Thoughts on community service
Oct. 31st, 2004 04:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eiriasI'm a member of a national service fraternity. We're a bunch of more-or-less privileged undergrads and grad students who team up to do things for other people, typically at no cost. I've spent the last year helping the group at UW to get its charter back, after having lost it sometime around 1977. It's been quite educational - I now have a lot of appreciation for what our founders at CWRU did back in 1992. One of the things that surprised me was how difficult it was at first to find service projects to do, especially on campus. It seemed that everything we could volunteer to do, someone was already getting paid to do.
In a recent chapter meeting, we had a guest speaker who offered us a fundraising opportunity - we would play waitstaff at parties nearby for a few hours, and they would pay us a certain amount per hour. After she left we had some discussion about this, and one of our members mentioned that he felt uncomfortable with the idea. He pointed out that if we took this work, we would be keeping this company from hiring people who needed work; and that, as non-employees, they would not need to pay payroll taxes or Social Security taxes for us; and that this was probably the reason for them to seek us out.
This got me thinking. By performing this service for money, yes, we would be helping a corporate entity to get by without hiring real workers. But can't the same be said of all the service we do? Well, okay, perhaps not all - surely if the local Alzheimer's Association didn't have our help blowing up balloons for a party, for instance, they would simply have gone without the balloons. But that sort of safeguard doesn't apply to the more essential service projects APO does - organizing food pantries, cleaning up local public areas, building houses for low-income families. These organizations we work with all have paid employees. Every dollar we save them is a dollar that doesn't go to a worker; every hour we "give" to the poor people is five dollars we have in some sense prevented them from earning. Paradoxically, it seems that the only service projects I should feel good about are the completely frivolous ones that no one would ever pay for.
Thinking about service in this way gives me the same complicated feeling I get when I think about gentrification. The wealthy invest time and energy in improving life in poor areas, be it through crime reduction or architectural revamping or free meals - and in doing so we spend leisure hours and leisure dollars that mean nothing to us, but could mean something to poorer families. Undoubtedly our efforts mitigate some of the immediate evils of urban poverty, but the flip side is that by doing so we are meddling in the local economy. Is the good we do worth this price?
In a recent chapter meeting, we had a guest speaker who offered us a fundraising opportunity - we would play waitstaff at parties nearby for a few hours, and they would pay us a certain amount per hour. After she left we had some discussion about this, and one of our members mentioned that he felt uncomfortable with the idea. He pointed out that if we took this work, we would be keeping this company from hiring people who needed work; and that, as non-employees, they would not need to pay payroll taxes or Social Security taxes for us; and that this was probably the reason for them to seek us out.
This got me thinking. By performing this service for money, yes, we would be helping a corporate entity to get by without hiring real workers. But can't the same be said of all the service we do? Well, okay, perhaps not all - surely if the local Alzheimer's Association didn't have our help blowing up balloons for a party, for instance, they would simply have gone without the balloons. But that sort of safeguard doesn't apply to the more essential service projects APO does - organizing food pantries, cleaning up local public areas, building houses for low-income families. These organizations we work with all have paid employees. Every dollar we save them is a dollar that doesn't go to a worker; every hour we "give" to the poor people is five dollars we have in some sense prevented them from earning. Paradoxically, it seems that the only service projects I should feel good about are the completely frivolous ones that no one would ever pay for.
Thinking about service in this way gives me the same complicated feeling I get when I think about gentrification. The wealthy invest time and energy in improving life in poor areas, be it through crime reduction or architectural revamping or free meals - and in doing so we spend leisure hours and leisure dollars that mean nothing to us, but could mean something to poorer families. Undoubtedly our efforts mitigate some of the immediate evils of urban poverty, but the flip side is that by doing so we are meddling in the local economy. Is the good we do worth this price?