RA360: Service and Community-Based Learning
Engage in service can be an incredibly rewarding experience. True service isn’t just about giving to a community, but engaging with the community. For anyone authentically engaged in service work, there are many things one can learn not just about others but also about oneself. Thinking of organizing a service activity for your community or thinking about undertaking a service-based activity yourself? Read on…
In this RA360…
Before Your Service
What does it mean to be an active citizen? It’s about more than just voting and paying taxes, says social entrepreneur Gabriel Marmentini. He explains why we can’t rely on the state alone to solve all our problems — and presents the four key ingredients for anyone to become a change-maker and engage in solving public issues.
Stanford University’s Haas Center for Public Service dives deeper into Pathways of Public Service and Civic Engagement.
During Your Service
When participating in a service project, it’s important to understand and align with the needs of the community, approach the work with respect and openness, and communicate clearly with all involved. Reflecting on the experience and showing appreciation can also enhance personal growth and relationships.
9 Components of Quality Community Engagement
- Strong Engagement: Meets a real, community-identified need. This is achieved through communication, humility, and authenticity.
- Education: Provides a framework of intersecting perspectives developed to help participants understand the root causes and effects of social issues. Connects participants’ personal experiences to the topic.
- Orientation: Before, during, and after the engagement experience, participants learn about the communities, organization(s), and projects with which they are working.
- Training: Throughout the entire engagement experience, participants are provided with adequate training necessary to carry out tasks and activities related to the service project.
- Full Immersion: Values-informed practices that show the community you care about their well-being.
- Identity-Consciousness: Community engagement programs should illuminate why we perceive engagement is necessary in the first place, helping participants to identify the role of power and privilege in perpetuating injustices AND in their own lives and identities.
- Equity: Community engagement as a tool of liberation. It should aim to redistribute resources, power, and wealth. Engagement should also be sustainable and be thought about in the long-term rather than the immediate.
- Reflection: Anytime participants engage in community work, they are strongly encouraged to reflect upon the experience—synthesizing the engagement experience, education, and community immersion components. Time is set aside for this to take place individually and as a group and should occur both organically and through structured activities.
- Reorientation: After the engagement experience, individuals transfer lessons learned by continuing education, service, advocacy, and/or philanthropy. Participants join or organize coalitions to take action around issues on campus, in their neighborhoods, within the local community, and more broadly.
After Your Service
The Active Citizen Continuum shows how service based learning can transform one’s thinking and approach to service overall.
Other Resources
Questions To Ponder:
- How can you make sure a service opportunity respects the people and communities your are doing the service for/with?
- What kind of learning can residents take away from acts of service?
- Do you have an office on campus that can help coordinate service opportunities? (You probably do!)
RA360 Outcomes:
RAs and student staff members will be able to:
- Describe the goals of service and community-based learning.
- Identify opportunities to bring service and community-based learning into one’s own community.
- Facilitate service and community-based learning opportunities for residents.
More To Explore
RA360 is a set of resources organized around skills, topics and competencies relevant to Resident Advisors and similar related student staff positions in college and university residence halls.
