Community Service: Things To Consider

By Emily Plummer on July 7, 2015

If you’re going to a university, then you probably did some community service to get there.

Whether it was serving food at the local homeless shelter, building houses in Honduras, or working at an orphanage in Argentina, universities tend to appreciate volunteer work, and there’s a reason for that.

Volunteering shows humility, altruism, and real-world experience– all qualities that colleges love. It is important to consider however, the goal of your service.

By volunteering in a community, do you attempt to fix it, to help it, or to serve it?

One who attempts to fix or to help enters a community, oftentimes without prior knowledge of the greater political, economic, or social issues affecting it, with notions only of their own designated time in the community. One who serves on the other hand, enters a community to learn from it, to work alongside community members, and to create a positive impact lasting long after they return home.

Attempting to fix or to help with a community’s problems as a foreigner inherently takes the position that the community is broken, and you, as the volunteer, are the omnipotent superhero without weakness or vulnerability, come to this community’s rescue.

Not that these aren’t good intentions. It is admirable to want to fix the problems facing a community. Approaching the situation as though you have all the solutions and the community members are helpless, however, is not the best way to go about service.

Image via Flickr.com

In her article from the Shambhala Sun, Rachel Naomi Remen describes this difference between helping and serving, “When we help, we become aware of our own strength. But when we serve, we don’t serve with our strength; we serve with ourselves, and we draw from all of our experiences.”

Service is a relationship between yourself and others. It comes from the perspective that the people you serve are not separate from yourself, but part of a larger community that includes all of us.

Service builds a relationship between equals whereas attempting to fix a community sets the precedent for an unbalanced relationship between one who is whole and one who is broken.

Furthermore, when serving, it is not enough to attend to the obvious, visible issues affecting individuals– hunger, poverty, disease. Instead, we must look beyond these symptoms to the institutions and policies that create the issues in the first place. We must ask the questions, “Why is there such drastic economic inequality within countries? Why are so many around the world starving, while others have millions of dollars to spare?”

This is called critical service-learning, in which you connect in-class lessons on social justice issues, to their real-world manifestations by serving. It requires developing authentic relationships and understanding institutional structures that govern the lives of community members.

Understanding is essential to critical service-learning because it allows a server to see their role in the alleviation of social justice issues in a community, among political structures, aid agencies, and community leaders.

Instead of volunteering to fix the issues we can see, like aiding a child who is without dinner by providing a meal, critical service-learning promotes examining the apparent issue, determining its cause, and attempting to end it for good, like ensuring that the child is never without a meal– even when we leave their community.

Without giving attention to the structures that cause social justice issues, we are engaging in “band-aid” service, attending to the symptoms of injustice but never their root causes.

While social change oriented service is a slower process, as it attempts to undermine flawed systems, addressing these root causes may eventually bring an end to the need for service in a community. Once the cycle of inequality, oppression, and dependence on outside aid ends, the community will no longer suffer from the pangs of social injustice, and service will no longer be necessary there.

An essential part of this critical learning-system is reflection, to analyze the impacts of servers’ specific actions in a community. This lets us to explore the roles of policies, institutions, and ourselves in creating or alleviating injustice.

While we might contribute to the alleviation of injustice during our service, it is easy leave that behind when returning to our daily lives. Reflection allows us to continue to meditate on the social justice issues we faced while serving as we draw a connection between the lives of those we served and our own lives, and discover related issues in our own communities.

In serving a community, it is important to understand the context of the issues we confront, as well as the reasons our service is necessary at all. This will make our service much more impactful in the long run.

Follow Uloop

Apply to Write for Uloop News

Join the Uloop News Team

Discuss This Article

Back to Top

Log In

Contact Us

Upload An Image

Please select an image to upload
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format
OR
Provide URL where image can be downloaded
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format

By clicking this button,
you agree to the terms of use

By clicking "Create Alert" I agree to the Uloop Terms of Use.

Image not available.

Add a Photo

Please select a photo to upload
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format