Palm Beach County residents were asked:
Please tell us about an important moment in your life that would help someone understand what it’s like living in your neighborhood.
The stories and micro-narratives they submitted (as part of the We Are Here SenseMaker project) are listed below. Click ZOOM IN to learn more about the community member and how they interpreted their submission. NOTE: Some stories were partially transcribed by volunteers who shortened the narratives and referred to the storytellers in the third person (e.g., “her experience was” instead of “my experience was”).
It’s significant to live in the glades because of support
Important moment in my life was buying a house. I saved all my money and worked two jobs to get my own house. I did not want to live with my mom anymore
Growing up in lake worth beach Florida was ok at first till group of kids thought they were man enough to handle things. Going out stealing cars , robing people, hitting people and other things
An important moment in my life is when someone who you loved the most turns out to be dead or injured.You don’t know how to feel you feel like nobody and this world can’t fix this.My community people would just come to me and say “sorry for your lost” but they know how people can change when someone was injured in their life too
Together, our analyses can offer a portrait of who is poor and why, and explore the public policy implications; we can lift up voices and lives that are normally ignored or caricaturized by the media; we can include people living on the brink in high-profile events that explore poverty and in our advocacy efforts.
An important moment in my life is when segregation is now continuing again in our community.Many people don’t see how badly people treat us . We are equal and have the rights as everyone else . Growing up here in the 1940s and 1950s, couldn’t visit the public library near My house, but instead had to travel to the “colored” library in the historically black room I attended a school for black children, where we received second-hand books, and where the school day was half the length of that of white schools, because the black school had too many children and not enough funds.