After reading the articles "To Hell With Good Intentions", by Ivan Illich, and "Why Servanthood is Bad" by John McKnight, my perspectives on community service were altered. These articles, while very inflammatory, made good points and while I did not agree with all of the ideas expressed in these essays, I felt they did have some good things to say about the importance of one's intentions when performing community service.
As far as good vs. bad intentions go, I feel it is important to come at your community service with a respect for and a certain understanding of the people you are serving. This means that you must look at things through their perspectives, not yours. You must not make assumptions. The people you are serving have a lot in common with you, but there are also often a lot of things about their experience that you have not experienced and thus cannot directly relate to. It is important to consider the different life experiences these people may be having.
For example, while I was at my tutoring job in a 3rd-grade classroom of a local elementary school, I was having a conversation with an 8-year-old boy who had a lot of questions about my nosering. At one point, he declared, "I'm going to get a nosering too, when I am a teenager!" I said, "Do you think your mom would let you??" He replied, "I don't have a mom." I felt terrible. It was uncomfortable because I had made the assumption that this boy had a mom. I was looking at his life from my perspective, assuming that his experience matched up with mine as a child in a certain, critical way. I should not have made this assumption. It put both of us in an awkward situation which highlighted our differences rather than our similarities, and it killed what had been a pleasant and interesting conversation. However, I am glad that it happened because it illustrated for me an important point made by the authors of the essays we read--the idea of serving people by considering their perspectives, and not making assumptions.
Moving forward, I will make an effort to be more thoughtful and careful about the way I interact with the people I work with in my volunteer jobs. I will try to make less assumptions about their lives, especially as they relate to my own experiences. My experiences are not universal, and do not apply to all people. To become a better volunteer, I must remember this.
