It doesn’t just happen overnight, and it doesn’t just happen without years of planning and execution. Here’s how we did it:
1. Focus on your education in high school. Make the honor roll consistently. Get scholarships and bursaries, enough to pay for your first year’s tuition. Then get a degree or two.
2. Work in a field that requires police record checks. It’s even better if you’ve actually worked for your local police department, where you’ll have to be fingerprinted as a condition of employment. You might also wish to work abroad in a country that will require you to be fingerprinted for your non-resident card.
3. Volunteer in community organizations. This requires a separate police record check for each organization where you volunteer, if you are working with any “vulnerable” person, such as children, the disabled or elderly, in our community.
4. Take an interest in your children’s school and activities. Attend school council meetings, volunteer in the classroom and on field trips (yes, more police record checks: bonus!). Help your children with their homework. Enrich their lives with activities they enjoy, like sports and music lessons. Both of these things are good for proving you’re a “hood”, because who but a hood would spend years driving their children to and from activities, spending money on associated activity fees, lessons and equipment?
5. Maintain your yard and the exterior of your home. Dig out the weeds, paint the trim, sweep the driveway, pick up stray garbage that has blown in with the wind, wash your windows, cut the grass and shovel the walks within 24 hours of a snowfall. Nothing says “hood” like maintaining community standards. Who but a ne’er-do-well would do any of this?
If all this seems like far too much work, there is a simple solution. Move to our ‘hood and you can skip the hard work of becoming a “hood”. Why spend years proving how unworthy you are? Come on down!
Red's Hoodwinks 