Meet Maria!

Hi, my name is Maria Clara Oliveira, my major is English in the track of Editing, Writing and Media, and I am from Recife, Brazil but I moved to Orlando, Florida at 11 years old.

This summer a plan on filming a short documentary on the homeless community in Central Florida. In my experience, I plan on doing volunteer work in multiple organization that include different types of volunteering opportunities and job variations, with this I will interact with multiple people who have either been involved in supporting homeless communities for a long time or are homeless themselves. By interacting with this people I will build connections and relationships with them which will take me a step closer to understanding how they would like to be represented in society. It is important to understand how they would like to be represented in society because since I will be making that documentary, I should be able to learn what exactly they are comfortable with sharing and being able to show their true selves to the people who watch the documentary. This is related to my community-based interest because I will interact with the community I am interest in exploring more about and understanding more of as I will document how this people are actually like instead of relying on beliefs of what other people think they are or act like. My expectations for my experience is to understand more about the homeless community and being able to correctly represent them in the documentary. I will achieve this by forming relationships with the people I will work with and some of the homeless people that I will interact with. I will try to ask them questions about themselves to understand their personality and character better which will be important when representing them. I am not sure in my experience is how the documentary will come about, I don’t know if many people will be okay with being in front of the cameras and if they would feel comfortable enough to share their stories with the world. I still haven’t organized how the structure of my documentary will be but if I could find at least one person who is willing to share their experiences and stories would be nice. I am also not sure how much time available I will have to volunteer because I am unsure of what my work schedule is like for the summer, but my plan is to try to volunteer at least once per week. I m not feeling scared about these things that I am unsure of but I wish to find an answer to them immediately and be able to do as I wish, but as far for now, I have a lot of hope for this experience.

This picture represent me patiently waiting for my summer experience as I will be doing something that I love while working with a community that I am interest in learning about.