What It Means To Be An Active Citizen
Everything that we have learned and done our first semester in SERVE ultimately led us to strive to achieve being an ‘active citizen’. But what exactly does being an active citizen mean? We could define it as, “…our agreement to receive rights and privileges from the community and, in so doing, to pay for them through our willingness to live within certain boundaries and act in the interest of the whole…[a] desire to care for the well-being of the larger institution…” as Peter Block stated in his article From Leadership to Citizenship. Or we could define it using Alternative Break Connection’s Active Citizen Continuum, which defines an active citizen as someone whose “community becomes a priority in values and life choices”. Both of these definition requires a person to intently think of one’s community and/or surroundings and live their lives for the better of the said community. As simple as it sounds, the majority of people living within a community will never truly reach the level of being an active citizen. To get to the bottom of why that is and what it really means to live a life as an active citizen, we have dig a bit deeper. A big concept that we learned was that there should be no reason or excuse to not live as an active citizen. No matter how busy anyone is, if they take a moment to be selfless, they will always be able to find the time to give their time to service someone and better the community. An example can be found in Robert Cole’s book The Call of Service. There is a story of a “…thirty-year-old assembly-line worker [who] spoke with great feeling of his weekly visit to a nursing home two miles from his house... ‘we weren’t sure at first what we were going to do, and we were nervous…but we just decided we’d be ourselves …and they all told us to come back, and we did, and now we’re regulars and we love it – it’s part of our lives. You give something, and believe me, you get something back’” (47). This person is an adult with a full-time job and a family who he has to support and spend time with, yet he found time in his busy schedule to visit a local nursing home and give back to his community by spreading joy to those elders. A line that really hit me was, “You give something, and believe me, you get something back.” Not many people would say that they agree with a statement like this. They may make remarks against it, beaten down by the criticism and hostility of our society that teach people to be self-indulged and live for themselves. However, even negativity can be good feedback if the one who is receiving such feedback uses it for good. Thus, I do believe that when you give you are bound to get something back and this should encourage others to open up their hearts too. Know that in volunteering to help someone other than yourself, you’ll be able to find great reward. However, another thing that we learned was that even if everyone is called to be a part of community service, we should also take caution when becoming involved in such activities. Now this may sound counterintuitive, telling everyone to engage in a certain activity for the good of the community and then to tell them to proceed with caution in case the activity they do actually does more harm than good. But since we are human, it is hard for everything to be perfectly pure in its intentions. There are many organizations that hide under the facade of good intentions but ultimately end up leaving harmful long-term effects. However, this should not become discouragement for those to not volunteer because when service is provided with caution and care, it can leave a great impact on people. Such phenomenon is described well in Brett L. Shadle’s paper The Perils of Promises of International Service Learning, which he wrote to “examine international service learning (ISL) and international volunteerism (IV), and the benefits and possible negative impacts it can have for students and host communities” (2). In the paper, he introduces some common misconceptions held within people that may lead to the increase of harmful service in the United States. He talks about some projects that happen specifically at Virginia Tech, saying “Students (and faculty) undoubtedly find these projects immensely rewarding, and report that they have been transformed by serving others abroad. Yet we must be very careful not to allow this enthusiasm to cloud our thinking about ISL/IV. Such projects carry the potential for great rewards, and great risks…” (4). Such thinking and misconceptions can lead to a thing called voluntourism, in which the act of volunteering can be confused with just touring a third-world country and not actually providing useful volunteer efforts. There have been many stories where people go to such countries intending to offer some time at a third-world country orphanage but then find out that those children actually had fully-functional families but they’ve been ripped apart from them so that the government could make a profit off of those who want to believe they’re doing something good by spending some time with unloved children. To reiterate, just because a project or service has the potential to do harm does not mean it should not be done, because it also carries the equal amount of potential to become something great. But these projects should be proceeded with intense caution as Shadle explains. One way that they examine service with Virginia Tech students who go on international service learning trips is by asking the questions, “Have students actually learned anything about themselves and those they encounter?... Are they questioning their own world views…Are students doing more harm than good?” (5). Such questions are an important step in making sure that there was no disservice being done to the group of people on the receiving end of service projects. Such questions must be asked before, during, and after a service project in order to make sure that the people who are giving service, especially in international service, are always going forward with the correct intentions and approach. Another thing that can be done is to highly facilitate the project. In Shadle’s case, he tried to create his project by following a few steps that he believed would allow his project to help as many people as possible. The steps go: “1. Selecting the project. Is it a project that the community desires, and has prioritized?... 2. Selecting students… 3. Preparing students… Do they have a sense of the complexity of the issue at hand, or do they see it as a simple technical problem that can be resolved in a matter of weeks?... 4. Post-ISL research” (8). Shadle used all of these steps in order to look at this project at all angles and all points of views. In order to “ensure that, at the very least, no harm is done and, in the best case, both…emerge better for the experience” (6). All of these steps may seem slightly excessive to some. You may be thinking, is there really such a negative impact of community service that you have to be meticulous in the way you do community service? But there are significant impressions that you leave when you do community service, and those impressions can be good, bad, or both. For example, you could intend to help a child living in the ghetto by tutoring them and showering them with love. But if gone about wrong, it could end up revealing the drastic difference between a privileged life and a deprived life and result in filling his heart with bitterness. This is just one example of a service going bad, but there are a billion ways that people who want to believe they’re doing something good can end up hurting other people. Which is why we should always be questioning our intent, our actions, and our impact. At the end of it all, if all of these things are done correctly and you truly believe in the cause and/or people that you are servicing, there are bound to be positive impacts. Virginia Tech’s school motto is ‘Ut Prosim’. Now, most people who go to Virginia Tech or know about Virginia Tech knows that it stands for, “That I May Serve”. Meaning Virginia Tech has dedicated itself as a place of service. On the Division of Student Affairs website, they say to “embrace Ut Prosim as a way of life”, through which they will be able to “enrich their lives through service to others.” They encourage “students to understand and develop a value system that will guide their decisions and enable them to offer themselves as responsible citizens of the world.” They constantly make their motto a part of their students’ lives, plastering it on the walls of buildings and the sides of buses. As a student or faculty of Virginia Tech who are on the campus on a daily basis, it would be hard to forget it. However, knowing the college’s motto and actually following through with it are two very drastic things. It takes a lot of work and effort to carry out “that I may serve”, and even when it is carried out, it doesn’t guarantee that you’re being an active citizen. I don’t think that many people know what being an active citizen even means, nor do they think about actually being an active citizen. Most people will live their lives thinking of and living for themselves and their immediate family. Maybe once in a while they’ll go to some community event or drop some change in a homeless man’s cup. They may even go out to church and put a dollar down in the offering basket to feel better about themselves. Whatever their small gesture of giving may be, not many citizens of a community or nation will ever reach the level of being an active citizen. Now, why is it that important to be an ‘active’ citizen? Like we discussed earlier, an active citizen basically means that one would have to intently think of one’s college community and live their lives for the better of the community. Living as an active citizen would benefit the university as a whole and would also challenge each individual to think selflessly. When someone lives as an active citizen, the impact that they can make on a community is far greater than the impact that they may have if they do not progress on the active citizen continuum. Once successfully creating a culture where serving another is a top priority, or even better just a routine thing, is when everyone in a community can play their part as an active citizen. Virginia Tech strives to encourage each student to reach a level of active citizenship by promoting their college motto of Ut Prosim. They may promote it by adding it to lectures at new student orientations, writing articles on it, making it a part of their student affairs, and having events rooted in it. Although Virginia Tech’s Division of Student Affairs and VT Engage works hard on all of these things, there still exists a lack of motivation among students. If it is hard for full-grown adults to make service a part of their routine, just imagine how much harder it is to make college students want to implement volunteering as a part of their busy college life. Even if serving is directly implemented into a school’s motto, moving students to serve is not an easy thing to do. Everyone is selfish of their free time, and little are willing to give up their time with friends to go volunteer, much less become passionate about a certain service. So what can a college do to move their students to become active citizens? How can they appeal the motto more than they’ve been doing? One way that I propose that they can appeal to more students is by making each volunteer event something to do about what a typical college student would be more inclined to be interested in, such as animals or free t-shirts. It may be hard to create events based on such trivial things, but incorporating them into service activities will bring an increase of student volunteers and thus create a positive impact. Another way that they could appeal to a larger crowd is to better inform students about the events using social media. In our day and age, most college students are all on some sort of social media platform. I know that right now Virginia Tech uses platforms such as Facebook and Gmail, but the time change so fast for millennials. Nowadays the best way to reach them is through Twitter and Snapchat. So, maybe if Virginia Tech made a main snapchat page where they post fun things going around campus and different events, more people would be made aware and more people would come out to such events. Lastly, another strategy that they could use is holding the events on campus or the drill field. That way it is easier to access and, if held at the drill field, there is no way that people would not know of an event that was going on that day. The event would have more exposure and accessibility, increasing the size of the event. At the beginning of the semester in August, I was at the volunteer level. Meaning I was well-intentioned but not well-educated about social issues. I had been involved in many different service activities and organizations, but I never deeply fell into the cause that I was volunteering for. For the most part, it was sort of a ‘doing it because I had to do it’ sort of thing. I was only a part of the organizations that I belonged to because of my parents or my friends. That’s why I felt like I was stuck at the ‘volunteer’ stage, because I wasn’t passionate about what I was doing. So I tried to find out what I was truly passionate about. And through deep reflection and the help of my fellow students around me, I found that the things that I am truly passionate about are children and people who are in need of help with no way to help themselves. In the case of children, I’ve always known that I love working with children. At my church back home, they have an annual vacation bible school that runs for a week. Parents drop their children off at 8 in the morning and we take care of them until about 3pm or sometimes even later. I’ve been a part of this program from since I was allowed to be a teacher and I look forward to every summer because of it. Most of the time I was assigned to take of children between the ages of 3 years old to those in 2nd grade. We made crafts, learned dances, sang songs, and had recreational activities. When I was with my kids, time would fly and before I knew it the kids would be giving me hugs and telling me ‘see you next summer!’ It was always so bittersweet taking care of these children because they brought me so much joy when I took care of them, but it was always so hard to say goodbye. And after I came to college, I constantly thought about how I much I missed taking care of children and being around my kids. This helped me to realize that I wanted to be around and help kids as a part of what I do for the rest of my life. That’s how I found my major from being undecided. I soon determined that I wanted to go into education and teach children as my job. I was a little bit reluctant at first because I knew how hard it was for people who majored in education to find jobs. I knew I would have the highest paying job or the fanciest workplace, but I also knew that I would be happy every single day of my life. As for wanting to help people who can’t help themselves, I looked deeply into who I wanted to be helping and why. I think that I have an inclination to want to help people who can’t help themselves because I feel both blessed that I was given the opportunities that I was if others weren’t given the same opportunities and I feel like I should be using the privileges and powers that I was given in life to help others or else I would be being selfish. I dug into myself to figure out who exactly I wanted to be helping and I found that I have a real passion for people living in third-world countries. Those who are living in places like Syria or Latin America, where they need real help but can’t get any, I want to become the voice that they lost or never had. I want to be one of the people who see them and think of them in the midst of their struggles even when they are forgotten by the world. So, I made it a life-long goal to make an impact on those people by giving my time and maybe eventually my life and career. Putting these two ambitions together, I set a common goal in one day being able to become a teacher and mentor for children in third-world or struggling countries. It may not be able to be immediately out of college or even in my twenties, but I hope that one day I’ll be able to go there for a few years and help them in the best way that I know how. This is how I’ve moved from just a volunteer to being a conscientious and maybe even an active citizen.