Capstone Project Proposal Draft

Name of student: Elly Lee

Date: February 14th
Teacher: Ms.Lacroix
Capstone strand I have chosen is Service Strand
Proposed title for my project: Supporting vulnerable women and children in our
community.

What is your inquiry question that interests you for further research? It should be a question that
connects with a purpose, passion or personalized area of interest for you. This is a question that
you cannot just google an answer for. Please see examples from your Capstone booklet.
My inquiry question is:

What effects the mental health of vulnerable women and children the most and how?

Rationale/context: Detail your reasons for choosing this inquiry question. Explain WHY you are
choosing to investigate this topic as a major area of focus. How does this area of inquiry connect
to your passion(s), purpose? Why is it of personal interest to you?

I chose this because last year, I almost went to one of these houses. I was stuck in a really
bad situation with my mum and going to a transition house was an option we were exploring.
I was going to school at the time and most of my teachers were notified of my current situation
but I was not given any spare time or pity for my mental health, rather criticized. I want to
research what was affecting my mental health the most during that time and prove that
students going through similar situations should be cared for.

Background: What background knowledge/connections/prior learning do you have in this

area of inquiry?

I have taken social justice 12 last year which taught me a lot about the cycle of poverty,
gender based abuse and mental illnesses. Other than that course, I have also taken Human
geography 12 which had a unit focused on the coronavirus pandemic which really opened my
eyes to how people in our community have been struggling. Learning about these things have
really inspired me to help our community and this project.

Career connections: What is your intended career area at this point in time? What
connections does this inquiry question have to your life, academic and/ or career goals?

When I graduate high school, I plan to go into political science and economics. Once I
graduate from post-secondary, I hope to get an internship at the UN women's council though I
would be perfectly happy being in any area of the UN. I will continue to work myself up in the

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 UN and become elected as a member of the UN Human Rights council. This inquiry connects
to many points of my life as I have always been interested in human rights especially women's
and children's rights. I have never been affected by poverty but I have struggled with mental
health before and hope to learn more about what sort of things may have affected it.
Political science also includes social justice which contains gender based crime issues and
human rights issues. Going into the UN, I will have to fight for human rights and equality
across the world.
My inquiry question connects to all parts of my past, current and future life.

Interdisciplinary and core competencies connections: What subject areas and core
competencies will be connected with your project? Outline and explain the connections.

Social Studies
• Social studies is about political science as well as social sciences. This includes
human rights, geographic trends of poverty, the cycle of poverty and gender based
violence. These are all factors of women and children going into transition homes
and shelters to seek refuge. These factors are all steps that led me to organizing a
donation for these transitional homes and providing the people with what they
made need for daily tasks.
Social responsibilities
• I am very aware of my community and surrounding environment. Looking at the
current state of the world, our community may seem fine but when looking at it
closely and considering all of the issues that have risen, there are many who need
to be supported during these times. This has really encouraged the current project
as I want to support the vulnerable women and children.
Personal and cultural identity
• With my past experience, I had also been close to being in a vulnerable position
and could have required community support. I understand that this really affected
my choices in pursuing this service project and directed it towards a specific group
of people. This may be seen as unfair as I am only doing this to support a group I
could have been a part of but being passionate about this issue, it will lead to
better results.
Critical Thinking
• Thinking about the limitations with the current state of the world with the whole
pandemic and social distancing, I realized that fundraising with bake sales and
events such as that will be very difficult. I came to the conclusion that having a
bottle drive would be much better as many people I know do not collect bottles and
cans at all and they can rack up quite a bit of value.

Capstone Presentation medium: select one or more project mediums you wish to use to
present your project. Outline and give details about how you will present your project once
completed. You may use a combination of mediums.
o Electronic portfolio: Prezi or PPT
o Physical portfolio
o Website
o imovie presentation

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 o YouTube channel

The form I would present my project would be by electronic portfolio. I am very familiar with
Prezi and I feel that using that platform I will be able to produce the best results. I will also
create information sheets which will be handed out to anyone who I present to. This will help
organize the information in an easy way for the audience to access all of the information if
they cannot keep up with the presentation.

Description of my Capstone project. Specific Project Details of the Capstone Project: what
will you research, create, study, produce, solve, investigate? What product will be produced
at the end of this project for evaluation. Write a one-page description outlining your
proposal.

For my capstone project, I will research the stability of a person who is

struggling with poverty. I will study the mental health aspect as well as physical
aspect of people who struggle with poverty and homelessness.
The main goal of my research is to find how people are affected by poverty and
how lack of food can affect someone’s mental health.
The question specifies on lack of food but I also want to focus on how the
nutritional value, presentation and taste of food affect people’s happiness.
After researching, I will start focusing on the actually “doing” portion of my
capstone project.
My project is to host a bottle drive to raise funds for the Ishtar transition society.
I will be purchasing items the organization needs for the women they help and I
will set an appointment with them to drop off the items.
The items I plan on purchasing are mainly food items such as cereals, peanut
butter, crackers and items with a longer shelf life. I will also be purchasing
hygiene products such as pads and tampons for the women as they tend to be
more expensive and less people donate them.
How will I obtain the funding for these items? For the bottle drive, I will share
my project on social media platforms and ask my friends to donate bottles as
well. A realistic estimate for the amount of money I will raise from my friends will
be about $20. I will also contact businesses to ask if I can collect their empty
cans and bottles and take them down to the bottle depot and I assume this will
add about $30.
As I work as a waitress, I will also pool my tips starting from now on into this
project and that will equal to at least $40 as I only work 1 shift per week.
To get more items for a cheaper price, I also plan on looking at coupons I can
use at stores to maximize my donation.
This will equal to $90 I can spend buying items to donate.
After donating these items, I plan on looking into the usual foods donated to
shelters and why they are so popular. To further support my research, I will

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 reach out to workers at the Ishtar transition society to learn the items that are
most frequently donated as well as the items they desperately need more of.
To present the knowledge learned, I will write an article on how we can better
support our community and the Do’s and Don’ts of donating. I hope this article
will educate the people in our community as well as inspire them to donate
more to shelters, thrift stores and food banks. After the article is written, I will
post it online to a weebly website where I will have also posted evidence of my
donations and also more tips on how to support the less fortunate in our
community. This website url will be shared on many social media platforms and
I hope to have at least 20 visits to the website after I post it.

Resources/ Technology/Skills: Make an assessment of the resources, technology and

skills you will need to be able to complete this project. What is your plan to be able to
access/learn all of the resources necessary to achieve completion of this project? Detail
your plans.

Resources I will need are bottles and cans, access to a storage area for all the bottles, a car
to transport the bottles and cans to a bottle depot and my computer.
I already have a computer which is working fine so I can rely on using this for the project. For
the car, my mom is willing to drive me and if she gets busy I have 2 other friends who offered
to help out.
The bottles and cans are the item I will be fundraising and collecting from friends and
businesses.

Mentors/Community Connections: What types of mentor(s)/community connections will

you need to help you complete your capstone project? How will your mentor(s) help you?
What is your plan to access the mentorship/community connections necessary for this
project?

The types of mentor and community connections I will need for the project are teacher
mentors as they can really help connect me to the social awareness part of the project
and guide me to understand how to connect it to statistical evidence of my contribution to
the community and justify the reasons why I chose this project.
The community connections I will use to make sure I receive enough funding for the
donations I will make are restaurant connections. I know a couple people who run
businesses so I will contact the owners to see if I can take their empty cans and bottles
and add them to the donations.

Project limitations: What are some project limitations and potential obstacles that you foresee
that might affect progress with your Capstone Project?

The only two obstacles I can see affecting me in the future is the fundraising portion. There is
a realistic limit to how much money I can raise in couple weeks and because of the current

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 pandemic events such as drink sales and bake sales are not possible. This means that I may
not be able to donate as much as I hope to.
There is also a limit to how much time I can dedicate to this project. If I could, I would spend at
least a couple hours every day on this but as I have three other classes, a part time job and a
volunteering job, I fear that I will not be able to do that.

Other considerations: List and detail any other related information/ considerations about
your project that you feel should be included in your project proposal.

References:

Attach a REFERENCE LIST. Your list should be written using correct APA formatting.
An example is provided on page 21 of your Capstone booklet.

- Donation of Goods and Services. (2021, January 2). Ishtar Transition Society.

http://www.ishtarsociety.org/how-you-can-help/donations-of-goodsservices-

program/

- Leliveld, M. C., & Risselada, H. (2017). Dynamics in charity donation decisions: Insights

from a large longitudinal data set. Science advances, 3(9), e1700077.

https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1700077

“Previous research showed that Donators are often younger, female, less conservative, and
have a lower income than Non donators”

- Chatzky, J. C., & Hultgren, K. H. (2017, October 31). How to Make Charitable Donations
That Make a Real Difference. Small Business.
https://www.thebalancesmb.com/smartest-way-charitable-donations-4116139
“hard truth is a bigger check is better than equally sized smaller checks”

- Lachance, L., & Ramsey, D. (2015). Food, mood, and brain health: implications for the
modern clinician. Missouri medicine, 112(2), 111–115.
“In order to promote mental health and recovery from mental illness, one could consider
encouraging patients to eat a diet that is optimal for brain health”

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 - Davison, K. M., Gondara, L., & Kaplan, B. J. (2017). Food Insecurity, Poor Diet Quality,
and Suboptimal Intakes of Folate and Iron Are Independently Associated with
Perceived Mental Health in Canadian Adults. Nutrients, 9(3), 274.
https://doi.org/10.3390/nu9030274
“... explain independent links between food insecurity and mental health...”

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