The Irony of Service: Charity, Project and Social Change in Service-Learning
TABLE 1
Motives Informing Community Service
N %
1. Why do you volunteer?
It makes me feel good about myself
It provides an opportunity for me to be exposed to and learn from other cultures
I want to give back to the community
I want to help someone less fortunate than myself
I want to change society
I want to gain experience in my chosen career field (or, explore possible careers)
It is central to my spiritual commitments
Other
TOTAL
2. Right now I feel I make the biggest impact on the world (choose only one):
Providing direct service to another person
Helping to set up and support community service organizations that are addressing
immediate community needs
Advocating for social change
Other
TOTAL
3. Over the course of my life, I feel I will make the biggest impact by (choose only one):
Providing direct service to another person
Helping to set up and support community service organizations
that are addressing immediate community needs
Advocating for social change
Other
TOTAL
6 7.3
17 20.7
16 19.5
20 24.4
9 11.0
7 8.5
3 3.7
4 4.9
82 100%
40 49.4
18 22.2
17 21.0
6 7.4
81 100%
24 30.8
31 39.7
20 25.6
3 3.9
78 100%
4. I feel that current community needs would be eliminated if everyone (choose only one):
Provided direct service to another person 27 32.5
Helped to set up and support community service organizations
that are addressing immediate community needs 31 37.4
Advocated for social change 20 24.1
Other 5 6.0
TOTAL 83 100%
Note: For question 1, response options consisted of an 8-point scale ranging from "being most important" (1) to "being least important" (8).
For this question, "N" represents the number of respondents who indicated "most important."
to respond to a crude survey that attempted to
describe the relationship between motives for and
acts of service (see Table 1).
Charity as a Paradigm
Charity, as the descriptions above suggest, has
many potential and some inherent weaknesses.
Certainly, in common usage, it is a term that has
come to mean the well-off doing service to the
poor if and when they feel like it, and then only on
their terms. History suggests that this is not an
accidental corruption of the original meaning of
"charity." In our survey, however, of eight possible responses to the question, "Why do you
volunteer," nearly 25 percent of the students-20
of 82 respondents-chose as their main reason, "I
want to help someone less fortunate than myself."
In addition, nearly 50 percent of the respondents
felt that, "Right now I make the biggest impact on
the world" by "providing direct service to another
person." Charity is a positive term for these
students: a recognition of their obligation to help,
and an expression of their recognition that our
society affords them very few opportunities to
make a contribution.
The director of the homeless shelter-in the
process of transitioning out of his role after 12
years of work-described the tension he felt
between the dual needs of caring for the individual persons he encountered, and working systemically to eliminate the structural causes of
poverty. He began "25 years ago [feeling] that
giving food and shelter was a concrete and unequivocal act of meaning and community building." This direct service, he said, "still acts as an
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