Service as community building, a survival technique.

I don’t know if you saw the video circulating of Levar Burton - famed Roots and Star Trek actor, Reading Rainbow host, Peabody Award-winner, and almost Jeopardy! host. He recently spoke at the Huntington Library’s Founder’s Day event about the themes of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable series.

In full transparency, I haven’t read the books (yet—I probably should), but it was what Burton said about the books that really struck me:

“One of the things that is really clear and apparent in Parable,” he said, “is the need, for survival’s sake, to create community. Relish the opportunity to be in community together,” he continued, “it is indeed the way forward.”

It has been a rough year so far and I have wanted to check in with many of you on how you are moving forward. While there are many conversation yet to be had, I have been fortunate to have had some remarkable conversations that have stayed with me.

One of the themes that keeps swirling up in these exchanges—especially against the backdrop of the gutting of AmeriCorps and AmeriCorps Senior Volunteers—is the purpose, power, and meaning of volunteer service.

Over a cup of coffee, a leader in community justice, whom I deeply admire, stated that the term "volunteering" doesn’t quite hit the mark of the spirit of service.  It conjures up images of handing out holiday turkeys once a year without learning anyone’s name.

The history of volunteerism is problematic because of its tendency towards paternalism and pity. In my own experience, people often come to volunteer to give back to “the underserved, less fortunate, and vulnerable.” But when we frame it that way (and I’ve done this myself), we imply that the people receiving help are somehow less than—defined by a deficit.

Jerome Tennille, a volunteer engagement expert, articulates this tension well:

“When people rush to solve problems they don’t understand, they can end up acting in a way which imposes a specific vision of what’s ‘right and wrong’ or ‘good and bad’ on other cultures. All of these behaviors I would suggest are centuries old and have mutated through the years from the colonial structures that shaped America’s very existence.”

But what if the true outcome of volunteering, of being in service to those in your community, when done right and with the right amount of openness, is not to give back, but rather, to connect.

What if we started to promise that by providing service to others, we would build a greater understanding of the community in which we all live.

Let me offer an example of what I mean.

An old friend of mine volunteered for CASA of Los Angeles, an advocacy organization that trains individuals to serve as volunteer advocates for youth in the foster care system.

As we were building our friendship, my friend admitted to me that before he started as a CASA volunteer, he believed that kids in foster care were “troubled” and came from “broken” homes with “lazy” and “bad” parents. He shared that it was only through his experience as a foster youth advocate that he learned of the systemic dynamics that often lead families into the dependency court system and make it difficult for them to escape.

Volunteering deepened his empathy for a world he had otherwise only seen from a distance. Being of service broke the barrier between his “us and them” world vision and it made him a more effective advocate —not just for the youth, but for their families and the policies that affect them.

I don’t want to say that it’s up to the service recipient to teach the volunteer. That would get us into a similar imbalanced mess. What I want to say is that it is possible to nurture the transactional benefits of service.

Over another cup of coffee, I had a beautiful conversation with the executive director of a homeless services organization that works with hundreds of volunteers. She said the real magic in the work is when she sees the perception of the divide between the housed and unhoused break down; when volunteers start to learn something about their fellow community member that they did not know before; when they start to learn something about their own biases; and when they start to see themselves as in community with those from which they initially believed they were separate.

Volunteering can be horizontal, interactive, and community building.

It is an opportunity - an opportunity to be in community together and indeed a way forward in a very heavy time.