COLUMN: A closer look at serving the surrounding community

From Nadia Dowshen's, "Urban Guerrilla," Fall '99 From Nadia Dowshen's, "Urban Guerrilla," Fall '99Currently, more than 20 Penn student organizations tutor and mentor children in Philadelphia. During the next academic year, the University will offer over 90 academically based community service courses. And three out of every four Penn students do some kind of community service during their four years at Penn; the University estimates that 4,000 undergraduate students were actively involved in community service as of 1998. At the beginning of this semester, a group of staff and students took on the task of trying to catalog all student service on campus. We quickly ran into difficulties. Service, like so many other things at Penn, is divided into a constantly changing number of unconnected groups and individuals. We have the Center for Community Partnerships and Civic House, which help to coordinate and support some of the largest and oldest student service initiatives, like the West Philadelphia Tutoring Project and the West Philadelphia Improvement Corp. But beyond these two centers, cultural groups, academic departments, honor societies and pre-professional organizations, political organizations, performing arts groups and random individual students all participate in activities that they label as community service. The extent of commitment to community partners ranges from a one-day annual clean-up event to spending over 20 hours per week working in a West Philadelphia public school classroom. Students involved in each of these varied efforts must begin to question their work. Is our aim to serve the needy or to be part of mutually beneficial partnerships? Even those of us involved in academically based community service -- often looked upon as better than traditional service volunteering like tutoring and mentoring -- have failed to prepare students to work with their community partners. While academically based service attempts to address core problems and work towards structural change through academic research, it too often defines and tries to solve a community's problems for it. Penn students often begin working in the West Philadelphia community with misconceptions and false assumptions about the people they will work with. Professors and programs too often do not prepare students for the strengths and needs of the community, or for its diversity. We have also failed to address issues of race, class and gender in our work with the community. Why is it that women comprise an overwhelming majority of active community service participants and leaders? And how should we negotiate race and class differences between us and our community partners when we don't even do a good job of this within our own community? But the ultimate question is: Do our community partners really benefit from our efforts and how do we measure such benefits? Do we ask elementary school students how they feel when a tutor leaves them after one semester? Or, for example, has implementing nutrition curricula at the middle school level helped to improved the health of children in this community? These are difficult questions with complex answers but if we don't make the effort to evaluate our community service courses and programs, we risk wasting time and money and possibly doing more harm than good. If you're one of the thousands who do "community service," or even if you're not, I encourage you to attend the Kellogg Conference on Academically Based Community Service and Volunteerism at Penn on Monday, April 26, in Meyerson Hall. This conference provides an excellent opportunity to reflect on a semester of hard work in the community. But don't just pat yourself on the back. Take a little time to think about whether you're really making a difference.