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These articles shined light on something we don’t talk about often: volunteer and community services aren’t always beneficial to the people they are supposed to be helping. Oftentimes you ask people why they volunteer, why they participate in community service and they say oh, I’m helping the community and it makes me feel good about myself. “It makes me feel good about myself.” Is community service benefiting the volunteer more than the recipient? McKnight’s idea is that servanthood is a bad thing because it forces people in poverty to be dependent on others, “professionals” as he called it, instead of building independency. Herzberg emphasizes how easy it is to only see the task you are performing, not seeing what caused the need for that task; I believe both ideas from McKnight and Herzberg hold some truth. In class we discussed community service as benefiting the community, helping those in need and we claimed it was something being a good citizen but how many of us actually learn the bigger picture in doing these things? We do our service, feel good about ourselves and go home to our nice homes with a fridge stocked full of food and forget all about the people’s problems we just helped. Herzberg’s definition of community service differs from ours because he believes that a requirement of community service is understanding why and how the people we help got to the place they are and possibly even figure out how to prevent these situations so they don’t need the help to begin with.
In class I stated that being a citizen is strictly having the papers and proof of citizenship, and I am still sticking to that definition. The extra responsibilities and rights such as doing community service that people say go along with citizenship are subjective, but I agree with Herzberg that if you choose to do community service, it should open your eyes to the bigger picture. Community service should be a learning experience, it should show you that your class, race, level of education, is not the only kind out there and you should be able to determine why. Herzberg goes into detail about a class dedicated to community service and he exposes the students to readings that help them better understand the people they work with. He saw growth in the students he taught, from being afraid to even walk into the shelter and having prejudice against the people they would help, to leaving as more empathetic people, realizing that these people were subjected to a meritocracy that doesn’t work. This is how community service should be done but this method is not practiced often, especially since we’ve turned volunteering into a paid career. Now there are “professionals” who do service as a career meanwhile the community becomes dependent on their outside resources. Not only have we turned it into a career, we’ve also made it a requirement. In high school, to make your resume look stronger when applying for college, you volunteer. In certain classes, you’re required to do community service, the service has lost the true meaning behind it. I unfortunately have fallen into this “requirement” of volunteering. Though I yearned to volunteer starting in 8th grade at the hospital, it was for my own benefit. When I came to college, I was required to volunteer but even the places I volunteered at put me behind the scenes and unable to connect with the people I was serving. My idea of community service coincides with McKnight and Herzberg however, my execution has not matched. I have volunteered at food pantries who deliver food to their impoverished customers instead of teaching them how to grow their own and become independent, as McKnight would have liked. The closest I’ve come to volunteering in efforts towards teaching independence is at a clothing shelter that also specializes in programs to help people get on their feet but even then I had nothing to do with the actual process. McKnight stresses the importance of not viewing people as their weaknesses but to build up their strengths and help them prevail from there. That’s the kind of community service work I would like to do as a volunteer but those options are often limited.
In conclusion, as “citizens” we need to focus on more ideologies like McKnight’s and Herzberg; we are doing a disservice to the people we are serving by allowing them to just become dependent on community service. We highlight their weaknesses and build what we think is right for them but we need to focus more on the bigger picture. Finding the root of the problem of the situations that people end up in can help us figure out how to prevent instead of react, and that’s what should be considered community service instead of what we have in place now.