What We Can and Can't Do to Improve Community Service
One of the greatest difficulties that an individual can face is having their beliefs challenged with uncomfortable truths. Such is the case with volunteering. On most days, you will not hear about all of the negative impacts of community service. “It seems to be so clear that service is good that we do not need to question service or to talk about it; we only need to do it.” It is safe to say though, that community service is not entirely good. Quite honestly, no one wants to hear its negative impacts; sometimes you just have to. Luckily, that is the first step to fixing the problems of community service: hearing them. The second step is to understand them.
The most common error of volunteering is that people do it for the wrong reasons. While helping others for personal benefit may not be the worst thing, it is still a problem. Misdirected intentions can cause others to lose sight of the cause, do work poorly, or, in the worst cases, both.
Losing sight of the cause can mainly be defined as doing the work for yourself instead of for the people in need. There are many ways this could happen: to have an intrapersonal experience, for a résumé item, to brag, etc. While the work may be helpful, community service should not be done for these reasons; it should be done to benefit someone in true need. It’s not called self service.
In the case of poor work with good intentions, it is usually because the volunteer is lazy yet believes they’re still being helpful to those in need by doing something. Maybe sometimes you can volunteer and do work lazily and correctly. However, lazy work could be, and probably is, more hurtful to the effort than helpful; someone else more passionate could be doing what the lazy volunteer is doing, to a higher standard of quality.
Doing poor work because you don’t care about the cause only requires an example to get the point across. A boss offers a salary raise to his workers if they go out and do X hours of volunteering at Habitat for Humanity. When they go out and do the volunteering, they are careless with their efforts because they are doing it for the pay-raise; they over-water some of the plants and drown them, forget to plant grass seed on one corner of the house, and leave dirt all over the sidewalk. And then they get paid for it.
Selfish intentions and harmful “helping” are joined by poor reflection when adding to the list of service’s negative impacts. As a result of selfish intentions, a volunteer’s reflection on an experience is usually confined to “it helps me appreciate what I have,” which, in other words, means that it’s great not to be homeless or hungry or cold or poor.
While many volunteering efforts are organized by people who know how to make service effective, there are lots of service events that are not really helping as much as the people organizing the events might believe they are. The quintessence of this is problem is demonstrated by voluntourism, or international volunteering. For example, many people go abroad to give their time to “help” at orphanages in other countries. Only staying for a limited amount of time, be it a day or 2 months, really damages the children at the orphanage because of the abrupt end to the relationships they form with the voluntourists. In this case, volunteering is harmful.
Volunteering can also reap no benefits. There have been stories in which the volunteer did something for the community that they did not need; that the volunteers thought they needed. A group brought clothes to a school that they assumed was poor and would appreciate a suitcase full of clothes; when the students gave the principal the suitcase, they watched him toss it into what seemed like a spare room filled with other suitcases of clothes that other volunteers “thought” the children needed.
Some community service is necessary. But in some instances, volunteers do work that could be done by the people being “helped.” Most of the time, yes, it is good to help accelerate work, even if it could be completed by the people you are helping. But that same time could be better purposed by performing service for someone who really needs it. Again, it is not bad to help accelerate a process by volunteering; it is only bad if another opportunity to serve someone in greater need is ignored.
Unfortunately, the greatest problem with volunteerism is that it perpetuates the problem that it tries to solve. Feeding hungry people may be a temporary solution to their hunger, but it doesn’t teach them how to get food for themselves. It can make those in need lose pride and dignity; their unspoken inequality is shown to them directly through service. It is not easy to imagine what that feeling is like. Even more unfortunate is the fact that no one is working to solve the long term problems, such as teaching the hungry how they can obtain food. No is working toward these problems because they either are unaware of the underlying causes or do not have the time or energy to fix them as a result of community service.
The third step to fixing the problems of community service is to make people aware of these negative impacts. While there may be many issues with community service, it should be recognized that many of them can be resolved. Although solving the problems of community service may make doing volunteering more cumbersome, they are problems nonetheless without excuses to be avoided. The easiest issues to solve are misguided intentions and the assumption that what you’re doing is more important or effective than it actually is.
Misguided intentions could easily be reduced when the volunteer’s motivations are not for the cause for which they volunteer. If volunteers that believed it was about their experience while serving were reminded by trip leaders why they’re truly there, to serve their community and not themselves, then people may realize what it actually means to serve. A problem arises when the person with misguided motivations leads a trip or a volunteer’s incentive is an increased salary, bragging rights, or a résumé item. These, unfortunately, I find hard to combat because the people are acting for themselves and it is hard to motivate them for different reasons. It luckily does not seem that this group of people is the majority, though; I believe that most people do community service because it’s the right thing to do.
The key to doing service successfully and beneficially is communication between the person helping and the people being helped. If you’re willing to do service, I’d be surprised if you didn’t want to make it impactful. If the people being helped were to explicitly express something that could help them, it would be difficult for those helping to perform anything else unnecessary. With proper communication, volunteers can always make proper benefits and those in need will always be benefitting. Previously, I discussed that simply accelerating work that the people being helped could do themselves is not the best way to serve, but if that is what the people being helped desire, then that statement does not apply.
While the smaller problems are fixable, it does not seem that the bigger problems are. Community service will always be instantly gratifying and take up the time, money, and energy of those who are aware that greater change is needed. These things make it practically impossible for justice and advocacy to be carried out, which perpetuates the main problem of community service: that the problems service tries to solve are met at the minimum, as opposed to actually being solved. This leads to those in need always being disheartened by their inability to provide sufficiently for themselves. The only way to fix this would be to engage all people in active community service so that there’d be little work left to do besides advocacy; sadly, this does not seem feasible because you can’t get everyone to perform community service willingly. Maybe I’m wrong though: I heard recently that it is becoming more surprising for a person not to do community service than to do it. If this is the case, then this seemed impossibility of engaging all people in community service and volunteer work might actually be possible after all.
For as many unconsidered negative impacts that there are about service, it still should be noted that it is both good and necessary. In my opinion, though, it could be better. It could be filled with passionate volunteers, who are all working hard for the cause and not for themselves. It could be understanding that a volunteer’s help can mentally frustrate whomever the volunteer is helping and that it is encouraged to feel sympathetic of their problems instead of feeling grateful that they are not your problems. It could be that all acts of service are thoroughly communicated, which would result in successful, effective, and beneficial volunteerism. Most importantly, it should be recognizing that the actions volunteers take, while still good, will always be necessary, unless in the unlikely case that justice is performed. The conversation should not be about why community service is good, but instead about how it could be better. I, at least, believe that it can improve; do you?