Criticisms of Volunteerism

From a young age I have always been taught the importance of service and the benefit it had on communities. From service opportunities with my church, my boy scout troop and just my family I remember thinking that no matter how small the act of service seemed or how few people it affected service always had good outcomes. I think that this is a value instilled in even our country summed up by President Kennedy's famous quote, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” (Kennedy). I remember first really thinking about this quote back in my early days of middle school probably around 6th grade when listening to the song “Cult of Personality” by Living Colour. The song inserts the first half of the famous quote towards the end of the song and I remember this leading me to a lot of thought about the strength of service when I was younger. I think the American ideal of service that I believe is embodied with this quote comes from similar American ideology of Manifest Destiny and The American Dream. As I have grown up however, I have been given the chance to reflect more on the service I have done and service as an institution worldwide.

As I have stated before in other writings on this eportfolio my first experience with service came from participating in my neighborhood community clean up for Earth Day. Since then my parents, both civil servants working for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, instilled in me the importance of service for the good that it does for a community. I feel that on a community level, with simple projects such as the neighborhood clean up it is especially hard to see any negative aspects as you truly believe that you are doing a very simple action to help the community. In a sense your service is not necessarily low risk low reward but instead low harm low reward. By that I mean to say that while small based community service projects might be less damaging but they also generally do not have the large impacts that you possibly relate to hurricane relief projects or programs such as Doctors Without Borders. While I personally believe or at least don’t see many problems with service located in your community I do believe that the main problems that arise with this kind of service similar to most problems that arrive with service in general is related to a lack of knowledge on the problems trying to be solved. Often times people go into communities trying to solve problems without being fully educated on what needs to be done and what the best solutions are to solve the problems we see in these communities. I think this has become apparent to me in the Scouts Thanksgiving program, Scouting for Food. This annual food drive was run by taking groups of scouts who would go door to door posting bags on people’s doors with a flyer about the event inside, asking people to fill the bag with non-perishable goods and leaving it outside to be picked up in a week or two. While this particular food drive was able to provide a number of food items to those in need I think that one of the negative aspects that followed it was it’s lack of efficiency. I believe that this factor strongly led from a lack of preparedness and planning going into the project. We as the scouts simply chose some houses in a neighborhood at what seemed to be random to hang these bags on hoping they would be able to contribute with generally only a week’s notice and a underwhelming amount of advertising going into the project. Other problems often seemed to arise from poor planning and communication amongst the scouts. I remember a few times where our days that we were supposed to go into the community had to be changed for various reasons such as other conflicts in the troop or with individuals ability to show up. I think this lack of planning mainly through the avenue of lack of communication with the community really showed a negative side of service in the inefficiency that can often follow it. While this project and a lot of other small, community based projects often are mainly good acts and have good results for those involved, I believe that a lack of planning and education into the community can often produce negative effects that could easily be avoided through taking the time submerge further into the problem.

Another area where I see ideals of service and problems of service arise is with the culture in our country. Since the USA took a stance as a world superpower after WWII and the droppings of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, other nations have looked to us, whether it was with good beliefs or bad. As the cold war began and we attempted to persuade countries whose economies had been badly affected by the war to remain capitalist and stop the spread of communism we accomplished this in a few countries, such as Greece, through humanitarian efforts. From this point as we tried to show the good values of a strong capitalist country such as the USA we at least appeared as a more humanitarian nation and I think that this translated into a large part of our nation’s culture and national identity. This later transformed over the years as it grew to a factor that pushed service for one’s country to a forefront that President Kennedy would famously bring up at his inauguration. Now we live in a country that greatly seems like a place where people have their own interests in mind yet I would still believe that a large part of American culture has to do with service to one’s country. This is why those who dedicate their lives to being public servant, whether it be as a police officer or firefighter, a member of our military, a government worker, or even a local, state, or national representative, will always be respected for the effort they put into making our country great. This is why even after the toughest fought elections, the loser concedes and peacefully accepts the results of the election putting their trust in the other candidate to work hard to serve our country. I also believe that this culture in America has come with some negatives.

While a large ideology in a nation based around service might often be seen as a good thing I believe that it can often lead to service endeavors that come without planning or more simply put people doing service without thinking about how to best solve the problem or about how to best make a difference in the community they are serving. I think that a lot of people jump into service projects because they feel like it is the right thing to do, and while this might be great, it often renders service as an inefficient way to create change in societies and make a sustainable difference in our communities. As I previously mentioned I grew up participating in service projects with my church that I know I would just jump into because they were fun and I thought I was helping to make people’s lives better. While I do think it is great to have people especially kids of a young age involved with volunteer work I also believe that I was not getting out of it what I could have and that in a lot of cases the communities we were working in were not getting the help they possibly needed the most. I think for me personally this became a large factor when I was 16 and spent two weeks in Guatemala working with an organization called, Partners in Development. We spent one week working on the construction of a house in a small village and the other serving the children by providing a daycare with games, songs, crafts, and a small English lesson. In reflection upon the trip I came to realize that it would have been significantly more productive to simply use the money we spent going on the trip pay local members of the community to build a house as it would take teams of volunteers around 7 or 8 months to complete the house while it could’ve taken a professional team around 2 weeks. Problems arose in the daycare as well where the kids were apparently really fast learners in the English class because they had had the same lessons with other groups of volunteers. While I still believe that my trip to Guatemala was overall beneficial and I like to stand by what I did, I believe that with more prior education on the construction project we would be taking on or more planning that went into creating English lessons or day plans at the daycare this trip would’ve seen a lot less negative outcomes.

I will always believe in the values that my parents taught me involving the positive aspects of service and how we should all do what we can to better our community and to share a hand when we can. However, in more cases than I am proud to say exist, the positive intentions of service are deterred by people's own greed and desire to improve themselves rather than the community in need. Service takes place with a lack of education and a lack of the right mindset often, and while serving other will always breed some positive outcomes it can greatly increase the inefficiency of service a produce a variety of negative aspects such as hurting communities that intended to be served.