Community Service: Educate, Act, Evaluate.

Community service is a diverse collection of actions that pool together to make a change. My view of community service has been expanded by this course and I have learned so much about the ins and outs of community service. I started this course with the idea that community service was giving time to a

The Destructiveness of Community Service

The measure of our moral worth is not how much we give to others but rather to what extent we hold our own lives as our highest value and take responsibility for our lives. That standard requires us to set goals that will contribute most to our survival and well-being, and to create the means

Final Assessment

I believe community service has the opportunity to be empowering, though ultimately, I think it’s usually destructive-based. Often, volunteer organizations fail to work collaboratively with the community they’re allegedly serving. Instead of benefiting the community, volunteer work tends to benefit the organization and the people volunteering the most. Charities, for example, will put more money

Addressing Critical Issues

In my community, every citizen has the ability to use one of the numerous different pathways – advocacy, activism, mutual aid, etc. – for addressing critical issues. In recent years, I’ve witnessed members of my community utilize these pathways to create change. For instance, After the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, students

Types of Changes and the Effects on our Communities

Currently, the community I identify the most with would be the Gorham USM campus as I spend the majority of my time there. Since this is my fourth year I have gotten quite familiar with the inability to create change. The advertised ways to make change are political advocacy however it never seems to create

Volunteerism Pathway Effectiveness

Throughout my research in this module, I have come to conclude that there are six major pathways to public service: philanthropy, ethical consumerism, activism, political advocacy, volunteering, and mutual aid. I think the approach that would be most effective in addressing the problem of my community is mutual aid. The need for mutual aid is

The Positive and Negative Impacts of Community Service

When we hear community service we often think of good. We think of people working to do good for others. However, who is truly benefiting from the service? As we have all learned throughout our lives as well as throughout this class, community service is likely something that we have all interacted with at some

Corporations Benefit More from Community Service than the Communities We Serve

I sadly have to say that it appears that corporations benefit more from my acts of service than the people I intended to impact. It appears as though what I do to help and assist my community is just written into grants of these corporations for them to receive further funding that happens to increase

Purpose Behind Community Service (Module 5)

Community service and volunteering hours are a necessity for people in need and can overall have a major impact on society. Whether that is constantly donating one’s time to a homeless shelter, tutoring kids in lower-income communities, or attending protests and demonstrations – all these acts of service can have a major impact. However, some

Benefiting from Community Service (Module 6)

The answer to “who ultimately benefits from community service and how?” can have multiple variations of an answer. It is known that many organizations directly help those in need; for example, when volunteering for the Preble Street soup kitchen in Portland, I would help by packaging clothes, toiletries, etc., and bringing them to those people