What does it Mean to be an Active Citizen?
My 5th grade English teacher always taught me that quality is more important than quantity; in other words, the quality or value of writing matters much more than the number of words you can say or the number pages you can fill. I find this to be true of community engagement as well: the value and significance of your work matter more than the number of community activities in which you participate. I believe that knowing what makes community engagement both valuable and significant is the best foundation to ensure great quality in your engagement. By using this knowledge to be aware of your impact and to perform service in a more effective way, you can become a more Active Citizen.
How I have grown from the readings from Community Engagement can be best explained by a quote from Roald Dahl’s Matilda: “All the reading she had done had given her a view of life they had never seen.” An entirely new perspective has been opened up to me and has changed the way I think about everything, a perspective of which most people have no knowledge. This is a result mainly of the readings involving charity vs. justice and the perpetualization of social problems, community service’s negative impacts, and more generally conceptual readings about strengths and leadership.
Part of being an Active Citizen involves understanding that charity is a short term solution and that justice is a long term solution; charity is the common type of service that comes to mind when you think of “volunteer work.” Justice is the type of social work that no one talks about and few do: addressing and fixing the problems that cause things like poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, etc. The main problem with charity is that it perpetuates the real issue that it seems to solve. For example, donating food to the hungry will solve their temporary hunger, but it won’t help them to provide food for themselves in the future. This also causes a type of thinking where volunteers are led to believe that the recurrence of the problem is the fault of those having the problem. In some cases, if you provide food for a person every day then they may not work towards finding some on their own, but in the end that would still be the fault of the food providers. I can’t say I know many service organizations that perform real justice. Part of being an Active Citizen is being a Conscientious Citizen, so I believe that being aware of this sad truth is important to being an Active Citizen.
There are other problems caused by charity other than its nature to act as a short term solution to long term problems. Another major problem with charity is that it is unsustainable. It may be possible to house or feed some people for a few months, but what happens when more people need to be housed than the room in a shelter can provide for? what happens when you run out of money because word of a soup kitchen grows and the number of people for whom the kitchen is providing increases too quickly? Another bad cause is that there grows a disconnect between the person being helped and the person helping. The person being helped seems less like a real person than they actually are. This disconnect also causes the person being helped to feel some shame as they become aware that they are truly in need. As grateful as some volunteers would like those they are helping to be, it is not easy for them to accept help in that way. They lose some dignity and pride in it as well, and as sad as that is, it is true. Being an Active Citizen should include being aware of this as well, so that you can anticipate any of these problems and try to avoid or fix them.
One of the most valuable things I have learned from the SERVE readings was that different people are different types of leaders and lead better in different situations. This has really inspired me to recognize the situations in which I feel like a leader, enabling me to act as one when the time comes. When I do not feel like a leader, it is probably better to let someone else who does take command. Leadership is often based on strengths, and something that Virginia Tech stresses is working through your strengths, not working to improve your weaknesses. Strengths based learning allows you to make better contributions to anything you’re working on, at home, at school, or in the community. By recognizing what you are good at, you can utilize these to make great things happen, whether it’s for a school project or a community service experience. Doing what you do best allows you to make things more effective, which is the ultimate goal.
When first learning about the Active Citizen Continuum, we were asked to place ourselves where we thought we belonged on the spectrum. I knew that I had evolved past the Member status; I was only a Member during high school while I was a part of Key Club. At that time, I did not understood the importance of the work I was doing nor the social problems that gave purpose to the work I was doing. I was essentially following directions: handing in however much money they told us to donate, buying canned food for food drives, going to events they sponsored. But, of course, I did not understand why I was doing it. Where the money or food went did not concern me; I did not care to learn about the organization for which I was volunteering. I was merely just a presence, until I first started to learn about the impact of what I was doing. This learning happened specifically at Key Club’s New Jersey District Convention in senior year of high school. One of the presenters showed us that the projects in which we participated as members of Key Club were really making a difference across the world, on a massive scale. This demonstrated to me that the work I was doing, while small, was having an true impact on real lives of other real people. This was what moved me toward realizing that I shouldn’t just be doing service to do service, but rather for the good of the people being served. And now I can recognize this as my progression along the Active Citizen Continuum from a Member to a Volunteer. From then until SERVE, all of the community work that I did was done as a Volunteer.
Joining SERVE helped me to realize I was ready to progress further, from a Volunteer to a Conscientious Citizen. I realized this on that same day, when we were first introduced to the idea of the Continuum. Community Engagement helped me to realize that there was more to service than just doing it for the good of others; there were positive impacts of service, negative impacts of service, and ways that service could be different. There were even ways to analyze the service itself, which included its purpose, problems, and effectiveness. By acknowledging my current status on the Continuum and knowing the steps I would have to take to progress further, I was ready to learn about community service and how to progress toward a Conscientious Citizen. The Community Engagement course has taught me to understand that there’s a lot more to learn about service underneath its surface. Through the readings and discussions, I was able to think and analyze further about the service done by the Montgomery County Christmas Store.
Through thinking about their work, I was able to become a more conscientious citizen, at least in the realm of food and clothing insecurity. Someone like me would not have thought twice about giving people options when looking for clothing and food. The MCCS gives its shoppers dignity by allowing them to choose clothes to give to their loved ones for the holidays, rather than just giving them clothes that they could dislike or that may not fit properly. I can safely say that the MCCS is more conscientious in its mission than the average volunteer would be, and knowing this gives me something extra to appreciate about it. If the organization itself were placed on the Active Citizen Continuum, it would definitely be considered Active; with greater knowledge and awareness of the impacts of donating to low-income families, its employees could all be considered Active Citizens. Volunteering with them regularly next semester would allow me, too, to nearly consider myself an Active Citizen in that domain. I would not exactly be an Active Citizen if I were to go work somewhere else because I have not done such reflection for organizations other than the MCCS, but the time I have to learn about other organizations in a similar manner allows me to become an Active Citizen in their domains of work, too. Overall, I have been prepared to be Conscientious about many different social problems by the learning done in Community Engagement. Now, I should take the time I have to become a more generally Conscientious Citizen.
This kind of thinking used to analyze the Christmas Store can be applied to our University as well. Virginia Tech boasts a motto Ut Prosim about its student body, especially while discussing the Big Event and Ut Prosim Week, but doesn’t have a lot to back this up. The students may have been involved in community service, but it doesn’t seem to me like a lot of people are involved anymore, unless they are part of a fraternity/sorority or a club/organization for which it is required. It does not seem like there is a way that the University encourages community service in the first place. Currently, Ut Prosim is nothing more than just a motto. But it could be something more and should be something more. If the University likes to admit caring people who have had experience doing community service, then the potential is there, and the University just needs to tap into it.
Personally, I plan to lead the service organization “Engineers Without Borders” at VT in order to expand the organization to different projects around the globe, while using my status as a conscientious citizen in order to make sure that the service projects are desired and needed by the host community, well communicated, and well prepared. Unfortunately, though, many people have not had the same journey and opportunities as I have, referring to my experiences with high school Key Club, SERVE, and the Montgomery County Christmas Store. The majority of students here at VT have not had exposure to the readings from Community Engagement, to the Active Citizen Continuum, or to the service opportunities that are available, leaving them stuck at the Member or Volunteer stage of the Continuum with no possibility to advance or progress. Perhaps the best way to give this exposure to the students would be through the RA’s.
Although the RA’s have a lot of authority over the students, they still maintain a more peer to peer oriented relationship with them as well. Employing service-oriented RA’s and structuring their hall activities to be more community-oriented could build the bridge between the claims of the University and what its students actually do.
In order to make students more community and service oriented, they would need the knowledge about which we were taught, as members of SERVE, and opportunities for community and service based activities. At weekly meetings, an RA or a group of RA’s could discuss a topic and inform their residents about opportunities they they themselves are leading. People are lazy, and so they are not going to go out of their way in order to find the opportunities or gain the knowledge to become more Active Citizens on their own. If these were provided to them, however, by someone like an RA, the experiences would be readily available and students may be more willing to involve themselves.
In order to make this manageable for the RA’s because they have their own lives and responsibilities, the entire thing could be structured by others. For example, if an RA chose to discuss a weekly topic via Powerpoint, there could be a basic Powerpoint created for them with notes on what to cover; the only thing the RA would have to worry about would be scheduling a meeting and relaying the information provided to them. Assuming that the RA is taught the subject on their own as part of RA preparation, they would be able to teach the information more easily and possibly more interestingly to the students. Another way to get around this could be that different lessons are distributed among a group of RA’s so that each RA wouldn’t have to worry about teaching every topic. Meetings would then be done with groups of RA’s and their respective residents instead of just with a single RA and his or her residents. The same would go for the service opportunities. Each week, an RA could lead a service event and the residents would have the option to attend the event or attend another RA’s event. If a weekly event were too much for an RA to handle, then it could be ensured that each week an RA has a service event to attend so that all of the residents had the option of joining them.
Being an active citizen means knowing that volunteering for Habitat for Humanity alongside the man who will be receiving the house may make him feel unaccomplished. It means feeling a deep connection with your community, while working both with it or for it. It means being conscious of what you’re doing (and not doing) and being able to reflect upon the service in an honest and constructive way. Being an active citizen involves much more than just doing community service; it involves recognizing the underlying causes of a social problem, working to make service for that problem more effective, and understanding the bigger picture and how it is impacted by you and your service.