makes an essay cliché is not the content, but the way the content is conveyed. This is where your voice and your descriptions become essential.
• Avoid giving too many examples. Stick to one community, and one or two anecdotes arising from that community that allow you to answer the prompt fully.
• Don’t exaggerate or twist facts. Sometimes students feel they must make themselves sound more “diverse” than they feel they are. Luckily, diversity is not a feeling. Likewise, diversity does not simply refer to one’s heritage. If the prompt is asking about your identity or background, you can show the originality of your experiences through your actions and your thinking.

Community Essay Examples and Analysis

Brown university community essay example.

I used to hate the NYC subway. I’ve taken it since I was six, going up and down Manhattan, to and from school. By high school, it was a daily nightmare. Spending so much time underground, underneath fluorescent lighting, squashed inside a rickety, rocking train car among strangers, some of whom wanted to talk about conspiracy theories, others who had bedbugs or B.O., or who manspread across two seats, or bickered—it wore me out. The challenge of going anywhere seemed absurd. I dreaded the claustrophobia and disgruntlement.

Yet the subway also inspired my understanding of community. I will never forget the morning I saw a man, several seats away, slide out of his seat and hit the floor. The thump shocked everyone to attention. What we noticed: he appeared drunk, possibly homeless. I was digesting this when a second man got up and, through a sort of awkward embrace, heaved the first man back into his seat. The rest of us had stuck to subway social codes: don’t step out of line. Yet this second man’s silent actions spoke loudly. They said, “I care.”

That day I realized I belong to a group of strangers. What holds us together is our transience, our vulnerabilities, and a willingness to assist. This community is not perfect but one in motion, a perpetual work-in-progress. Now I make it my aim to hold others up. I plan to contribute to the Brown community by helping fellow students and strangers in moments of precariousness.    

Brown University Community Essay Example Analysis

Here the student finds an original way to write about where they come from. The subway is not their home, yet it remains integral to ideas of belonging. The student shows how a community can be built between strangers, in their responsibility toward each other. The student succeeds at incorporating key words from the prompt (“challenge,” “inspired” “Brown community,” “contribute”) into their community essay.

UW Community Essay Example

I grew up in Hawaii, a world bound by water and rich in diversity. In school we learned that this sacred land was invaded, first by Captain Cook, then by missionaries, whalers, traders, plantation owners, and the U.S. government. My parents became part of this problematic takeover when they moved here in the 90s. The first community we knew was our church congregation. At the beginning of mass, we shook hands with our neighbors. We held hands again when we sang the Lord’s Prayer. I didn’t realize our church wasn’t “normal” until our diocese was informed that we had to stop dancing hula and singing Hawaiian hymns. The order came from the Pope himself.

Eventually, I lost faith in God and organized institutions. I thought the banning of hula—an ancient and pure form of expression—seemed medieval, ignorant, and unfair, given that the Hawaiian religion had already been stamped out. I felt a lack of community and a distrust for any place in which I might find one. As a postcolonial inhabitant, I could never belong to the Hawaiian culture, no matter how much I valued it. Then, I was shocked to learn that Queen Ka’ahumanu herself had eliminated the Kapu system, a strict code of conduct in which women were inferior to men. Next went the Hawaiian religion. Queen Ka’ahumanu burned all the temples before turning to Christianity, hoping this religion would offer better opportunities for her people.

Community Essay (Continued)

I’m not sure what to make of this history. Should I view Queen Ka’ahumanu as a feminist hero, or another failure in her islands’ tragedy? Nothing is black and white about her story, but she did what she thought was beneficial to her people, regardless of tradition. From her story, I’ve learned to accept complexity. I can disagree with institutionalized religion while still believing in my neighbors. I am a product of this place and their presence. At UW, I plan to add to campus diversity through my experience, knowing that diversity comes with contradictions and complications, all of which should be approached with an open and informed mind.

UW Community Essay Example Analysis

This student also manages to weave in words from the prompt (“family,” “community,” “world,” “product of it,” “add to the diversity,” etc.). Moreover, the student picks one of the examples of community mentioned in the prompt, (namely, a religious group,) and deepens their answer by addressing the complexity inherent in the community they’ve been involved in. While the student displays an inner turmoil about their identity and participation, they find a way to show how they’d contribute to an open-minded campus through their values and intellectual rigor.

What’s Next

For more on supplemental essays and essay writing guides, check out the following articles:

• How to Write the Why This Major Essay + Example
• How to Write the Overcoming Challenges Essay + Example
• How to Start a College Essay – 12 Techniques and Tips
• College Essay

Kaylen Baker

With a BA in Literary Studies from Middlebury College, an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, and a Master’s in Translation from Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, Kaylen has been working with students on their writing for over five years. Previously, Kaylen taught a fiction course for high school students as part of Columbia Artists/Teachers, and served as an English Language Assistant for the French National Department of Education. Kaylen is an experienced writer/translator whose work has been featured in Los Angeles Review, Hybrid, San Francisco Bay Guardian, France Today, and Honolulu Weekly, among others.

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Blog > Essay Advice , Supplementals > How to Write a Community Supplemental Essay (with Examples)

How to Write a Community Supplemental Essay (with Examples)

Admissions officer reviewed by Ben Bousquet, M.Ed Former Vanderbilt University

Written by Kylie Kistner, MA Former Willamette University Admissions

Key Takeaway

If you're applying to college, there's a good chance you'll be writing a Community Essay for one (or lots) of your supplementals. In this post, we show you how to write one that stands out.

This post is one in a series of posts about the supplemental essays . You can read our core “how-to” supplemental post here .

When schools admit you, they aren’t just admitting you to be a student. They’re also admitting you to be a community member.

Community supplemental essays help universities understand how you would fit into their school community. At their core, Community prompts allow you to explicitly show an admissions officer why you would be the perfect addition to the school’s community.

Let’s get into what a Community supplemental essay is, what strategies you can use to stand out, and which steps you can take to write the best one possible.

What is a Community supplemental essay?

Community supplemental essay prompts come in a number of forms. Some ask you to talk about a community you already belong to, while others ask you to expand on how you would contribute to the school you’re applying to.

Let’s look at a couple of examples.

1: Rice University

Rice is lauded for creating a collaborative atmosphere that enhances the quality of life for all members of our campus community. The Residential College System and undergraduate life is heavily influenced by the unique life experiences and cultural tradition each student brings. What life perspectives would you contribute to the Rice community? 500 word limit.

2: Swarthmore College

Swarthmore students’ worldviews are often forged by their prior experiences and exposure to ideas and values. Our students are often mentored, supported, and developed by their immediate context—in their neighborhoods, communities of faith, families, and classrooms. Reflect on what elements of your home, school, or community have shaped you or positively impacted you. How have you grown or changed because of the influence of your community?

Community Essay Strategy

Your Community essay strategy will likely depend on the kind of Community essay you’re asked to write. As with all supplemental essays, the goal of any community essay should be to write about the strengths that make you a good fit for the school in question.

How to write about a community to which you belong

Most Community essay prompts give you a lot of flexibility in how you define “community.” That means that the community you write about probably isn’t limited to the more formal communities you’re part of like family or school. Your communities can also include friend groups, athletic teams, clubs and organizations, online communities, and more.

There are two things you should consider before you even begin writing your essay.

What school values is the prompt looking for?

Whether they’re listed implicitly or explicitly, Community essay prompts often include values that you can align your essay response with.

To explain, let’s look at this short supplemental prompt from the University of Notre Dame:

If you were given unlimited resources to help solve one problem in your community, what would it be and how would you accomplish it?

Now, this prompt doesn’t outright say anything about values. But the question itself, even being so short, implies a few values:

a) That you should be active in your community

b) That you should be aware of your community’s problems

c) That you know how to problem-solve

d) That you’re able to collaborate with your community

After dissecting the prompt for these values, you can write a Community essay that showcases how you align with them.

What else are admissions officers learning about you through the community you choose?

In addition to showing what a good community member you are, your Community supplemental essays can also let you talk about other parts of your experience. Doing so can help you find the perfect narrative balance among all your essays.

Let’s use a quick example.

If I’m a student applying to computer science programs, then I might choose to write about the community I’ve found in my robotics team. More specifically, I might write about my role as cheerleader and principle problem-solver of my robotics team. Writing about my robotics team allows me to do two things:

Show that I’m a really supportive person in my community, and

Show that I’m on a robotics team that means a lot to me.

Now, it’s important not to co-opt your Community essay and turn it into a secret Extracurricular essay , but it’s important to be thinking about all the information an admissions officer will learn about you based on the community you choose to focus on.

How to write about what you’ll contribute to your new community

The other segment of Community essays are those that ask you to reflect on how your specific experiences will contribute to your new community.

It’s important that you read each prompt carefully so you know what to focus your essay on.

These kinds of Community prompts let you explicitly drive home why you belong at the school you’re applying to.

Here are two suggestions to get you started.

Draw out the values.

This kind of Community prompt also typically contains some kind of reference to values. The Rice prompt is a perfect example of this:

Rice is lauded for creating a collaborative atmosphere that enhances the quality of life for all members of our campus community . The Residential College System and undergraduate life is heavily influenced by the unique life experiences and cultural tradition each student brings. What life perspectives would you contribute to the Rice community? 500 word limit.

There are several values here:

a) Collaboration

b) Enhancing quality of life

c) For all members of the community

d) Residential system (AKA not just in the classroom)

e) Sharing unique life experiences and cultural traditions with other students

Note that the actual question of the prompt is “What life perspectives would you contribute to the Rice community?” If you skimmed the beginning of the prompt to get to the question, you’d miss all these juicy details about what a Rice student looks like.

But with them in mind, you can choose to write about a life perspective that you hold that aligns with these five values.

Find detailed connections to the school.

Since these kinds of Community prompts ask you what you would contribute to the school community, this is your chance to find the most logical and specific connections you can. Browse the school website and social media to find groups, clubs, activities, communities, or support systems that are related to your personal background and experiences. When appropriate based on the prompt, these kinds of connections can help you show how good a fit you are for the school and community.

How to do Community Essay school research

Looking at school values means doing research on the school’s motto, mission statement, and strategic plans. This information is all carefully curated by a university to reflect the core values, initiatives, and goals of an institution. They can guide your Community essay by giving you more values options to include.

We’ll use the Rice mission statement as an example. It says,

As a leading research university with a distinctive commitment to undergraduate education, Rice University aspires to pathbreaking research , unsurpassed teaching , and contribution to the betterment of our world . It seeks to fulfill this mission by cultivating a diverse community of learning and discovery that produces leaders across the spectrum of human endeavor.

I’ve bolded just a few of the most important values we can draw out.

As we’ll see in the next section, I can use these values to brainstorm my Community essay.

How to write a Community Supplemental Essay

Step 1: Read the prompt closely & identify any relevant values.

When writing any supplemental essay, your first step should always be to closely read the prompt. You can even annotate it. It’s important to do this so you know exactly what is being asked of you.

With Community essays specifically, you can also highlight any values you think the prompt is asking you to elaborate on.

Keeping track of the prompt will make sure that you’re not missing anything an admissions officer will be on the lookout for.

Step 2: Brainstorm communities you’re involved in.

If you’re writing a Community essay that asks you to discuss a community you belong to, then your next step will be brainstorming all of your options.

As you brainstorm, keep a running list. Your list can include all kinds of communities you’re involved in.

Communities:

• Model United Nations
• Youth group
• Instagram book club
• My Discord group

Step 3: Think about the role(s) you play in your selected community.

Narrow down your community list to a couple of options. For each remaining option, identify the roles you played, actions you took, and significance you’ve drawn from being part of that group.

Community: Orchestra

These three columns help you get at the most important details you need to include in your community essay.

Step 4: Identify any relevant connections to the school.

Depending on the question the prompt asks of you, your last step may be to do some school research.

Let’s return to the Rice example.

After researching the Rice mission statement, we know that Rice values community members who want to contribute to the “betterment of our world.”

Ah ha! Now we have something solid to work from.

With this value in mind, I can choose to write about a perspective that shows my investment in creating a better world. Maybe that perspective is a specific kind of fundraising tenacity. Maybe it’s always looking for those small improvements that have a big impact. Maybe it’s some combination of both. Whatever it is, I can write a supplemental essay that reflects the values of the university.

Community Essay Mistakes

While writing Community essays may seem fairly straightforward, there are actually a number of ways they can go awry. Specifically, there are three common mistakes students make that you should be on the lookout for.

They don’t address the specific requests of the prompt.

As with all supplemental essays, your Community essay needs to address what the prompt is asking you to do. In Community essays especially, you’ll need to assess whether you’re being asked to talk about a community you’re already part of or the community you hope to join.

Neglecting to read the prompt also means neglecting any help the prompt gives you in terms of values. Remember that you can get clues as to what the school is looking for by analyzing the prompt’s underlying values.

They’re too vague.

Community essays can also go awry when they’re too vague. Your Community essay should reflect on specific, concrete details about your experience. This is especially the case when a Community prompt asks you to talk about a specific moment, challenge, or sequence of events.

Don’t shy away from details. Instead, use them to tell a compelling story.

They don’t make any connections to the school.

Finally, Community essays that don’t make any connections to the school in question miss out on a valuable opportunity to show school fit. Recall from our supplemental essay guide that you should always write supplemental essays with an eye toward showing how well you fit into a particular community.

Community essays are the perfect chance to do that, so try to find relevant and logical school connections to include.

Community Supplemental Essay Example

Example essay: robotics community.

University of Michigan: Everyone belongs to many different communities and/or groups defined by (among other things) shared geography, religion, ethnicity, income, cuisine, interest, race, ideology, or intellectual heritage. Choose one of the communities to which you belong, and describe that community and your place within it. (Required for all applicants; minimum 100 words/maximum 300 words)

From Blendtec’s “Will it Blend?” videos to ZirconTV’s “How to Use a Stud Finder,” I’m a YouTube how-to fiend. This propensity for fix-it knowledge has not only served me well, but it’s also been a lifesaver for my favorite community: my robotics team(( The writer explicitly states the community they’ll be focusing on.)) . While some students spend their after-school hours playing sports or video games, I spend mine tinkering in my garage with three friends, one of whom is made of metal.

Last year, I Googled more fixes than I can count. Faulty wires, misaligned soldering, and failed code were no match for me. My friends watched in awe as I used Boolean Operators to find exactly the information I sought.(( The writer clearly articulates their place in the community.)) But as I agonized over chassis reviews, other unsearchable problems arose.

First((This entire paragraph fulfills the “describe that community” direction in the prompt.)) , there was the matter of registering for our first robotics competition. None of us familiar with bureaucracy, David stepped up and made some calls. His maturity and social skills helped us immediately land a spot. The next issue was branding. Our robot needed a name and a logo, and Connor took it upon himself to learn graphic design. We all voted on Archie’s name and logo design to find the perfect match. And finally, someone needed to enter the ring. Archie took it from there, winning us first place.

The best part about being in this robotics community is the collaboration and exchange of knowledge.((The writer emphasizes a clear strength: collaboration within their community. It’s clear that the writer values all contributions to the team.))  Although I can figure out how to fix anything, it’s impossible to google social skills, creativity, or courage. For that information, only friends will do. I can only imagine the fixes I’ll bring to the University of Michigan and the skills I’ll learn in return at part of the Manufacturing Robotics community((The writer ends with a forward-looking connection to the school in question.)) .

Want to see even more supplemental essay examples? Check out our college essay examples post . 

Liked that? Try this next.

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How to Write a College Essay (Exercises + Examples)

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How to Write the “Community” and “Issue” Yale Essays

This article was written based on the information and opinions presented by Hale Jaeger in a CollegeVine livestream. You can watch the full livestream for more info. 

What’s Covered

The “community” essay: choosing a community, structuring the “community” essay, the “issue” essay: choosing your issue, issues to avoid, structuring the “issue” essay.

In this article, we discuss strategies for writing Yale University ’s “Community” and “Issue” supplemental essays. Applicants using the Common App or Coalition Application to apply to Yale are required to choose one of these two prompts and respond to it in 400 words or fewer. The first prompt is the “Issue” essay prompt, which reads:

Yale carries out its mission “through the free exchange of ideas in an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community.” Reflect on a time when you exchanged ideas about an important issue with someone holding an opposing view. How did the experience lead you either to change your opinion or to sharpen your reasons for holding onto it? (400 words)

The second prompt is the “Community” essay prompt:

Reflect on a time when you have worked to enhance a community to which you feel connected. Why have these efforts been meaningful to you? You may define community however you like. (400 words)

In this article, we discuss choosing topics for each of these essays and strategies to structure them.

The Yale “Community” essay prompt clearly states that you can define community however you wish, which means you can choose to write about any kind of community that you feel you are a member of. When considering potential communities, start by brainstorming any groups you are part of that have defined boundaries, such as your town, school, team, or religious organization.

There are also informal communities that you could choose from, such as your friend group, family, coworkers, or neighborhood. Even though these groups have less of a formal definition, they are still communities. What matters most is that the community that you choose is important to you, that you have contributed to it, and that you have learned something from it.

When structuring this essay, think about it in three sections. The first introduces the community, the second demonstrates your contributions to the community, and the third explains what the community has given and taught you. As you write, keep in mind that this essay is a two-way street; you want to show what you have given to your community and what it has given you.

Introduce the Community

The first step in writing this essay is to introduce the community. Explain who is part of the community and what the community is like. Highlight the community’s structure by demonstrating how you are part of it and how you interact with your peers, superiors, or inferiors within the group. It is also important to depict the community’s dynamic in this part of the essay. For example, is it fun, relaxed, and loving, or is it rigorous, challenging, and thought provoking? 

Show What You’ve Contributed

The next section of this essay should discuss your engagement with this community and what you’ve contributed to it. Consider what you’ve done, what initiatives you’ve brought to the community, and what your role is within it. You can also highlight anything that you had to give up to be part of the community.

Show What You’ve Learned

The last part of this essay should discuss what you have gained and learned from this community. For this portion, consider things that the community has given and taught you, as well as ways that it has helped you grow. Think about how this community has shaped who you are and who you are becoming.

The other prompt option is the “Issue” essay. The first step for this one is to define what your issue is. It doesn’t matter what you choose, as long as it’s something that has enough nuance for you to talk about it in a complex and intelligent way.

Make sure it’s an issue of some relevance to you; otherwise, it will come across as dispassionate. As you write this essay, you should show that you are somebody who cares about an issue that they think is significant. 

Grand Issues

When selecting an issue, you can either choose a grand one or a local one. Grand issues are big, unsolved problems that are common in society, such as cancer, homelessness, or food insecurity. If you do choose a grand issue, remind yourself of its personal importance. While grand issues are full of nuance, they may lack personal meaning. Examples of personal connections to grand issues could be if you have encountered homelessness, lived with food insecurity, or have lost someone to cancer.

Local Issues

Another topic option is to write about an issue that is local. For example, maybe your high school has a teaching staff that doesn’t represent the diversity of the student body. While this is not a global issue, it’s something that strongly affects you and your community. 

Perhaps you live in a town that is directly suffering from the opioid crisis, or you have divorced parents and have started an activist group for children of divorced parents. Both of these examples of local issues also have personal importance. 

When choosing a topic to write about, avoid issues that you don’t have any connection to and that aren’t personally important. These are often problems that are too grand and can’t be made personal, such as world peace. 

Another category of issues to avoid is anything that doesn’t align with Yale’s values. Yale, like most universities in the United States, generally has a liberal lean. As such, it is likely not in your best interest to write a strong defense of socially conservative values. While there are values that you are free to hold and express—and Yale welcomes people of all backgrounds and ideologies—this essay is not necessarily the best place to express them.

You are most likely applying to Yale because it’s a place that you want to be and have something in common with. This essay is a great opportunity to emphasize the values that you share with the university rather than the things that divide you. Since a reader only has five to seven minutes to go over your entire application, you don’t want them to come away with the sense that you are somebody who won’t thrive at Yale.

Define the Issue and Highlight Past Experiences

When writing the “Issue” essay, start by identifying the issue and sharing how you came across it. Then, provide insight into why it is meaningful to you and your relationship with it.

Next, show the reader how you have already engaged with the problem by detailing your past with the issue. 

Discuss Future Plans to Approach the Issue

After this, you can look forward and discuss your future with this issue. A great strategy is to write about how your Yale education will address the problem and how your field of study relates to it. You can also highlight any Yale-specific programs or opportunities that will give you insight or context for tackling the issue. 

Alternatively, if there is something about this issue that Yale’s academic flexibility will enable you to explore, you can share that in this part of the essay. For example, maybe you are interested in health policy and plan to take classes in the sciences. You also want to take classes in the history of health, science, and medicine, as well as political science and economics courses, which you plan to utilize to write new healthcare policies.

Another option is to focus on an aspect of Yale’s community, such as peers, professors, or mentors who will help develop your ability to navigate the issue. Ultimately, you want to demonstrate in this essay that what (and how) you learn at Yale will prepare you to take action and move forward with confronting your issue in the future.

Related CollegeVine Blog Posts

The Community Essay

“Duke University seeks a talented, engaged student body that embodies the wide range of human experience; we believe that the diversity of our students makes our community stronger. If you’d like to share a perspective you bring or experiences you’ve had to help us understand you better—perhaps related to a community you belong to, your sexual orientation or gender identity, or your family or cultural background—we encourage you to do so. Real people are reading your application, and we want to do our best to understand and appreciate the real people applying to Duke.” 

As with every essay you ship off to admissions – think about something you want admissions to know that hasn’t been represented. What can you expand upon to show your versatility, passion and ability to connect with the world around you?

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Category: Admissions , College Admissions , Essay Tips , Essay Writing , Supplemental Essays

Tags: admissions essay , admissions help , application , application supplement , applications , brainstorming , college admissions , college admissions essay , college application , college application help , college applications , college essay , common application , supplemental essays

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What Does Community Mean to Me?

Justina Crawford, Program Officer

In November 2016, I relocated to the Greater Boston area from Dayton, OH just days after the Presidential election. As I reflect upon my first few days, months, and years in Boston, I was always asked “where do you live” or “where are you from?” Were people really this curious about my upbringing? Is there an initiation process in which I need to go through in order to be an official “Bostonian”?

After more than two years, I’m yet again reflecting upon these questions but most importantly, how so many of us yearn to belong to something – community. As an arts and culture professional who has worked in public spaces to increase access, well-being, and participation in the arts for “at-promise” communities, I continue to find different ways to engage with people who are unlike me to better understand community. As I continue to learn about the arts and culture landscape of the Commonwealth as a program officer of the Community Initiative, I too am curious about what community means to the individuals, organizations, leaders, neighbors, and cities that are found within and outside it. But before embarking upon this journey, I’d like to share what community means to me.

To me, community can be defined as the moments involving food that is shared amongst family and friends ; its moments in our lives that become immortalized through lived arts & cultural experiences, and more importantly, the traditions that we create to preserve and connect us. It is a changing, impactful, and powerful entity that requires commitment.

Thus, community is a space where I can grow, reflect, and share experiences with others who may or may not be like me, but at the end of the day, am still a part of it in some way.

For me, it is essential to remember that as we live in a nation that is divided by its inequities, it is worthwhile for us to be open to engaging with new faces and becoming familiar with new communities. Through my role at Mass Cultural Council, I look forward to learning from locals about their communities in hopes of sharing them with you. But in the meantime, what does community mean to you?

Power of Culture Blog

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‘De La Puente’ Perseveres Through it All

Artist Kevin Angulo discusses his public mural project funded by Haverhill Cultural Council

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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, how to write a great community service essay.

College Admissions , Extracurriculars

Are you applying to a college or a scholarship that requires a community service essay? Do you know how to write an essay that will impress readers and clearly show the impact your work had on yourself and others?

Read on to learn step-by-step instructions for writing a great community service essay that will help you stand out and be memorable.

What Is a Community Service Essay? Why Do You Need One?

A community service essay is an essay that describes the volunteer work you did and the impact it had on you and your community. Community service essays can vary widely depending on specific requirements listed in the application, but, in general, they describe the work you did, why you found the work important, and how it benefited people around you.

Community service essays are typically needed for two reasons:

#1: To Apply to College

• Some colleges require students to write community service essays as part of their application or to be eligible for certain scholarships.
• You may also choose to highlight your community service work in your personal statement.

#2: To Apply for Scholarships

• Some scholarships are specifically awarded to students with exceptional community service experiences, and many use community service essays to help choose scholarship recipients.
• Green Mountain College offers one of the most famous of these scholarships. Their "Make a Difference Scholarship" offers full tuition, room, and board to students who have demonstrated a significant, positive impact through their community service

Getting Started With Your Essay

In the following sections, I'll go over each step of how to plan and write your essay. I'll also include sample excerpts for you to look through so you can get a better idea of what readers are looking for when they review your essay.

Step 1: Know the Essay Requirements

Before your start writing a single word, you should be familiar with the essay prompt. Each college or scholarship will have different requirements for their essay, so make sure you read these carefully and understand them.

Specific things to pay attention to include:

• Length requirement
• Application deadline
• The main purpose or focus of the essay
• If the essay should follow a specific structure

Below are three real community service essay prompts. Read through them and notice how much they vary in terms of length, detail, and what information the writer should include.

From the Equitable Excellence Scholarship:

"Describe your outstanding achievement in depth and provide the specific planning, training, goals, and steps taken to make the accomplishment successful. Include details about your role and highlight leadership you provided. Your essay must be a minimum of 350 words but not more than 600 words."

From the Laura W. Bush Traveling Scholarship:

"Essay (up to 500 words, double spaced) explaining your interest in being considered for the award and how your proposed project reflects or is related to both UNESCO's mandate and U.S. interests in promoting peace by sharing advances in education, science, culture, and communications."

From the LULAC National Scholarship Fund:

"Please type or print an essay of 300 words (maximum) on how your academic studies will contribute to your personal & professional goals. In addition, please discuss any community service or extracurricular activities you have been involved in that relate to your goals."

Step 2: Brainstorm Ideas

Even after you understand what the essay should be about, it can still be difficult to begin writing. Answer the following questions to help brainstorm essay ideas. You may be able to incorporate your answers into your essay.

• What community service activity that you've participated in has meant the most to you?
• What is your favorite memory from performing community service?
• Why did you decide to begin community service?
• What made you decide to volunteer where you did?
• How has your community service changed you?
• How has your community service helped others?
• How has your community service affected your plans for the future?

You don't need to answer all the questions, but if you find you have a lot of ideas for one of two of them, those may be things you want to include in your essay.

Writing Your Essay

How you structure your essay will depend on the requirements of the scholarship or school you are applying to. You may give an overview of all the work you did as a volunteer, or highlight a particularly memorable experience. You may focus on your personal growth or how your community benefited.

Regardless of the specific structure requested, follow the guidelines below to make sure your community service essay is memorable and clearly shows the impact of your work.

Samples of mediocre and excellent essays are included below to give you a better idea of how you should draft your own essay.

Step 1: Hook Your Reader In

You want the person reading your essay to be interested, so your first sentence should hook them in and entice them to read more. A good way to do this is to start in the middle of the action. Your first sentence could describe you helping build a house, releasing a rescued animal back to the wild, watching a student you tutored read a book on their own, or something else that quickly gets the reader interested. This will help set your essay apart and make it more memorable.

Compare these two opening sentences:

"I have volunteered at the Wishbone Pet Shelter for three years."

"The moment I saw the starving, mud-splattered puppy brought into the shelter with its tail between its legs, I knew I'd do whatever I could to save it."

The first sentence is a very general, bland statement. The majority of community service essays probably begin a lot like it, but it gives the reader little information and does nothing to draw them in. On the other hand, the second sentence begins immediately with action and helps persuade the reader to keep reading so they can learn what happened to the dog.

Step 2: Discuss the Work You Did

Once you've hooked your reader in with your first sentence, tell them about your community service experiences. State where you work, when you began working, how much time you've spent there, and what your main duties include. This will help the reader quickly put the rest of the essay in context and understand the basics of your community service work.

Not including basic details about your community service could leave your reader confused.

Step 3: Include Specific Details

It's the details of your community service that make your experience unique and memorable, so go into the specifics of what you did.

For example, don't just say you volunteered at a nursing home; talk about reading Mrs. Johnson her favorite book, watching Mr. Scott win at bingo, and seeing the residents play games with their grandchildren at the family day you organized. Try to include specific activities, moments, and people in your essay. Having details like these let the readers really understand what work you did and how it differs from other volunteer experiences.

Compare these two passages:

"For my volunteer work, I tutored children at a local elementary school. I helped them improve their math skills and become more confident students."

"As a volunteer at York Elementary School, I worked one-on-one with second and third graders who struggled with their math skills, particularly addition, subtraction, and fractions. As part of my work, I would create practice problems and quizzes and try to connect math to the students' interests. One of my favorite memories was when Sara, a student I had been working with for several weeks, told me that she enjoyed the math problems I had created about a girl buying and selling horses so much that she asked to help me create math problems for other students."

The first passage only gives basic information about the work done by the volunteer; there is very little detail included, and no evidence is given to support her claims. How did she help students improve their math skills? How did she know they were becoming more confident?

The second passage is much more detailed. It recounts a specific story and explains more fully what kind of work the volunteer did, as well as a specific instance of a student becoming more confident with her math skills. Providing more detail in your essay helps support your claims as well as make your essay more memorable and unique.

Step 4: Show Your Personality

It would be very hard to get a scholarship or place at a school if none of your readers felt like they knew much about you after finishing your essay, so make sure that your essay shows your personality. The way to do this is to state your personal strengths, then provide examples to support your claims. Take some time to think about which parts of your personality you would like your essay to highlight, then write about specific examples to show this.

• If you want to show that you're a motivated leader, describe a time when you organized an event or supervised other volunteers.
• If you want to show your teamwork skills, write about a time you helped a group of people work together better.
• If you want to show that you're a compassionate animal lover, write about taking care of neglected shelter animals and helping each of them find homes.

Step 5: State What You Accomplished

After you have described your community service and given specific examples of your work, you want to begin to wrap your essay up by stating your accomplishments. What was the impact of your community service? Did you build a house for a family to move into? Help students improve their reading skills? Clean up a local park? Make sure the impact of your work is clear; don't be worried about bragging here.

If you can include specific numbers, that will also strengthen your essay. Saying "I delivered meals to 24 home-bound senior citizens" is a stronger example than just saying "I delivered meals to lots of senior citizens."

Also be sure to explain why your work matters. Why is what you did important? Did it provide more parks for kids to play in? Help students get better grades? Give people medical care who would otherwise not have gotten it? This is an important part of your essay, so make sure to go into enough detail that your readers will know exactly what you accomplished and how it helped your community.

"My biggest accomplishment during my community service was helping to organize a family event at the retirement home. The children and grandchildren of many residents attended, and they all enjoyed playing games and watching movies together."

"The community service accomplishment that I'm most proud of is the work I did to help organize the First Annual Family Fun Day at the retirement home. My job was to design and organize fun activities that senior citizens and their younger relatives could enjoy. The event lasted eight hours and included ten different games, two performances, and a movie screening with popcorn. Almost 200 residents and family members attended throughout the day. This event was important because it provided an opportunity for senior citizens to connect with their family members in a way they aren't often able to. It also made the retirement home seem more fun and enjoyable to children, and we have seen an increase in the number of kids coming to visit their grandparents since the event."

The second passage is stronger for a variety of reasons. First, it goes into much more detail about the work the volunteer did. The first passage only states that she helped "organize a family event." That really doesn't tell readers much about her work or what her responsibilities were. The second passage is much clearer; her job was to "design and organize fun activities."

The second passage also explains the event in more depth. A family day can be many things; remember that your readers are likely not familiar with what you're talking about, so details help them get a clearer picture.

Lastly, the second passage makes the importance of the event clear: it helped residents connect with younger family members, and it helped retirement homes seem less intimidating to children, so now some residents see their grand kids more often.

Step 6: Discuss What You Learned

One of the final things to include in your essay should be the impact that your community service had on you. You can discuss skills you learned, such as carpentry, public speaking, animal care, or another skill.

You can also talk about how you changed personally. Are you more patient now? More understanding of others? Do you have a better idea of the type of career you want? Go into depth about this, but be honest. Don't say your community service changed your life if it didn't because trite statements won't impress readers.

In order to support your statements, provide more examples. If you say you're more patient now, how do you know this? Do you get less frustrated while playing with your younger siblings? Are you more willing to help group partners who are struggling with their part of the work? You've probably noticed by now that including specific examples and details is one of the best ways to create a strong and believable essay .

"As a result of my community service, I learned a lot about building houses and became a more mature person."

"As a result of my community service, I gained hands-on experience in construction. I learned how to read blueprints, use a hammer and nails, and begin constructing the foundation of a two-bedroom house. Working on the house could be challenging at times, but it taught me to appreciate the value of hard work and be more willing to pitch in when I see someone needs help. My dad has just started building a shed in our backyard, and I offered to help him with it because I know from my community service how much work it is. I also appreciate my own house more, and I know how lucky I am to have a roof over my head."

The second passage is more impressive and memorable because it describes the skills the writer learned in more detail and recounts a specific story that supports her claim that her community service changed her and made her more helpful.

Step 7: Finish Strong

Just as you started your essay in a way that would grab readers' attention, you want to finish your essay on a strong note as well. A good way to end your essay is to state again the impact your work had on you, your community, or both. Reiterate how you changed as a result of your community service, why you found the work important, or how it helped others.

Compare these two concluding statements:

"In conclusion, I learned a lot from my community service at my local museum, and I hope to keep volunteering and learning more about history."

"To conclude, volunteering at my city's American History Museum has been a great experience. By leading tours and participating in special events, I became better at public speaking and am now more comfortable starting conversations with people. In return, I was able to get more community members interested in history and our local museum. My interest in history has deepened, and I look forward to studying the subject in college and hopefully continuing my volunteer work at my university's own museum."

The second passage takes each point made in the first passage and expands upon it. In a few sentences, the second passage is able to clearly convey what work the volunteer did, how she changed, and how her volunteer work benefited her community.

The author of the second passage also ends her essay discussing her future and how she'd like to continue her community service, which is a good way to wrap things up because it shows your readers that you are committed to community service for the long-term.

What's Next?

Are you applying to a community service scholarship or thinking about it? We have a complete list of all the community service scholarships available to help get your search started!

Do you need a community service letter as well? We have a step-by-step guide that will tell you how to get a great reference letter from your community service supervisor.

Thinking about doing community service abroad? Before you sign up, read our guide on some of the hazards of international volunteer trips and how to know if it's the right choice for you.

Christine graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in Environmental Biology and Geography and received her Master's from Duke University. In high school she scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT and was named a National Merit Finalist. She has taught English and biology in several countries.

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What my community means to me – Essay Entry

What my community means to me

Aliasgher Mohammedakhtar Walji submitted this as part of the first essay competition, and resides in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

“The believers are but brothers, so make settlement between your brothers. And fear Allah that you may receive mercy.” Suratul Hujurat, Ayah 10

I advise you (both) and all my children and members of my family and everyone whom my writing reaches, to fear Allah, to keep your affairs in order, and to maintain good relations among yourselves for I have heard your grand-father (the Holy Prophet – p.b.u.h.a.h.p.) saying, “Improvement of mutual differences is better than general prayers and fastings.” Nahjul Balagha, Letter 47

y name is Aliasgher Walji, I was born and brought up in Dar es Salaam for eighteen years, where I was  blessed to part of the Khoja Shia Ithna-ashari Jamaat of Dar es Salaam. My community means a lot to me in various aspects which I wish to discuss in this write up. My community was a blessing from Allah(swt) which I have come to realise, now that I have travelled outside Dar es Salaam, for my further studies.

There are several reasons my community was a blessing to me, thirty five of which are;

• I was never alone, I never experienced any loneliness, as my community was always by my side. My community gave me a sense of belonging and connection to others.
• After my family, my community served as my secondary support system, in times of need.
• My community gave me a platform for socialisation, the opportunity to meet and learn from those people who are not easily accessible individually such as representatives of our Marjas.
• By means of empowerment of the youth, and allowing the youth to partake in important projects involving both the community and outside of the community, my community gave me the opportunity to make a difference.
• My community gave me access to local resources and services, such as national identity cards and health check ups.
• I was and am proud of having been part of such a prestigious and loving community. My community gave me a sense of pride.
• My community gave me the chance to learn about and appreciate the diversity of the community. It is my hope they will initiate an action plan against discrimination.
• I was given a sense of responsibility to contribute to the well-being of my community from a young age.
• My community gave me a feeling of safety and security knowing that I was surrounded by others who cared about me. The genuine care the community had for community members provided comfort and ease for all the members.
• I was given a sense of identity and connection to my local history and culture. The rich khoja cultural history was fascinating to learn about.
• My community gave me opportunities for personal and professional growth through community involvement. Every year my community provides youth summer internship opportunities where I worked in professional companies such as MeTL Tabata Branch and Shree Hindu Mandal Hospital
• I gained access to local events and activities. Such as blood drives, health check ups and football games.
• My community gave me a chance to build relationships with neighbours and local businesses, which encouraged support and economic betterment.
• My community gave me a source of support and guidance from community leaders maalims (abbreviated as maa), bais and our great scholars.

In specific, the teachers of Madressa such as

• Maa:Munawar who was our Madressa principal,
• Maa:Shabbir Yusufali who was our Madressa vice principal,
• Maa:Shabbir Moledina who taught me Quran and akhlaq,
• Maa:Sibtain Moledina who taught me tarikh,
• Maa:Hussein Moledina who taught Quran,
• Maa:Alihussein Molloo who taught me theology,
• Maa:Ali Manekia who taught me theology,
• Maa:Murtaza Bhalloo who taught me discipline,
• Maa:Maisam Versi who taught me theology and tarikh,
• Maa:Imran Versi who taught me more than I can describe,
• Maa:Mohammedabbas Jessa who taught me discipline,
• Maa:Shaneabbas Jessa who taught me comparative religions,
• Maa:Hassan Dewji who taught me how to gain success and about mental health,
• Maa:Muntazir Rattansi who taught me jurisprudence,
• Maa:Amir Kanji who taught me tarikh,
• Maa:Jaffer Chandoo who taught me jurisprudence,
• Maa:Tehsin Hirji who taught me jurisprudence,
• Maa:Aliasgher Rajani who taught me theology, 
• Maa:Murtaza Sikander who taught me Quran and akhlaq,
• Maa:Aliasgher Mukhtar who taught me Quran and akhlaq,
• Maa:Yasin who taught me Quran,
• Maa:Hassan Hussein, who taught Quran,
• Maa:Mudathir Hassan Hussein, who taught Quran.
• Maa:Mohammed Walji who taught me tarikh, 5 years later I(Aliasgher Walji) taught alongside him. And many, many, many, more

The teachers of Quran khani such as

• Maa:Mazher Gulamhussein,
• Maa:Sajjad Rahim,
• Maa:Imran Versi,
• Maa:Mohammedbaqir Versi,
• Maa:Shabbir Chandoo,
• Maa:Gulamabbas Dattoo,
• Maa:Sameer Moledina,
• Maa:Aliabbas Shamji,
• Maa:Mohammedjawad Dhalla,
• Maa:Aliasgher Walji,
• Maa:Mohammed Lalji,
• Maa:Mujahid Chandoo,
• Maa:Muhammad Sameer,
• Maa:Mohammed Hirji,
• Maa:Atlaf Yusuf,
• Maallim Hassan Versi,
• Maa:Ali Dharsee

And many, many, many, more

Along with the great bais and maalims teaching the lower Madressa, who taught me when I was younger, specifically our principal Bai Raziya Janmohammed, Bai Fatim Somji, Bai Mumtaz Jaffer, Bai Dilshad Jaffer and many, many, many, more.

They all worked very hard for us and loved us all, I cannot repay them for all they taught me.

Each one of these bais and maalims teaching Madressa and Quran khani to me are worth more than a well of infinite gold coins. Two maalims who I will name separately are Sheikh Imran Saleh, and Maa:Shabbir Dattoo.

These maalims are the reason I can sleep well at night. The amount of knowledge I gained from these two great personalities cannot be described, it suffices me to say I am forever indebted to them for the vast, vast, vast amount of knowledge and wisdom they imparted to me, which has shaped my understanding of jurisprudence(fiqh) and theology(aqaid) forever.

Sheikh Saleh and Maa:Dattoo to me are worth more than a well of infinite diamonds and precious gems.

Finally we have our great scholars such as

• Sheikh Imran Saleh,
• Sheikh Saleh famously known as Madawa,
• Sheikh Mohammed Kamran,
• Sheikh Azeem Shirazi,
• Sheikh Hussein Versi,
• Sheikh Ali Rajani,
• Sheikh Mansoor Daya(Rahimallah),
• Sheikh Zeeshan,
• And finally our esteemed great resident Alim Sayyid Adeel Raza(who is our candle in darkness),

These Holy scholars to me are nothing short of guides representing Imam Zaman(a.t.f.s) and to me their value cannot be described.

• My community gave me a sense of unity and solidarity with others in the community. Clearly seen in activities and functions such as solidarity walks and khushali/wafat programs. What I miss the most is the Juma Khutbas.
• I met different people, having different interests, I met some passionate about community service, some passionate about a certain career path, some passionate about a certain cause or a certain sport or a certain concept this was an opportunity given to me by my community.
• My community gave me a way to give back and make a positive impact on my community. To help my community members by organising events such as Barazas and question answer sessions.
• My community gave me opportunities for volunteerism and community service. Volunteering in sales, projects, dramas and exhibitions touched my heart.
• My community gave me access to recreational facilities and spaces.               Subsidised sports facilities and gym facilities, including a swimming pool.
• My community gave me a chance to participate in community decision-making processes. By asking for feedback from members, we were in a way able to participate in decision making.
• My community gave me a sense of responsibility to advocate for the needs of my community members during forums.
• My community gave me a way to build a sense of trust and cooperation among community members. Building relations which are currently ongoing and beneficial was enabled by the community.
• My community gave me a chance to celebrate and appreciate the unique qualities of community members. “The talent of one is the pride of all” was the principle our community was based on
• My community gave me opportunities to learn new skills and develop talents through community programs. Such as emergency life saving and first aid training.
• My community gave me a chance to build a sense of belonging and connection to the place you call home. When I remember my home city of dar es salaam, I am also reminded of my loving community.
• My community gave me a source of support and encouragement during times of challenge or difficulty. During deaths and tragedy the emotional support is unmatched.
• My community gave me a chance to connect with others and build relationships with people from different backgrounds and walks of life. Interfaith dialogue was  encouraged by my community.
• My community gave me a way to learn about and appreciate the diverse cultures and traditions within it. We have people from all different backgrounds, places and cultures in our community.
• My community gave me a source of inspiration and motivation to make a positive difference in the world. The encouragement to take the first step is widely given in our community, and the encouragement to begin start ups.
• My community gave me poportunities for leadership and personal growth through community involvement. I was a development society chairman at our Madressa and an Islamic council chairman in our school, this was enabled by my community.
• My community gave me a chance to make a positive impact on the lives of others.By means of organising various events, working entire nights and days at times.
•  My community gave me my loving friends who I treasure, and they always do amr bil maruf and nahi nail munkar (encouragement of good and discouraging evil).
•  My community protected me from the fitna(trials) of the end times when deviant people attacked ismat(infallibility), wilayat e takwini(guardianship of affairs), tawasul(seeking means to) and Shafa’ah(intercession) which are fundamentals of shiaism.
•  The community provides us with elderly people, who have experienced life and have gems of wisdom for the youth who choose to take them.
•  The community reminds us of the greatest man we have forgotten Bar ma Imam which is a gujrati way of saying our twelfth Imam(a.t.f.s) may his reappearance be hastened.

All communities are great, including the community I currently reside in, but to me, Dar es Salaam Jamaat holds a special place within my heart.

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Watch CBS News

What Does Community Mean To You?

April 16, 2020 / 8:24 AM CDT / CBS Minnesota

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- Merriam-Webster defines "community" as a unified body of individuals. Not a very warm definition, so we wanted to reach out to some folks to answer this Good Question: What does community mean to you?

We put the same question to a number of people who have a hand in WCCO Mid-Morning and our other shows, and here's what they said.

Ali Holman, Mid-Morning Fitness Expert I know a lot of people complain about social media but to me I do believe that it has allowed us to maintain our "community" and stay connected with each other during this time of isolation. I am thankful to know we are all in this together. "Community" is equality and support of one another. ❤️

Dr. Gigi Chawla, Chief of Pediatrics at Children's Minnesota Community means to me that we are people woven together like fabric. We lean on one another, learn from one another, celebrate together, and grieve together. But like a fabric, even when one thread is weakened or broken, the fabric still remains strong.

Karen Bachman Thull, Bachman's "Community to us is the shared desire to bring beauty to life. Bachman's is grateful to be part of our community's gardens. landscapes, neighborhoods, holidays and special moments.

Jasmine Stringer, Mid-Morning Lifestyle Contributor When I think about my community I think of the lyrics to Sesame Street song, "In Your Neighborhood." But as the world as become more and more connected my community has expanded beyond the people I that I meet when I'm walking down the street and the people I meet each day to the people I connect with and stay connected to virtually thorough technology, social media and even the TV airways. In essence WE ALL are community.

Amy Blaubach, Mid-Morning DIY Friday Community to me means friends, family, fur babies, neighbors, and the fun activities/resources in your daily routine. Community can be near or far. It can have a wide reach, too, some of which may not even know about. You can do a small act and it can have a ripple effect of reaching people or situations that you couldn't possibly imagine! Which is why being mindful and kind in your community is so important. We're all connected.

Liz Heinecke, Kitchen Pantry Scientist Have you ever seen a herd of elephants circled up, protecting their young? That's community: a group of individuals who collectively care for each other and lift each other up, protecting the vulnerable and acting for the greater good. It's been amazing watching the sacrifices people have been making recently to keep their communities safe. I'm very proud to be a Minnesotan right now. "Community" is also a really, really funny TV series. We've been re-watching it on Netflix.

Dr. Shonda Craft, Mid-Morning Relationships Guru Community is not only the people, places, and experiences that we have in common. It is also the gaps between and within those commonalities. It is important for me to see those who are the same as me, and those who are different, as all being part of my community. Everyone is not the same, but we are often working towards the same goals and have the same needs. And, this is what makes a community so complex and beautiful. This keeps me accountable to see the humanity in everyone, and to take responsibility to make my little part of the world a better place. For me and those around me.

Michael Walker, Mid-Morning Relationships Guru Individuals understanding that they are part of the whole and responsible for the collective well-being of others. For example, our Minnesota community has followed Gov. Walz stay at home order to ensure the health and safety of our state.

Jan Hagerman, Habitat for Humanity ReStore I have so many communities, and they are all so important. Of course my Habitat for Humanity family- coworkers, volunteers, home owners and customers. My volunteers ate especially of concern for me right now. Their routines have been totally upended, when we reopen, I want them all back, I especially want them safe. A fairly large part of our volunteer community is considered vulnerable with this pandemic. I have a wide community within the Episcopal community and many are putting themselves in harms way. A large number of them are on the Rosebud Reservation in SD. As a demographic my SD friends are especially vulnerable, even in the best of times. Keeping everyone safe and healthy (physically, emotionally, spiritually) is so important to me. Once back to work making sure my staff and customers are ok is something I am already making sure is implemented.

Alise McGregor, Founder & CEO of Little Newtons Early Education Centers "It makes me think of "it takes a village." Communities have common groups of members who share values and interests. People look to communities for support, to be lifted up and enriched in their lives. Lastly, a united community provides a sense of security and safety with belonging."

Joy King, Executive Director, Be The Match Foundation When I think of community, I think of the individuals who support Be The Match. Our community of supporters is comprised of patients in need of a transplant, donors willing to give their blood stem cells to patients and volunteers willing to transport those lifesaving cells all across the world. I also think of our contributors who ensure we have the funding to reduce barriers our patients face and to fund research to ensure better outcomes for all patients. At Be The Match, we are so grateful for our community.

Kari Patey, WCCO News Director Community is connection in its truest form. Neighbors coming together to help, support, honor and celebrate. It's most noticeable in the happiest of times like the Minneapolis Miracle and the most worrisome times like this pandemic. Among the highs and lows and good and bad times, we always have the bond of community to help us feel better together instead of alone.

Mike Max, WCCO Sport Director Community means we put all differences aside at a time of need and work towards a common good.

Chris Shaffer, WCCO Chief Meteorologist I wish the word was carunity (as in care and unity) because to me it is a group of folks who unite because they care about good things and being good people. It is good people...not good resources...that make a community great.

Ann Ouellette, WCCO General Manager That is not as easy a question as it sounds. As our world has gotten so small quarantined at home, the word 'community' means many things. On one end of the spectrum I miss my family, close friends, and fellow employees I saw regularly. It's also brought me closer to my elderly neighbor and everyone on my block. But I also feel a sense of community with people everywhere who are trying to get through this. It's bigger than geography or family, it's also about a shared experience.

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What My School Means to Me: Essays from 3 High Schoolers

How students at an unusual school think—and write—about their experience.

In January, I visited the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, a public residential high school in Greenville. Artistically talented students from around the state spend two or three of their high school years in dedicated pursuit of their art—dance, drama, music, visual arts, or creative writing—along with their academic curriculum. I wrote about it here .

I asked Scott Gould, a creative writing teacher at the school, if he would ask his students to write me a short essay about their school. This was a wide-open request; I wanted to hear whatever perspective the students wanted to offer about their experience at the school. Among the essays the students submitted, here are three of my favorites, unedited and untouched. I’d like to share them with you.

The first is by Cameron Messinides, a junior from Camden, SC:

Long-Distance My mother called on Sunday to tell me our herd of goats, previously twenty-one strong, had been reduced to three. Two feral dogs squeezed through a hole in the pasture fence and killed anything they could catch. My parents and brother arrived during the massacre. My father jumped the fence to chase the dogs and shot the slower one with a pistol. On his way back, he heard a few scattered bleats and followed the sounds. In a gully, he found two billies and the last nanny. They had survived by shoving themselves into an abandoned chicken coop. Afterwards, my family walked among the carcasses--once white, now bloodstained and caked with rain-softened clay. We wanted to find life, my mother said. They gave up at four in the afternoon, and my father and brother made a pile of the bodies in the woods, to be buried later. Phone calls like this are common now. I've been in a boarding school since August, and every weekend my mother seems to find something new to break to me. It's not always bad. The weekend before, she called to tell me my brother enrolled in a birding retreat on the South Carolina coastline. And before that, she told me about the new color she picked for the living room walls. I'm still not used to this kind of communication. I miss immediacy. A year ago, when I still lived with them, I would know all this. She wouldn't have to tell me two or three days later. I'd like to say I've adjusted, but I haven't. The Wednesday after the goats died, she called again. She told me she couldn't shake what she had seen. She worried. Would the dogs' owner show up? How about the surviving dog? What if he came back? She hadn't been sleeping, and when she did, she dreamt of the bloody bodies, the torn sides of a billy, the kids crushed into the mud. I told her I knew how she felt, but I don't. I don't think it's possible. She sent me only one picture of the scene, a close-up of the surviving nanny's nose, ripped open by the dog's teeth. The rest I have to imagine. I imagine the dogs—Brown? Black?—chasing the herd across a winter field, hooves and paws tearing up dead grass. I imagine stumbling kids. I imagine the deputy who arrived a few hours later, gray-haired and perhaps a slow talker. None of it is certain. I still sleep easily. That's the cost of our separation: her anxieties don't travel the phone lines, and I can't make myself care. But I want to care. Some days I only want to be home, in the ranch-style with green siding and the stump in the front yard, which is the only remnant of the rotting oak my family cut down without me. I'd walk to the pasture with my father, take the shovel he offers me, and dig with him, shoulder-to-shoulder, a hole big enough to put all eighteen dead goats under three or four feet of orange clay. Then, we return home, and I sit in the living room next to my mother, tell her she can sleep now. Even hours into the night, after she has gone to bed, I sit, surrounded by lamplight and the color of the freshly-painted walls, three coats of Townhouse Tan, and listen to my brothers. They lie side-by-side on the hearth, birder's guidebook open before them, and take turns whispering names to each other: bobwhite, cardinal, tufted titmouse.

Next, by Shelley Hucks, a senior from Florence, SC:

Florentine In the heart of South Carolina, the railroad tracks converge over swampland, and fields are laced with cotton in the Dog Days of early August. The summer heat rolls in, unstoppable and rests between cypress knees and Spanish moss. The place can’t decide what to be: it’s one-third urban, one-third rural, and one-third swamp. The people seem to fall victim to a cycle of poverty, of being at sixteen what their parents were at eighteen, what their own children will be at fourteen. It’s not easy to get out. The place is called Florence, and I lived there for sixteen years before moving three hours away to study creative writing at a boarding school. In upstate South Carolina is the Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities. It’s situated just off Greenville’s downtown area, with Reedy River Falls Park in the school’s backyard. Downtown Greenville is an arts community, with performing centers and theaters, galleries, art festivals and craft fairs, and restaurants willing to provide venues for writing club readings or jazz band performances. Not only is the atmosphere different, but the entire landscape: from my dorm room, I can see the hazy silhouette of mountains. At the Governor’s School, I’ve studied under excellent teachers. I’ve been exposed to new authors and genres, learned to be curious, analytical, to believe in the deliberation of every line of poetry and each line of dialogue in a short story. I’ve learned to put my personal life into artistic context with the help of professionals. I’ve learned to become aware. To make something strange, beautiful, something important. And, something particularly valuable to me because of my immense pride in my hometown, I’ve learned to appreciate a strong sense of setting, the way characters can function in so many complex ways. I’ve learned how to convey Florence in words. Governor’s School has provided me with the training to write about the content that I grew up with, the material I naturally have to offer. Every story I write takes place in some type of Florence, with its tangible sensation of heat trapped in the swamp, the perpetual presence of desperation. All of my characters are based on Florentines: single mothers I’ve met at work, the mysterious neighbor who passed out already-opened Halloween candy, or the woman who showed up to church drinking hairspray. Going home on breaks, or for the summer, has altered my perspective of Florence. Instead of seeing tragic figures living in a never-changing place, I see characters full of complexities living in a place as undecided as they are. Once, the chain-link fence covered in hubcaps was ugly. But now I see it as armor, protecting the women on the porch, who sip sweet tea and watch another fistfight unfold in the street, those men who wordlessly understand the ritual required to live here.

Finally, by Jackson Trice, a senior from Simpsonville, SC:

Outside the Lines I forget how strange my school sounds to the rest of the world until I leave it. On a card at the front desk inside a college admissions building, I am told to write the name of my high school. The full name, South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, does not fit on the dotted line, and I have to draw an arrow to the back of the card, and write the rest there. When I say my school’s name out loud to family members, it sounds prestigious, almost regal. But on the first day of school here it is made clear that I was chosen based on potential, and not necessarily talent. It’s this ego smashing that happens throughout junior year that creates the atmosphere of Governor’s School. You don’t get “good,” you just make progress. You are not special, you’ve just been given an excellent opportunity. I don’t know how much Governor’s School has changed me until I meet up with friends from my old school at a football game during fall break. I live in Simpsonville, South Carolina only a fifteen minute drive from downtown Greenville. Still, all these kids know about my school are rumors. “I’ve heard the dancers are super catty,” one says. “I’ve heard there’s, like, crazy amounts of sex.” I answer, “Sometimes,” and “That’s a good joke,” respectively. I try to explain to them that yes, I have real school work on top of art work. No, I can’t have a boy in my dorm room—I can’t even have Advil. Hey, hey, there are a few republicans. Like, two, maybe? I quickly realize that the magic of this school is lost as soon as I try and pin words to it. I stop coming home for Friday night football games. I choose, instead, to stay on campus. There are two creative writing classrooms that make up our department. Each is packed with books and long desks and computers. Only creative writers are allowed in these rooms, and there’s a giddiness in the seclusion of it. Monday through Thursday, we stay in the rooms after hours to get work done, but on Fridays, we kick our shoes off and run around to celebrate the weekend. We lay on the desks and talk to each other and laugh until our sides ache. We share secrets and stories and we belong to these rooms, to the spines of our favorite books on the bookshelves. We belong to each other. There are, of course, the nights when AP Chemistry keeps me up until four in the morning. There are the days where workshop is brutal, and I never want to write another word again. There are those scary moments where I feel that the pressure is too much and I fantasize about going to regular school. Maybe then, I could learn to drive, go to real high school parties, eat my mother’s delicious food anytime I wanted. But then there’s a drama student playing guitar in the academic stairwell. The sound of his voice spins up the flights of stairs, bouncing off walls in wistful echoes. It calms me. There’s hot chocolate at the Starbucks across the street, and there’s the beauty of that street, which is lined with small trees dressed up in white Christmas lights, illuminating the sidewalk. There’s my friend who sits with me inside Starbucks and talks about Rilke and Miley Cyrus with equal insight and tenacity. When I return, there’s a group of students outside the residential life building, blocking the doors. They’re all dancing, and singing to the beat of their clapping hands, stomping feet: “You have to dance to pass. Dance, dance, to pass.” And because I can sense that there is something wonderfully magical about this place, I feel that I must obey them. It is only necessary. I am a terrible dancer, but in this moment, I dance shamelessly. When the crowd is satisfied with my moves, they cheer, and finally part, letting me into the building, welcoming me home.

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Our Trump reporting upsets some readers, but there aren’t two sides to facts: Letter from the Editor

• Updated: Apr. 06, 2024, 10:27 a.m. |
• Published: Mar. 30, 2024, 8:16 a.m.

Some readers complain that we have different standards involving Donald Trump and Joe Biden. (AP Photo, File) AP

• Chris Quinn, Editor, cleveland.com/The Plain Dealer

A more-than-occasional arrival in the email these days is a question expressed two ways, one with dripping condescension and the other with courtesy:

Why don’t our opinion platforms treat Donald Trump and other politicians exactly the same way. Some phrase it differently, asking why we demean the former president’s supporters in describing his behavior as monstrous, insurrectionist and authoritarian.

I feel for those who write. They believe in Trump and want their local news source to recognize what they see in him.

The angry writers denounce me for ignoring what they call the Biden family crime syndicate and criminality far beyond that of Trump. They quote news sources of no credibility as proof the mainstream media ignores evidence that Biden, not Trump, is the criminal dictator.

The courteous writers don’t go down that road. They politely ask how we can discount the passions and beliefs of the many people who believe in Trump.

Chris Quinn's recent Letters from the Editor

• Around the globe and the nation, thousands thank us for telling the truth about Trump: Letter from the Editor
• Voices of hope. Voices of anxiety. Tears of gratitude. A global response to how we tell the truth about Donald Trump
• Let’s hang it up on polling. In election after election, they get it wrong: Letter from the Editor

This is a tough column to write, because I don’t want to demean or insult those who write me in good faith. I’ve started it a half dozen times since November but turned to other topics each time because this needle is hard to thread. No matter how I present it, I’ll offend some thoughtful, decent people.

The north star here is truth. We tell the truth, even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information.

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.

This is not subjective. We all saw it. Plenty of leaders today try to convince the masses we did not see what we saw, but our eyes don’t deceive. (If leaders began a yearslong campaign today to convince us that the Baltimore bridge did not collapse Tuesday morning, would you ever believe them?) Trust your eyes. Trump on Jan. 6 launched the most serious threat to our system of government since the Civil War. You know that. You saw it.

The facts involving Trump are crystal clear, and as news people, we cannot pretend otherwise, as unpopular as that might be with a segment of our readers. There aren’t two sides to facts. People who say the earth is flat don’t get space on our platforms. If that offends them, so be it.

As for those who equate Trump and Joe Biden, that’s false equivalency. Biden has done nothing remotely close to the egregious, anti-American acts of Trump. We can debate the success and mindset of our current president, as we have about most presidents in our lifetimes, but Biden was never a threat to our democracy. Trump is. He is unique among all American presidents for his efforts to keep power at any cost.

Personally, I find it hard to understand how Americans who take pride in our system of government support Trump. All those soldiers who died in World War II were fighting against the kind of regime Trump wants to create on our soil. How do they not see it?

The March 25 edition of the New Yorker magazine offers some insight. It includes a detailed review of a new book about Adolf Hitler, focused on the year 1932. It’s called “Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power” and is by historian Timothy W. Ryback. It explains how German leaders – including some in the media -- thought they could use Hitler as a means to get power for themselves and were willing to look past his obvious deficiencies to get where they wanted. In tolerating and using Hitler as a means to an end, they helped create the monstrous dictator responsible for millions of deaths.

How are those German leaders different from people in Congress saying the election was stolen or that Jan. 6 was not an insurrection aimed at destroying our government? They know the truth, but they deny it. They see Trump as a means to an end – power for themselves and their “team” – even if it means repeatedly telling lies.

Sadly, many believe the lies. They trust people in authority, without questioning the obvious discrepancies or relying on their own eyes. These are the people who take offense to the truths we tell about Trump. No one in our newsroom gets up in the morning wanting to make a segment of readers feel bad. No one seeks to demean anyone. We understand what a privilege it is to be welcomed into the lives of the millions of people who visit our platforms each month for news, sports and entertainment. But our duty is to the truth.

Our nation does seem to be slipping down the same slide that Germany did in the 1930s. Maybe the collapse of government in the hands of a madman is inevitable, given how the media landscape has been corrupted by partisans, as it was in 1930s Germany.

I hope not.

In our newsroom, we’ll do our part. Much as it offends some who read us, we will continue to tell the truth about Trump.

I’m at mailto:[email protected]

Thanks for reading.

( Note: A follow-up column about the overwhelming international response to this piece can be found here , and a sampling of the responses can be found here .)

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My Family Kept My Dad's Secret For Years. I Wasn't Prepared For What Telling The Truth Would Mean.

Guest Writer

Family secrets are nothing new.

It’s safe to say that almost every family has probably hidden something from others, and maybe even one another, out of fear, shame, self-protection or even love. Not everyone feels the press of those reasons so acutely that the silence threaded into the secret-keeping lingers long after the secret has been revealed and becomes a crushing burden, eventually too difficult to carry.

In 1985, when I was just 13 years old, my 42-year-old surgeon father underwent a quadruple bypass after suffering a heart attack. Eight months later, he received the news that the transfused blood he’d been given during surgery was contaminated with HIV and he’d contracted the virus.

Almost 40 years later, those who contract HIV can live long, healthy lives with the help of medication. But in 1985, being diagnosed with the disease was nothing less than catastrophic — a nearly certain death sentence.

AIDS was still a mystery back then. Misinformation, ignorance, bigotry and stigma fueled people’s views. We lived in a frightened society — one that largely believed people diagnosed with HIV were responsible for their own infection.

In a feature piece in the fall of 1985, Time magazine called people with AIDS “The New Untouchables.” Inconsistent and conflicting messages about how HIV spread made people afraid to even come into contact with someone infected with the virus. Many individuals known to be HIV positive or to have AIDS lost their jobs, their homes and the support of their friends and neighbors.

Making matters worse were members of the evangelical Christian right who were among the loudest voices about AIDS in the 1980s and early ’90s, claiming it was a weapon of God’s wrath. Jerry Falwell, an influential Southern Baptist preacher, televangelist and founder of the Moral Majority political organization, declared, “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.” Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan, a close adviser to President Ronald Reagan, called AIDS “nature’s revenge on homosexuals.”

This harmful theology played a considerable role in the way my father coped with his diagnosis. As a devout Christian who’d grown up in a fundamentalist church tradition that believed homosexuality was a sinful lifestyle choice, he struggled to reconcile his situation with society’s and the evangelical church’s stance on his disease and its causes. He feared for his personal reputation.

Though he was an accomplished physician, he felt disempowered by the limitations of his — and the greater health system’s — knowledge about the facts of HIV. The only certainties were that the disease spread at a rapid rate and there was no cure. He expected, like most patients he knew or knew about, that he could die at any time in any number of terrible ways.

My father was unwilling to chance infecting his patients, and he made the painful choice to end his medical practice, taking an advisory position in a national medical legal association. He refused to allow my mother, brothers or me to endure any form of ostracism because of his HIV status. His illness would be a secret.

When my parents first found out about Dad’s infection, they didn’t tell me. They did, I know now, tell my two older brothers, but they left me and my younger brother out of the conversation.

Trauma researchers say that our brains can hide experiences to protect us from having to relive them. To protect us from overwhelming fear or stress that is tied to them. Sometimes those experiences remain hidden forever. Maybe this is what happened to me, because even though how I knew remains a baffling hole in my memory, I knew Dad had AIDS within days of his diagnosis.

As I felt my world being upended with this unwanted knowledge, I took inventory of the facts:

• The news was flooded with stories of people, mostly gay men, developing horrible illnesses because of the virus.
• Magazine covers on newsstands described AIDS with words like “plague” and “epidemic” and “threat.”
• Parents picketed outside schools carrying signs with hateful slogans to keep away children who’d tested positive for the disease.
• A group of boys in my eighth-grade class had started bullying other kids on the playground with the taunt, “Careful not to get too close to him. You might get AIDS!”
• Some people at church had said God was using this disease to launch his revenge on sinners.
• AIDS had no cure.
• Since no one was talking about any of it with me, I understood I couldn’t talk about it either.

I couldn’t talk about this thing that had stolen my sense of security and safety. I couldn’t talk about how sad I was. How alone I felt. How confused. Terrified. I couldn’t tell anyone about the nights when sleep refused to come and I’d sit with my back pushed into the wooden headboard of my bed, my knees squeezed against my chest, clutching my bedspread to my chin. I stared into the darkness, my eyes burning with the strain of trying to glimpse the thing hiding just beyond where I could see. The thing hovering over everything. I tried, but failed, to shut down the blur of frightening thoughts and images that cartwheeled through my brain as I imagined all of the possible ways Dad would die.

Dad lived for 10 more years.

With no road map for these circumstances, my parents were desperate to keep life as normal as possible for my brothers and me, and they hoped, I think, that not talking much about Dad’s illness would protect us (even after it was clear to them that I knew). I understood that not talking about the pain I was feeling would protect them. So we all learned to pretend.

Pretending was easy. Even though Dad developed AIDS after five years and suffered (I learned much later) one opportunistic infection after another, until the final year of his life, he didn’t look sick. He didn’t look different from any other dad I knew. Most days he could get up, put on a suit and go to work. He mowed the lawn and weeded the garden on weekends. He downhill skied and ice-skated and swam and boated. He took our golden retriever on long walks. Life moved forward, and we moved with it.

Just beyond the façade, though, the anguish of our circumstances hung heavy in the air. I could see my beloved dad, the man whose charisma and brilliance had always made him seem larger than life to me, shrinking beneath the stigma and shame of his illness. My dear mom, who shouldered the bulk of Dad’s physical and emotional care on her own, bent with the burden. We were all suffering, but the culture of silence created by the secret kept us from sharing in that aching grief together. Instead, we each traveled our own lonely paths of coping.

Two years before he died, Dad started writing a book. It began as a personal, therapeutic attempt to try to understand the mess of what had happened to him. As his narrative took shape, he read passages to my mother, and she added thoughts of her own. An idea bloomed between them: Maybe they had something to say. Maybe their experience living with HIV and AIDS could help someone else. Maybe their unique story could dispel some of the myths that swirled in the AIDS climate of the early 1990s and add a different voice to the mix. Maybe, as Christians themselves, they could call out the Christian community for its destructive and narrow-minded views toward victims of this devastating illness and encourage a more loving, Christ-like response in the face of suffering, no matter what form it takes. Maybe their story mattered enough to break a nine-year silence and spill their secret. Our secret.

I treaded carefully around the concept of the book. I knew how risky writing it was for Dad. To me, the endeavor felt precarious, like a fragile cord being woven together, thin thread by thin thread, to create a lifeline that might finally pull us out of our isolation.

The book was published in 1995, six months before Dad died. My parents had broken free of the secrecy, experiencing the relief of finally talking to others about what they’d endured. And when it ended up on the Globe and Mail’s bestseller list for a couple of weeks, they were met with an outpouring of support from friends and strangers. Support that bolstered them in the final months of Dad’s life.

Ironically, though, the book’s contents remained largely unspoken within my family circle. By then I was newly married and living a thousand miles away. Lost somewhere in that distance and physical separation was the permission I believed I needed to break free, too — the new set of family rules that would help me navigate a world where the secret was no longer necessary. I packed away the fear, the grief, the loss, the anger, the confusion, the shame, and I kept on pretending.

My silence hung on for two more decades until I just couldn’t carry all of those stored emotions anymore. Pretending wasn’t doing me or anyone else any good. I wasn’t OK, and I hadn’t been OK for a long time. So without having any idea where the tandem endeavors might lead, I started therapy and I started writing.

The road to finding the answer to what happened to me was a long and painful one. I had to look back at that moment that divided my life into a before and an after. I had to dig into memories of living in the after that sometimes felt too hard to face. Felt too frightening to reveal. That sometimes made me feel like looking at them would actually kill me. I had to pull back the curtain on the shame and fear that were still embedded in me and give them words. With the careful guidance and support of writing mentors and an excellent therapist, I finally figured out how.

Until then, I realized, I had never truly been myself. All those unspeakable things stood directly in the way. Replacing that long-held silence with an honest recounting of the experience helped break down that barrier.

My path to processing and finding meaning in my family’s experience is carved in words. For my mother and brothers, it has taken different shapes. Two of my brothers are physicians, following in Dad’s footsteps and making his calling to caring for others in their times of suffering their own. My oldest brother is the president of a global relief organization that works specifically with marginalized communities around the world, many of which have been devastated by HIV/AIDS. After my father died, my mother changed careers and worked for a time as a family therapist, channeling her compassion and lived experience of loneliness and isolation to offer companionship to others coping with difficult circumstances.

These days, I stand directly in front of readers of my story, speaking with a confidence I’ve never felt before. Sometimes it’s to a room so packed that extra chairs are needed. On other nights, just a single soul shows up. But each time, I feel a deep sense of connection to those in attendance. I have no idea the specific stories or suffering carried by those who read my book or who raise a hand at an event and nudge the topic of spilling the secret. I can only know what I’ve carried and speak authentically about how good it feels to put it down. I can only hope that my words might help someone else put their unspoken burdens down, too.

Melanie Brooks is the author of “A Hard Silence: One Daughter Remaps Family, Grief, and Faith When HIV/AIDS Changes It All” (Vine Leaves Press, 2023) and “Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art From Trauma” (Beacon Press, 2017). She teaches professional writing at Northeastern University and creative nonfiction in the MFA program at Bay Path University in Massachusetts. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast writing program and a Certificate of Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, Psychology Today, Yankee Magazine, The Washington Post, Ms. magazine and other notable publications. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, two children (when they are home from college) and a chocolate Lab.

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