To Serve

When we think of community service, what is the first thing that comes to mind? High school students giving out food at their local pantry, perhaps. Or people getting together one weekend to clean up the trash in a local park. Or college students tutoring local youth in need.

Indeed, these rosy images of service can be alluring. Who doesn’t love seeing a child’s eyes light up when they're handed a box of Oreos? Who doesn’t feel a sense of pride as onlookers suddenly observe a newly clean, neat park, highway, or field? Who wouldn’t be thrilled to watch a child eagerly dive into a new book?

At face value, there is nothing wrong with any of this. But in appreciating this kind of service, it is important to better understand it - it is called direct service. As the name suggests, it's the kind of service where you can see the product of your work, where you can see directly the individuals and communities which benefit from it.

But there’s another kind of service, one which isn’t what we first think of when community service comes to mind, but is arguably just as important: indirect service.

Potatoes?

A few weeks ago, I cut sprouts off of potatoes. The work was part of volunteering I did at The Store, a student-run food pantry at my own George Washington University.

I initially learned about volunteering at The Store through GW UNICEF, a wonderful organization on campus which I couldn’t recommend more (click here to learn more!).

I didn’t know specifically what I would be doing at The Store when I went in to volunteer, and recalled how back when I volunteered at a food pantry in high school, the service I performed was almost completely direct.

The first thing I noticed, simply put, is that the potatoes were ugly. I later learned that The Store acquired them from Hungry Harvest, a Baltimore based company which specializes in delivering “ugly” produce that is often rejected by mainstream grocers.

Indeed, as we went through the potatoes, we discarded many of them which were falling apart, and had to cut sprouts off of most of them. Furthermore, they were small, and often oddly shaped.

At GWU, 43% of students said that, at one point or another, they did not have enough food for themselves. Frankly, these students, and millions of others suffering with food insecurity across this country, could care less about whether their potatoes looked nice or were big.

We often don’t realize our own privilege, which is why I feel that indirect service is so important. When you perform direct service, it is personal, it is emotional. You feel good about the work you do immediately, and you are happy to interact with those you know will benefit from it.

Cleaning potatoes, and many other forms of indirect service, can often be tedious. They are not as glamorous, and often are not the kind of tasks which entice people to serve.

But when you do them, in fact, especially when you do them, you have the time to think about what you're doing.

Why We Do It

While cleaning the potatoes, I thought about the work I was doing. Furthermore, I came to the realization that there could be many who perform service for reasons besides, well, service.

When I say this, I’m not just talking about people serving their communities to meet requirements put upon them by their schools, sports teams and the like, nor am I only talking of those who perform service to pad their resumes.

I’m addressing those who serve for the feeling alone. Those who perform only direct service, and who pat themselves on the back afterwards. Again, here the question must be asked, is there anything wrong with this?

It's easy to argue: “Sure, many people could only serve to feel good themselves, and don’t care about the specific people and communities that they are actually helping. But, they are still serving.”

After all, isn’t some service better than no service, regardless of the motive? In what situations would this not be the case? These are not easy questions to answer, but that is precisely why they are worth thinking about.

Personally, I think the clearest takeaway, despite the complicated nature of this issue, is that we should not undervalue indirect service. If we find ourselves performing only direct service, and rarely thinking about the motives behind it, I think it's paramount to ask “why am I really doing this?”

We shouldn’t be afraid to do the menial, behind the scenes tasks. We shouldn’t be afraid to compile a town history, or clean a low-income community center after-hours, or clean beds at a homeless shelter.

Sometimes, we all need to pull up our sleeves, and clean some ugly potatoes.