Interview② (My Own Place)

My Own Place" (MOP) is a student organization in Fujisawa City, Kanagawa Prefecture, that works to create a place for children to live. We would like to thank My Own Place and their staff for their cooperation.

About MOP

MOP was founded in 2016 by students at Keio University with the desire to create a place for children and not want them to give up their dreams for financial reasons. Today, MOP is operated by students from several universities. The organization holds activities titled “Shonandai MOP HOME Terakoya” at “Tosho-ji Temple” in Shonandai, Fujisawa City. On the second and fourth Saturdays of the month from 1:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m, the group provides a “third place” for children to come to Tosho-ji Temple, and also provides free meals to those under 18 years old. Meals for parents and visitors are provided for a fee, but there is also participation by community members and other non-children. At Tosho-ji, MOP students play with the children and eat meals to support their development, and the 5.5-hour long activity time is due to their desire to “allow the children to come and go whenever they want.” The staff member who was in charge of the interview said, “MOP's main goal is to create a place for children to stay, and providing meals is a part of that.” During the day, MOP holds events such as playing in the nearby park, holding mochi pounding contests, bingo tournaments, and picking oranges with the cooperation of farmers. For children who want to study, MOP also provides learning support.

When we observed the activities, we were impressed by the close but not too close “Diagonal relationship” relationship (detailed later) between the children and the university students. Also, many university students came to participate in the activities for the first time, and the circle of activities seemed to be expanding.

Community-based activities

MOP's activities are funded by donations of foodstuffs needed to serve the meals. In addition to monetary donations from local residents and parishioners of Tosho-ji Temple, where MOP's activities take place, foodstuffs are sometimes donated by neighboring farmers. When serving meals, they cook the rice and miso soup themselves and buy lunch boxes for side dishes, using the donated ingredients for their own cooking. When MOP was first established, it sought out temples and churches that had ties to the community as possible locations for its activities. The head priest of Tosho-ji Temple had a volunteer spirit, holding Japanese language classes for foreign residents in Japan since that time, and he decided to provide the location. The person in charge of the interview said, “One of the features of activities at MOP is that they can be done at low cost. Therefore, we believe our business is relatively sustainable.”

MOP also manages social media to publicize its activities, and says that children often come by word of mouth among children and through introductions from parishioners of Tosho-ji Temple and people in the community. The person in charge of the interview believes that people are more likely to come to the activities if they learn about them through others. Many of the children who come to “Shonandai MOP HOME Terakoya” seem to be local children.

Regarding the future development of MOP's activities, the person in charge of the interview said that there is no intention to expand its activities. The person in charge of the interview said, “If we expand the scale of our activities, the number of donations and the number of children who come will increase, but there is also the aspect that it will be difficult to go when there are many children coming from various situations. We want to continue with the current situation where children who want to go can come.”

Love for growth

At MOP, our activities are based on the idea of “love for growth”. Graduates serve as advisors as organizers, but the core of our activities are university students. For the children, university students are a “diagonal” relationship that does not fit into either the “vertical” relationship for children, such as parents and teachers, or the “horizontal” relationship, such as friends, and MOP values this relationship.

As the person interviewed was being raised by their parents and receiving scholarships for college, they began to feel “supported not only by those close to me, but also by complete strangers.” In this way, they have come to feel that they are supported not only by those close to them, but also by strangers. From a position where one could be supported by others, they began to think that they had a responsibility to support another person. They also felt that they did not have a place to belong and wanted one, such as when they were in junior high school. These thoughts led the person in charge of the interview to become involved in activities to create a place to stay. We were impressed when the person in charge of the interview said, “I also have a sense that I am supported by my children.” They also believe that their involvement in the activities is not due to the impression that they are helping, but rather due to the idea that the activities are fun and that if they don't do them, there is no substitute for them.

MOP also encourages junior high and high school students to think about the following: “Everyone is supported by various people, including strangers. Many of the roles that support society are carried out by volunteers. When we realize that the world is also greatly supported by the volunteer spirit of people, we can see many things. It is important for people to help each other.“