Community service should be taught as a form of learning

Students walking down Trousdale Parkway during the Involvement Fair are bound to find a broad range of clubs all tied around a similar mission: community service. 

In fact, USC Campus Activities even breaks down service organizations at USC into different categories: clubs that provide meals to people, provide health services, provide legal services and consulting and provide focus on education.  

There are even ways students can get involved with community service beyond clubs and organizations on campus. The USC Volunteer Center states there are more than 300 nonprofits and community organizations that offer volunteer opportunities around USC.

Regardless of the kind of service performed, all recognized service organizations at USC should educate their members on the best way to approach community service and provide resources to learn from communities different from their own. By doing this, not only will students who are already volunteering have more meaningful experiences but those who have shied away from volunteering may be convinced to begin. 

Many organizations, whether due to a lack of time or resources, fail to teach people to check their biases or look at service in a constructive way before sending volunteers into the community. This lack of guidance leads to a common mistake where volunteers look at community service through the lens of a savior complex. 

This savior complex phenomenon occurs when people volunteer because they feel that others need them, and it is therefore the duty of the volunteer to save them. This is a line of thinking rooted in pity and an imbalanced power dynamic. With this viewpoint, the volunteer thinks of themselves as the sole teacher who can impart knowledge. This savior complex shuts people out from all the opportunities they have to learn while engaging with the community. 

Instead of creating an “us” versus “them” mentality, volunteers should establish mutually beneficial relationships with people to learn about a cause, injustice or new perspective they previously lacked knowledge about. In this way, community service organizations can cultivate volunteers aware of inherent, systematic issues in society while simultaneously providing a way to help communities. Community service is certainly not a one-sided exchange. In other words, the benefits, learning, growth and needs are a two-way street.

Most people involved in community service have good intentions. However, they may slip into the savior complex simply because they have never been taught to be conscious of it.

To make community service as meaningful as possible for all parties involved, student service organizations should bring in guests to speak to their members and provide necessary resources to train their members about how to best approach service. This “training” could be as simple as  a club inviting a professor to come in to explain something like the savior complex. 

An organization could also teach members about the kind of volunteering they participate in.  For example, if an organization’s focus is to tutor children from local schools, it could organize a workshop to teach volunteers concepts such as systematic education inequality or an emphasis on understanding that college is not the end goal for everyone. Community service organizations could also invite local nonprofit leaders from the same field of work to come in and talk about their experience and how service can extend far beyond college. 

The key is to look at service as a learning experience rather than as a way to impart knowledge to someone else. Placing an emphasis on a mutually beneficial relationship between volunteers and communities will create the most impact at both the individual and community level for all groups involved.