Scrambling to Serve

Alissa E. Schapiro ’10 considers Margaret Peña a close friend.

“We instantly hit it off,” Schapiro says of her and Peña, who she met last year. “She knows all about me and my family, and I know all about her and her family.”

But Margaret Peña isn’t a fellow Harvard student—she is an 11 year-old girl that Schapiro has been tutoring for the past year with the Mission Hill After School Program (MHASP).

“The relationships that you make with the kids are what makes the programs the most satisfying,” says Jennifer E. Graham ’08, a former coordinator and current counselor for MHASP.

Schapiro’s experience is the type that social service volunteers strive for, the story that gets touted at information sessions for those eager to make a difference beyond Harvard’s ivy-covered gates. And with Harvard’s many options, students can easily find a service opportunity that’s right for them among the many colored posters that populate extracurricular fairs and Phillip Brooks House Association (PBHA) open houses.

PBHA offers 72 different programs to undergraduates, according to the organization’s Web site. Fraternities and sororities have social service arms, and even some final clubs are hopping on the “comm serve” bandwagon, adding various one-day service events into their social calendars.

Yet despite the number of opportunities available to Harvard students, it’s not always clear what benefits are drawn from the service.

This problem stems primarily from the duality of the words “community service”—that it’s not just the “service” that’s important, but the connection with the “community” as well. Unfortunately, developing such ties requires a commitment that doesn’t fit well into the lives of overscheduled Harvard students.

If the deeper engagement in the community isn’t fully realized, then these projects—and students who run them—run the risk of undermining themselves. And, of course, local residents can often be skeptical of students from the world’s richest university, easily viewing them as condescending outsiders.

With this range of issues stemming from the nature of community service in general and at Harvard in particular, the nagging question remains: is doing something is always better than doing nothing?

TO DO: SAVE THE WORLD

When it comes to community service, good intentions only get you so far.

“One of PBHA’s main values is community partnership,” says Lucerito L. Ortiz ’10, PBHA’s outreach officer and a former Summer Urban Program (SUP) counselor. “You can have good intentions, but without the context and history of where you’re working, you can do more harm than good.”

Ortiz speaks to the reality that only through coupling goodwill with community partnership can social service be optimally effective. Ortiz, who directed a SUP camp in Boston’s South End last summer, learned about this partnership first hand.

“Working closely with community leaders made me realize the importance of having volunteers understand the context within which they’re working,” she says. “It changes people’s behaviors and improves the quality of the service and the program.”

Without this notion of equal collaboration, volunteers risk the consequence of appearing patronizing.

“You can’t just go in to fix what you think is a problem,” says Jennifer E. Graham ’08, a former coordinator and current counselor for PBHA’s Mission Hill After School Program (MHASP), which serves up to 50 children from two neighboring housing developments in Roxbury.

MHASP for its part, stresses the importance of forming relationships within the commnity beyond the project they advertise. Counselors meet their students in the afternoons at the project’s playground, and work with them for several hours at a nearby college. To round off the day, the counselors walk the children home, speaking to MHASP’s goals of expanding the volunteers’ duties pastjust teaching.

“You have to work with the communities to help them, and I think that just doing something for the sake of doing it isn’t always the best route,” Graham says.

Like Ortiz, Graham stresses the need for a strong partnership with the community.

“If you don’t have that insight into the community, the community will think you’re just coming to fix them, so it seems condescending,” Graham says. “And then if the program should disband, it doesn’t help the community afterwards.”

Without an effort to understand a community past the three hours it takes for one philanthropy project, change often isn’t viable or sustainable.

But the time needed for this integration often becomes a rare luxury for students at Harvard, where life can feel like a never-ending cycle of problem sets, response papers, and incessant comp processes. The lower the time commitment, the more appealing extracurricular activities can be—especially in the case of social service.

Many of these philanthropic programs require a certain level of dedication that can deter students from participating.

“It’s discouraging to some students, because you’re not used to devoting that much time to just one program,” says Mariah F. Peebles ’09, a co-coordinator of Peer Health Exchange (PHE), which trains undergraduates to teach health curriculums to schools lacking formal health education.

But for students with limited time but a desire to help, the ability to gain knowledge and insight into communities is not always impossible. Graham maintains that the most important thing for students is to have an open mind.

“Being involved in that way is hard for college students,” she says, “because we’re always going in and out and we don’t have time to think about a lot of issues. So it’s mostly about having an open mind and just wanting to know the people you’re working with to make it a successful enterprise for all people involved.”

THE DRIVING FORCE

Frances M. Tompkins ’09, the current PBHA president, is optimistic about the level of student interest in community service, and believes it’s the driving force behind PBHA.

“One advantage of PBHA is that we are student led,” Tompkins says. “Programs are started and continue to run on the basis of student interest.”

But the exact motive behind student interest can be difficult to gauge. Two student volunteers might be participating for completely different reasons: next to dedicated participants might be the resume-builder who wants something to talk about at the next job interview.

“One frustrating thing is whether or not some people are just doing token service,” Tompkins says.

Still, Tompkins says that while this issue of “token service” crosses her mind, she doesn’t wring her hands about it.

“People do it, but to dwell upon that is to miss the opportunity to be doing greater things,” Tompkins says. “I try to focus on how to change it so that when people walk out of the PBHA building, they’re thinking as more conscious beings.”

With the multitude of the programs for undergraduates to choose from, the problem of having unmotivated or insincere participants is common. Some groups have even structured policy to directly address this issue. Graham, also a former fundraiser for PBHA, says the organization deters the uncommitted participant by avoiding short-term social service initiatives.

“This past fall,” she says, PBHA “did a Day of Service, a university-wide project day with a lot of different projects, including a field day at Mission Hill and river cleanup. When a graduate student council member approached PBHA, they wanted to do those one-day, feel-good, paint-a-mural type projects, and we got back to them and said, ‘That’s not really what we’re about.’”

PBHA’s selectivity and hesitance embody the belief that inaction can be better than half-hearted attempts to help out.

“We’re not about one day, feel-good service.” Graham adds, “We’re about relationships and partnerships.”

But is the “feel-good” brand of service really worse than action motivated by genuine desire to help others? Should motives really matter so long as service gets done?

According to Peebles, any service is better than none.

“When people are giving their time and energy, they need something in return,” she says, “When you’re working at a job, you get money. But in community outreach or social service, you need that emotional feedback.”

As both a leader and a volunteer, Peebles has learned to appreciate the give and take of social service.

“Gratification is a positive part of doing social service. When you’re creating the program, you need to make sure that volunteers are getting some value as well,” she says.

DO-GOODER BACKLASH

That’s not to say that there are no risks, however.

Many believe there are cases when volunteers should be cautious about volunteering at all because they might end up doing more harm than good.

“There’s a range of programs where it’s hard to do any substantial harm, like cleaning up the Charles River,” says Christopher Winship, a sociology professor. “But the other end of the continuum is, say, working with a second or third grader and helping them learn to read. Perhaps, for them, the more fundamental issue is learning to trust adults and form strong relationships in their lives, and if you blow it on that, in a sense, you may have made things much worse,”

Winship supervises several sociology classes, including Sociology 95: “Research for Non-Profits,” and Sociology 96: “Individual Community Research Internship.” His classes tend to encourage community outreach and social service as a form of education, as opposed to either a necessity or a way to attempt to act upon goodwill.

Less time-consuming activities that don’t involve personal relationships—such as the “paint-a-mural type projects” PBHA avoids—can be particularly harmful, Graham says, because of the negative effects of PBHA’s relationship with community leaders.

“That’s a type of service that can be detrimental, when community leaders feel like people, who in this case are predominantly upper-middle class, white, educated people, come in and hope to feel good about themselves for one day,” she says.

But it’s not only the one-day projects that have this problem. Long-term service programs can cause equal harm. Tutoring programs in particular can be risky because students sometimes sever ties with children they have tutored for a semester or year.

“Many poor kids,” says Winship, “their lives are full of adults who have been there and left, and the last thing we need is to have one more adult fail them.”

This doesn’t mean that the possibility of harm should be a deterrent from doing any kind of service at all. The solution, Winship believes, is to thoughtfully question the program itself and one’s own motives.

“One has to look across the spectrum of programs,” Winship says. “You need toyou’re doing is at least going to be neutral, and not harmful, and hopefully positive.”

While the directors of PBHA programs have a responsibility to choose dedicated volunteers, it is often difficult to anticipate a volunteer’s level of commitment. One way of dealing with this is by educating their volunteers as much as possible about the communities they are working in. But there is also a large element of self-education and awareness necessary for real immersion in social service.

“It’s about being conscious of what you’re doing in service, and what you’re going into,” Tompkins says. “All service is valuable, but there has be that consciousness.”

HARVARD to the rescue

Even conscious volunteers, however, can make the mistake of being too naïve. Some students may have the notion that their work will be instantly helpful and life changing.

“What I often tell people is that Harvard professors are really smart, but we don’t know anything,” Winship says. “Harvard students have the same potential, too. We’re pretty good at thinking, but we know little about the world and the people we work with.”

The College seems to agree. As a result, the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning initiated a program that collaborates with PBHA and the Public Service Network in order to place students in area schools. Still, even with some training in pedagogy, students can be susceptible to some pitfalls.

“There is a great danger at Harvard of being paternalistic,” Winship says. “Harvard students in particular are prone to being labeled as patronizing in social service situations because of the University’s reputation as a bastion for the privileged and wealthy.”

Harvard students come from families with median incomes in the six figures, according to the admissions office, which contrasts to $27,133—and a 27.1 percent poverty level—in Roxbury—where MHASP operates. And Chinatown—where Harvard students can volunteer to work with the elderly, teenagers, and children as part of programs run by the Chinatown committee—has a median income of $14,829 and poverty level of 37 percent.

Such marked disparity raises questions as to how Harvard volunteers relate to the communities and people they hope to help.

“When you’re parachuting into a place, it can do harm if you don’t know what you’re doing,” says Shane P. Donovan ’09, one of the 14 directors of the Harvard Homeless Shelter. If you don’t understand the community that well or don’t have the energy to really go after it, you might be detracting time from the kids that they could be spending with people who know them better.”

But the idea that doesn’t necessarily come from the students themselves. According to Winship, the problem might come from both sides.

“When people outside of Harvard look to Harvard for help, they have this funny feeling that we’re these people from Harvard who are going to parachute in and have these unbelievably deep insights and tell how to straighten everything out,” Winship says.

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE...TOILETS?

Donovan says that the most realistic volunteers are also often the most committed.

The Harvard Homeless Shelter, the only entirely student-run homeless shelter in the country, attracts committed volunteers, Donovan says, because the work isn’t always fun.

“Maybe that’s why we get so many genuine people, because you know that it’s not always the kind of work you can just bring up in conversation, and I think that’s valuable,” he says.

Donavan argues that in order for community service involvement to be truly meaningful, it must also be somewhat uncomfortable. “I was taught and firmly believe that doing good work is not about just feeling good.” Work at the homeless shelter, which can include everything from serving guests their dinner to cleaning the toilets, is rarely “warm and fuzzy,” he says.

But others believe that it is possible for community service to be fun and easy while still having positive effects.

Graham says that work doesn’t have to be really hard to be meaningful. Even without this discomfort, she says, the volunteer can still get something significant out of the experience, while also providing meaningful help.

“You’re challenged in a broad sense, because you push your boundaries in the way that you’re thinking,” she says.

But Peebles acknowledges the fact that PHE, along with many other Public Service Network and PBHA programs, often tries to weed out those participants who don’t want to be there in any discomfort.

“In terms of people doing it just for themselves, it would be hard, because it’s not always fun,” she says. “We have so much training and so many meetings.”

The requirements for PHE, she notes, include learning to teach a 50-minute workshop nearly word for word.

So for many Harvard students, community service is measured not by fancy data and educational metrics, but by time, energy, and sometimes even emotional turmoil. While this often leaves students feeling defeated or futile, PBHA leaders say, that doesn’t mean that volunteers don’t accomplish something positive.

“It’s easy to think that you’re not addressing the bigger, systematic problems of what we’re doing,” Peebles says, “but at the same time, you’ve got to do what you can, and this is one way of doing that. The fact that you’re there in the first place makes a huge difference.”

GET WITH THE PROGRAM

Every community service program and every volunteer functions in a different way. Every volunteer has a different story.

Schapiro plans on staying in contact with Margaret long after she graduates from Harvard, to act both as a mentor and a friend.

Ortiz, on the other hand, is just as satisfied with her work even though she’s taken a different approach towards her relationships with her campers.

“I don’t know where they will be in 20 years,” she says, “but I know that I gave them a great summer, and that’s such a satisfying feeling.”

The common thread that successful volunteers realize, leader say, is that in order to be successful, volunteers must not only be fully committed but also fully aware of their effect on individuals and the community as a whole. It is better to do something than nothing, but only if it is done with some care.

Winship has a South African saying that he often passes on to students and friends when discussing social service.

“If you’ve come to help me, go away,” the proverb goes. “If we can work together, then let’s get started.”