Research Project: ACTS (Allied Churchs Teaching Self-Empowerment)

The ACTS program was started initially by the staff at St. Michael Church in 1992. After a few years, two other churches, St. Rose and St. Francis of Assisi combined their efforts along with St. Michael to formally incorporate ACTS Community Development Corporation. The program was set in place by the residents of the area along with staff at these churches to help clean up the area from the ground up.

This program began to be put together in the late 1980's when the crime rates in the area around St. Michael Church where at some of their all time highs. The lack of responsibility in the area led to greater violence and overall low living conditions in the neighborhood. The programs initial goal was to clean up the area, and make it better not only for the people coming in, but also for the residents who had lived there for awhile.

What ACTS does is work with the people in the community to allow for new immigrants, mainly from Laotian and Hmong ethnicity, and people that have been here for awhile to purchase a new home. What the program has done has put people in charge of the area they live in by empowering them to by a home, and by doing so caring about the area that they live in. The founding churches along with the ACTS staff work regularly to help coordinate several activities to keep the area clean. These activities can vary from cookouts and bake sales to planned clean up the neighborhood weekends, on a monthly basis.

ACTS also offers services, which includes one-on-one credit counseling, one-on-one home-buying counseling, real estate brokerage, down payment grants, rehab management and funding, and port-purchase assistance. All of these services are available on a daily basis to the residents from an area reaching all the way from Oklahoma Ave. to Capitol Dr. and from 40th St. to a little past Martin Luther King Dr.

More information about the ACTS Organization and their cause can be found at www.actshousing.org

Final Reflection

After a semester of taking of Film 150: Multicultual America, I have definitely broadened my horizons when it comes to present day issues of race and class differences. Throughout the semester, I worked with St. Michael's Congregation in several activities, mainly related to helping out a mainly immigrant population in Milwaukee from countries within Southeast Asia. The ethnicities according to our book would definitely be considered Asian, but while talking with the residents of the area, I could definitely tell there were a lot of differences in each individual culture.

The activities that I personally helped with wee several area cleanup projects, which were run by St. Michael's Congregation and ACTS, a program set up by St. Michael's to help clean up the area, which had hit crime rate highs in the 1970's and 1980's when the primarily white population started to move to the suburbs or pass away. While participating in this activity, I found that these people, though low-income, had a lot of self-respect and self-confidence. They had these qualities, because they own their own homes, and help to keep the community clean.

The other activity, which I worked on at the end of the semester, was a Soup Sale, which was held at St. Michael's congregation on Sunday, December 13, 2009. The soup sale was held after the first mass in the morning, which was a multi-cultural mass. This multicultural mass was held in not one, not two, but three different languages to accommodate all of the immigrants that lived in the area. It also had a unique feel to it, but when people started to sing, in their own languages, it kind of made sense. Though the words were all mixed in, it seemed as though there was a certain harmony to it, which was just plain out phenomenal. During the soup sale itself, I found that the people within the community although from different countries were able to find certain similarities, which made them stronger together as a group. Also, I was able to find that there was a certain mixture of cultures as I was told that the food was made up of different cultures. For example, small differences in spices, within the egg rolls, made it based more from one particular country as opposed to another, something that I would have never known otherwise. (An egg roll is an egg roll is an egg roll to me.)

Overall throughout this semester, I feel that it was a great success that helped me to broaden my horizons. Not only in a sense of being more ethnically aware of certain stereotypes, but also in a sense of class difference. I feel that from going forward, this class has helped me to be less judgmental as I’ve realized there are more restrictions out there in the world, than I initially thought.

The Mission of UWM Service Learning

The UWM Institute of Service Learing's purpose is to offer students service experiences that enrich academics, build critical thinking skills and foster a sense of civic responsibility. Service learning connects students with the real world side of their coursework, bringing social and cultural issues into focus and providing significant benefits to the more than 200 local nonprofit organizations which host our students.