My capstone project was based on the homelessness I have witnessed growing up in my neighborhood. Living in Hartford my whole life I have seen homelessness and poverty at every turn and when I became a senior I teamed up with my mothers church to try and make a difference in our community by helping people who needed our help the most. Through the help of my mentors Edward and Elissa Ford I was able to accomplish big events in my neighborhood such as a haircuts for the homeless at my barbershop, two homeless dinners at St. Elizabeth's shelter in Hartford, and a clothing drive in my school . Through this project I have grown so much as a person and have matured in the sense that age is really a number when it come to making a change in your surroundings. Through this project I have understand the cost of procrastination and the value of working hard from the beginning. I believe I was finished with my capstone around December of 2018, I had gotten all the hours and artifacts I had needed for the grade but I still decided to do a clothing drive and another dinner for the homeless in March. I have seen both sides of the fence when it comes to the academic standpoint of the project because I was so caught up in the actions that took place in capstone I just wanted to go out there and make a change rather than document a conversation or track the hours I spent working on my project which now I see is a very important key to this process. When things started to become due I was missing some and others were so old I couldn't even find them so I had to start over and take bad grades until I made them up. Personally in this project I have found out that I am capable of so much and I have seen first hand that when I am passionate about something there isn't a lot of people around me that can match my work ethic because I would spend hours making sure things went perfect not for me though for the people I was helping. In the beginning of capstone I did a speech at my mothers church and i had to go to the altar and introduce myself to the church and in smaller terms I had to ask for help. I went up there and ask the church to help me reach my goal for capstone but to also make a difference in there community as well. Looking back that was so big because through all my years of high school I dreaded asking anybody for help. would struggle so much but I would rather struggle on my own than to ask for help because for some reason in my heart i though it made me look weak so everything I did I would do on my own. Looking back at those pictures of me in front of the church I don't know why but i feel like I left all that pride behind when i stepped down after the speech because things really did change after I humbled myself and really made a difference where I live. Then through helping homeless people I had this feeling of disgust at first. Not towards them but to myself, I felt so bad that I really was taking everything I had for granted while these people come here everyday to eat because they have nothing else other than the clothes they carry. I don't want to call it life changing because there is so much more that I don't know but those two dinners really changed the outlook on life i had previously had, I wanted to make every moment last from then on and everything I was doing or working towards I appreciated so much more when I got there. For the haircuts for the homeless I really learned to appreciate people's intentions, my barber Gabby was the first person to lend me a hand before I even met my mentors he was the one who decided to do the haircuts for the homeless he taught me a lot about being selfless and that there is people in the world who want to see you succeed just because they believed in what you could do. I swear if I will remember anything about this it's what he told me when I got a haircut after we did the event. All the barbers were sitting around and he was cutting my hair, we were talking about what had just happened and how well it went and he told me “ there is a lot of young guys who sat in this chair and I gave advice to your the first kids who took the advice from everybody here and made something great out of it, i'm proud of you”. My barber wasn't very soft and sentimental about a lot of things but when every other barber chimed in and said that it was the truth because there is a lot of people who come in and they offer them help with whatever they need but between pride and maturity they don't take the help that's being offered. A big portion of this project was on the research paper, through what I found on why homeless people continue the cycle of homelessness and why they end up in that cycle to begin with i learned to understand what they were going through and why I needed to help them even more. I can tell anybody honestly when you serve your community out of the goodness of your heart it really changes who you are as a person because you really are apart of something that is more than just you, your touching people who can't do nothing else for you but say thank you and I feel it goes a long way to help people just because you want to. There is a million things that could have went better with my project but with all honesty it didn't have a challenging moment the hardest thing for capstone is motivation, I feel everything I did the dinners,the speech, the haircuts were really all at my fingertips what was hard was motivating myself but even then if your passionate about your project even that becomes easy. My capstone was a success and the experience I gained from it was even better, I wouldn't change anything about the way my capstone again I wish I could do it all over one more time because when I look back it's hard to think I did all that at 17 years old. This was such an important part of my life and my high school career I appreciate what i went through to get here and I feel it has helped me shape my future by making me more passionate about my goals and not settling for less than everything I asked for in my future.