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“Volunteerism isn't right! Matter of fact, it is not good at all." With that, Mister Sankton ended his speech, complete with "Amen!" and "Hallelujah!" coming from the crowd gathered. I was a 19-year-old at a neighborhood meeting in the mid-sized Midwestern city where I grew up, and my ears were burning. Throughout the meeting I heard several perspectives from my friends and neighbors on the volunteers and missionaries who had come to rehabilitate houses, tutor kids and work at the food bank in my neighborhood.
Mister Sankton was alluding to a belief that I hear repeated in many of the discussions I've been in where community volunteerism was addressed: that similar to other "isms" in our society, volunteerism has become an addiction that serves to reinforce the social, attitudinal and structural barriers facing "others" in American society - children and youth, homeless, LGBTQ, differently-abled, people of color. These barriers limit the recipients of said volunteerism in their ability to experience authentic self-driven change in the situations they occupy.
However, my experience has also shown me that there is hope for volunteerism. For the last three years The Freechild Project has operated under the motto of "By, not to; With, not for." This motto is strengthened by our mission to build active democracy by engaging young people in social change, particularly those who have been historically denied participation.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
- Irish proverb
When the purpose of service and volunteerism is to strengthen democratic participation and community empowerment, volunteerism can be wholly beneficial. As Ivan Illich once observed about international volunteerism, "[Volunteers] frequently wind up alleviating the damage done by money and weapons..." When conducted as part of a deliberately revelatory cycle, volunteerism can become a process for empowerment, as long as it is not at the expense of others' self-determination.
After growing up occasionally homeless, then in a low-income community where my family and friends were the subject of much volunteerism, I served three terms in the AmeriCorps national service program. I developed a tutoring and mentoring program for Kurdish and Iraqi kids in the Midwest, ran a ropes challenge course for low-income youth in the Northwest, and assisted in the leadership of a service learning program in the Southwest. I know service work, and I promoted volunteerism to all kinds of people. However, my most riveting experience came when I worked for a larger national foundation where I was responsible for teaching young people about volunteering. I discovered that the language of "service" covered an attitude that was pious at best; at worst, it perpetuated a sense of noblese oblige, the royalty taking pity on the peasants and giving them alms.
My own concern about volunteerism was coupled with others who I met in this volunteering. After several years, I worked with a group of people from across the United States to develop a teaching practice called Activist Learning. After exploring the benefits and faults of service learning, we defined Activist Learning as community learning characterized by people taking action to realize a society based on just relationships by seeking to change unequal power structures throughout our communities. However, after promoting Activist Learning for several years I discovered that there is another need that extends beyond schools and into communities. I see that need as a re-visioning of experience of volunteers.
New Realities
Below is a model through which volunteerism can start to become emancipatory for ALL of its participants, including the volunteer and the community, the "giver" and the "receiver." The Freechild Project believes that this model represents the most radical and powerful possibilities for people's participation throughout our society. One of the goals of The Freechild Project is to realize the full participation of all people throughout society as equal members in decision-making and action. We have developed this model in order to represent our vision of democratic, community-oriented participation for ALL people. Individuals and organizations can use this model to start thinking about how volunteers of all ages can be integrated as empowered, purposeful participants throughout society.
I have re-envisioned sociologist Roger Hart's Ladder of Children's Participation for this model. According to Hart, he developed the Ladder to introduce community workers to the practice of children's participation, and its importance for developing democracy and sustainable communities. The model presented here is done in the same context, except for the purpose of sharing the goal with a broader audience. I believe that the importance of developing democracy and sustainable communities must be spread to all people, including the homeless, the impoverished, and all those regarded as "others" in American society.
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Adam Fletcher
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