Community Service Views

Reflection #1: Herzberg & McKnight Reflections around Community Service My first experiences with community service were simple things. Once a month, my mother, sister, and I would make baked goods and deliver them to the Hospitality House that served the major hospital in our area. At that time, I never thought too much about what I was doing, or how it really affected anyone. But as I continued to do service, and opportunities to do other types of service arose, I began thinking about it a bit more. I started looking for things that I felt good doing, that I could see the difference or impact created. As a result, I began working on Habitat for Humanity builds and saw how different every project was and how it was influenced by the people being served as well as by those doing the service. In McKnight’s article “Why ‘Servanthood' is Bad,” the author explains various scenarios of service and community and how the current idea of ‘community service’ as a paradoxical statement. McKnight first addresses the perception of service, and the immediate problems that the idea of service being amongst unequal parties causes. It fosters the idea that service is a system that caters to those in need, to those who are lacking or are not good enough, when it should focus on the skills that these people have and the way that they earned them and utilize them now to build what they have. The way McKnight indicates how service has changed from being community-focused to being commodity-based is especially evident when looking at the way service is done today. In looking at the different scenes that have occurred at Habitat builds, the flaws with the idea of the current service model are very apparent. In best-case scenarios where the idea of community and service are tied as one and the same, more similar to the old idea, the entire community has pitched in to assist the newest building and its future tenant who works along with them. This idea shows the truest form of service and community to me. The less ideal situations comes in various forms; the first form having a tenant who does not care, and the second having a community that is disinterested in welcoming newcomers. With either one, the idea of community is often warped by the perception that the ‘service’ being provided is from a greater party towards a lesser with the implicit understanding that the lesser will never measure up. McKnight stresses that the proper way to provide service is to not provide it at all; that instead of labelling people deficient or incapable, the community should grow together and have the strengths of each member shore up the weaknesses of the others so that they all cooperate and depend on each other like equals. After reading McKnight’s article, I realized how similar my thoughts on service were. With a variety of services and projects under my belt, I had come to a separate understanding that community building was by far more effective and long lasting than the simple ‘pinpoint’ services done by an outside team that had no real interest or investment in the overall success or failure of an unknown community. This idea is built upon in greater depth by the article written by Herzberg as he explores the failures of services to enlighten the members of the community and the service groups to the real cause that has created the need for services in the first place. For Herzberg, the issue with community service is the way that the problems leading to the need for service are addressed. The author explains that the way service is done today it is like treating the symptoms of a sickness without ever looking to rectify the cause. Looking at many of the organizations that are currently active in neighborhoods and high-need areas, this pattern of treating symptoms only is highly pervasive and is considered normal. I have come to realize through my work on Habitat’s homebuilding crews that there are very few organizations that also attempt to fix or even address the underlying faults in the system. Due to the way the housing application is done for Habitat, the person applying must be highly motivated for the better. They cannot simply get ‘handouts’ and continue as they were, living off of their deficiencies. This is more the type of service that should be employed everywhere along with lessons that really get people to understand and see that the problems blamed on circumstance or personal failure have a deeper root cause in the underlying situation. The way Herzberg emphasizes the teaching of the true cause behind the symptoms and advocates for a change at the source of struggle is definitely something I think would cause a major change. It would make service more about community building because it would have eradicated the ideal of deficiencies leading to assistance without effort.

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