By Amanda Alfanos, Editor-in-Chief
A female student with pearly white teeth and blonde hair anxiously picks up her phone to make a call. It’s a call she’s made weekly for the past three months. She’s waiting to hear back from an organization that she’s passionate about. The official on the line tells her she’s still on the waiting list. She ends the call shortly thereafter.
Annalise Freeman, Miss OCU 2011, walks across the Kirkpatrick auditorium stage Saturday in the Miss OCU Pageant. The vocal performance senior received a three-semester tuition scholarship.
Annalise Freeman was inspired to choose her pageant platform for a few reasons.
“I used to work in a nursery in a church in Edmond,” said Freeman, Miss OCU 2011. “A lot of the congregation were foster parents.
“I witnessed a lot of issues the foster children faced and saw a lot of things they went through.”
Freeman’s platform is mentoring foster and homeless children.
“I used to have a platform before about financial education in school system, but I wasn’t really passionate about it,” she said.
Freeman said she’s on the waiting list to receive a foster child to mentor from Citizens Caring for Children, 730 W. Wilshire. The organization aims to provide transitional programming for foster children through a mentoring program. The program also has a boutique full of new clothing. The children can visit the store three or four times a year to pick out new shoes, clothing and school supplies, Freeman said.
“Most of their life is so stressed out from not being a normal child,” she said. “Most of them are abused in some way.
“The cycle of abuse not broken. It continue through live their lives.”
Freeman said a purpose of the program is to encourage and empower the children to be what they want to be.
“Only 50 percent of the children graduate from high school,” she said.
While Freeman said she’s anxious to receive her child to mentor, she exercises her platform weekly by teaching theater classes to homeless children on Fridays. She plays theater and improvisation games with the children at Positive Tomorrows, P.O. Box 61190.
Her roommate, Sonya Meyer, music theater senior, co-teaches the classes with Freeman.
“We teach three different classes,” Meyer said. “We’ve been working on movement and doing things with their bodies.
“We’ve also been defining characters with their movement.”
Meyer said she hopes by teaching the children theater, the roommates hope to help them open up.
“There’s one boy in our kindergarten class,” she said. “He’s undergone a lot in his life.
“We got him to be a monkey last week. He’s made a lot of progress and he’s really opened up a lot.”
Freeman said she encourages students to get involved with the organizations.
“Positive Tomorrows is always looking for volunteers and teachers for the children,” she said.
Students can visit the Positive tomorrows website and the Citizen’s Caring for Children website for volunteer information.
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