What Does it Mean to be an Active Citizen

When first examining the question that frames this essay the sarcastic part of my brain asked itself if this was a question proposed to a mass of people by a famous leader such as Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., or the Dalai Lama. However after further inspection (in the form of a quick search on google) I discovered that the leading question of this course is not a famous quote but rather something to encapsulate a way of thinking that we should challenge ourselves to reach not just as Hokies but also as citizens of this country and as global citizens of our planet. Being an active citizen means going above and beyond, or as my childhood hero Buzz Lightyear said it “To Infinity and Beyond”. Taking that extra step in your community to be aware of what is happening in the community, what the problems are, what the needs are, and how to better the community. I am a big believer in the American Dream and the almost definitely construed but still hopeful American ideology of working hard to create the best lifestyle possible for you and your family based of the ideas of American superiority. While this may be a bloated and selfish way of thinking that I could go into a separate eight page paper on I think it greatly plays into how I at least, handle the term of active citizenship in my life. Being an active citizen requires putting in a maximum effort in order to strive for the best for your community and fully believing that you will be able to achieve that. So today I hope to entertain you with some of my thoughts on what I have learned in my first semester as a Hokie and my life as a whole about being an active citizen, what that means, what it looks like, and how it affects a community.

My first weekend spent at Virginia Tech, was actually spent in Floyd, Virginia where we bonded with our fellow first year SERVE students and also with a number of upperclassmen SERVE students that were able to help us begin to prepare for what we should expect that year. I personally know that I benefited a lot from that weekend in getting to develop relationships with the people I would be living with as well as with connect with some older SERVE students and learn some tips about surviving my first semester as a Hokie, which I think I can now say I have done. While on the trip before going out and partaking in service on our second day we listened to a Ted Talk from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who spoke about “The Danger of a Single Story” and how judging things off of one story or looking at things through a single lense can lead us to make ill advised decisions about the people we are interacting with. Through this we have also learned how this lesson from Adichie plays into volunteerism. One thing that I feel I learned this semester was the importance of education in service. When we were learning about the negative aspects of service earlier in the semester and looked at the service vignettes (written by our teacher for the second semester SERVE class Dr. Gary Kirk) in class it was easy to see how a lack of education and preparation in service could easily turn a good intentioned act into one that could cause harm to a community. In the third service vignette, which described a service fraternity that was planning a cruise to the caribbean in which they would partake in service in orphanages in 5 different countries it was easy to see where a lack of preparation and would factor in. The description of the project quotes, “Tripp added, “It really makes you realize how lucky you are to be American. I am seriously looking into what it would take to adopt Miguel and bring him back to Virginia.” (Dr. Kirk). Now while this might seem like I am straying far from my original topic of this paragraph of the danger of a single story, don’t worry I’ll make it all connect. In the description of these senior fraternity brothers service project it is easy to see the flaws that arise due to lack of planning and ill education in the problems that caribbean countries face. While an initial thought about the flaws of this project may just be that the fraternity brothers are not focusing on the service by splitting their time between service and the cruise I think that there is a larger overhanging problem in this trip. The act of spending just 5 hours with a group of orphans and building there hope along with weak connections that are about to be broken is going to create a greater negative impact in the lives of those kids than the positive one that could be had from just about any other service project. These brothers looked at these caribbean countries and more specifically their orphanages through a single lense and judged them upon a single story. This single story being that the orphan children only needed a small amount of attention and did not have larger problems that needed to be addressed. By assuming that short 5 hour visits with groups of orphans in various countries would be beneficial to the lives of those that they were meeting with they showed they had failed to look at these communities through a variety of angles and think of various solutions to the problems facing the community. Rather they chose the option that most benefited them and still made them feel like they were making a difference in the caribbean communities they would be working in.

Another thing we learned about this semester was leadership and how proper leadership is fundamental in appropriate service and social change work and also how the glorification of leaders has set an unreachable standard for our leaders of today to achieve. As well as how leadership develops into citizenship, but I’ll focus more on that later in the paragraph. This year on October 15th I went to Rainelle, West Virginia as part of a VT Engage Get on the Bus trip in order to complete some repairs on houses that had been damaged in floods. This trip provided a great look into the importance of leadership in service as we were led by a senior building construction major, Kevin Sykes. Without Kevin’s leadership on this project I truly believe that we would’ve accomplished nothing on this trip and wasted a day our day of service in West Virginia when educated people could have been there actually solving the problem. I previously mentioned the importance of education going into service and Kevin was the reason we had this. As we were tasked to build a wall and raise the foundation of a damaged house Kevin was able to instruct us and lead us in a construction project that the rest of us would have had absolutely no idea how to complete. Kevin proved to me that a good leader makes a world of difference in a service project and can really be the determining factor of the outcome of said service project as long as the people are willing and enthusiastic to serve. Kevin proved that leadership is still alive in our society and necessary for the completion of acts towards social change. On the other hand in one of the early weeks of the semester we read Peter Block’s “From Leadership to Citizenship” which focused greatly on the importance of acting as a citizen in this world as the term leader was now archaic in a sense. Block makes the argument that “we need to question the power of the leadership industry we have created” (Block page 1). Block makes this argument saying that the leaders we have are not benefiting the communities they serve. Block makes the argument that we as a society have shaped our idea of leaders and leadership into an industry which is killing their ability to successfully lead. On page 1 he quotes, “Once an idea becomes an industry, it loses its meaning. Everyone claims it has their own and it becomes commercialized. The question of leadership that began as a search for spirit and vision has now been commodified. We operate as if leadership can be packaged, and thereby be sold and then purchased.” I personally believe that he is saying that through our society's expectations of leadership and expectations for everyone to be a leader in some form or another we have lost sight of the aspects and the personality traits that truly develop strong leaders. I really like this way of thinking because I really do believe that while leaders can be made or shaped by the experiences of their own lives, leadership is a quality that somebody is born with. Through some of the activities I chose to be involved with in high school I think I established a pretty good idea of what a good leader was and what they had to do. Through my involvement with my youth group, Boy Scouts, and my high school’s running programs I witnessed first hand the qualities that made a good leader and I believe or at least hope that I gained some of those qualities along the way. I believe that I am the kind of person that was shaped into a leader by my peers and experiences. However, it was always apparent that there exists people on this earth that are “Born to Lead” as the song by Hoobastank puts it. Certain people such as the previously mentioned Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., or the Dalai Lama were placed on this earth as born leaders with certain traits that allowed them to gain the attention a masses of people of create social change for the better. These people prove Block right that the industry of leadership is killing the very thing that this industry is trying to produce. Block further develops this argument into stating how in this world of industrialized leaders we need citizens rather than the leaders this “industry” is producing. His argument is that citizenship should replace the sought after positions of leadership in our society, “Citizenship is our capacity to create for ourselves what we had sought from our leaders”. (Block page 2) This argument that citizenship empowers us to take control of our own problems I think fits in very well with the active citizenship continuum and my definition of what an active citizen is as it probably should considering they both are about citizenship. An active citizen is someone who puts the needs of a community above their own. In a lot of ways an active citizen is a leader without the formal title or generally formality that leadership generally carries with it. I think that this goes hand in hand with Block’s argument that citizenship creates what was sought from leaders. In conclusion leadership is something that is both naturally given and acquired over time, but in the end it is also a trait that can easily replaced or substituted with good active citizenship.

Active Citizenship is an extremely influential part of building strong communities. As it was defined to us in our second week of SERVE class from second year SERVE student Marueen Besade when someone becomes an active citizen, “community becomes a priority in values and life choices”. Through development of one’s self into the role of an active citizen we begin to put the needs of the community above our own and we begin to devote our lives to the benefit of that community. Through partaking in the role of active citizenship we are becoming members of the community that are driven and dedicated to the development and success of a community, therefore strengthening that said community. If a community was filled with active citizens constantly looking for ways to improve the community one of the largest problems inside communities cold easily go away. One thing that we talked about a lot this semester was the negative aspects of service. I learned that one of the biggest drawbacks in service is the inefficiency that it can often have. Service should be something that without a doubt benefits a community, group of people, or just a general cause in the best possible way that it can and I found out this semester that a lot of times this is very untrue. Groups of people without a community's best interests in mind go into a new area and do service to make themselves feel good or make it seem like they are doing the right thing. While progress may still be made in the right direction, groups can also cause damage to the communities that they are attempting to benefit. When active citizens, with the best interests of the community in mind, are leading the service it is much more likely that they will take the time to make sure that they and hopefully the people in their group are educated on the problems they are trying to solve that the best potential solution can be reached and the service will take an efficient and beneficial route. The role of active citizens in a community can create a drastic difference when trying to make a change in a community or when trying to perform charity or justice work for a community or group of people.

In my experiences I don’t really think I can say I have achieved the role of an active citizen in the respect of a service organization. By this I mean that I have never been enough involved with an organization such as habitat for humanity, the ASPCA, or a local food bank to call myself an active citizen. I have often found myself floating somewhere between a volunteer and a conscientious citizen on the Active Citizen Continuum with organizations such as BARC at Virginia Tech or, Rebuilding Together, Montgomery County back in Maryland, where I was well intentioned in my attempt to create a difference and interested in learning about the problems at hand but not taking the extra step for change. The two areas where I do feel I have had the experience of becoming an active citizen were with my Boy Scout troop and with my high school’s running programs. These two organizations were some of the most inportant things to me in high school and still hold significance in my life as I believe they shaped me into the person I am today. With the Boy Scouts of America as well as with running I can clearly remember my early days as a member of the organization. I simply would show up to events and partake in what was going on not concerned with what was happening or what we were really doing. As I grew in both organizations I can clearly reflect on experiences where I can see how I changed from a member to a volunteer. As I became more involved with each organization I began to take the priorities of the groups as a whole into account even if I still wasn’t really educated on what to do because I later learned that that education came with time. In Boy Scouts I can identify myself as a volunteer when we welcomed in a new group a young scouts into the troop after I had been in the troop for a year and was no longer part of the youngest kids in the troop. I realized that being part of this organization was to help benefit others in developing as boys not only the development of myself in trying to reach a higher rank. This shift into the position of volunteer came around the same time on my cross country team, when I hit the start of my second year, however with this organization it was for a different cause. As a sophomore I was propelled into a role on the varsity team and while I still didn’t really know how to achieve what I wanted to I realized that I was trying to benefit a team of over 70 kids all trying to achieve similar goals. In my Boy Scout troop the development into a conscientious citizen came once I had reached high school and gainer the maturity to be able to recognize that there were questions I had to ask myself if I was going to be able to fully benefit this troop in the ways that I wanted to. As part of the troop’s PLC or Patrol Leader’s Council I began to ask questions of how to make the troop better and how to help kids in the troop succeed. In my high school’s running program I believe I began to reach this role in my junior year (I think it worked out that with running I reached a new level on the continuum every year of high school). Thrust into a new spot on the team as the number 3 runner and an upperclassmen I found that I had a mass of people looking up to me and that I had to figure out how to help them. I still believe that I greatly lacked the knowledge to actually achieve this and that while I was trying to ask myself the questions to benefit the community I did not take the action to benefit the community. In my Boy Scout Troop I slowly entered into the role of an active citizen after serving on the PLC for a while a developing a greater knowledge for what the members of our troop needed. I remember leading my first campout spring of my sophomore year in high school when I was the active person leading these kids in their cooking, activities, and general living for the weekend. My senior year I believe I that I reached the point where I took a role in making a difference in the lives of the younger runners. I took the time to learn about them and develop relationships in order to strengthen our team that I had not taken the previous years. Here at Virginia Tech I do not have a well thought out plan of how to enter into roles of active citizenship. I came into the year with a number of organizations I wanted to involve myself with such as Hokie Ambassadors, the club triathlon team, FLEX, and step-up leaders. For the future I am still looking at pursuing a active citizenship role in some organization on campus because I believe that this level of devotion to a community based organization is vital to an overall community.

Being an active citizen is a way of life rather than simply something you partake in when it is convenient for you. An active citizen is willing to make sacrifices for the community they are involved in because they care about making a difference.