Critical Service Learning from Skid Row
As a Chinese student at USC and a community member, I can simultaneously sense significant differences between all these identities. I am utterly proud and thrilled to be able to accept higher education at this well-known academic institution. Nonetheless, being enrolled does not equally mean being “known” by it. The lack of understanding of being part of the community of Chinese international students separates me from the genuine belonging to USC. Working with my community partner, water drop strengthens this feeling of difference. While providing service for the community, those differences make an invisible wall between us from the others who are also providing service and water drop, thus the less effective engagement for us. The limitations in my engagement result from the disconnection between my community partner and my university. In this way, before we try to navigate the differences, recognize where the differences come from and try to prove that we are all in this for the best interest of community partners despite the difference.
Institutions of higher education have an apparent vested interest in building strong relationships with the communities that surround their campuses. Universities are inherently a critical institutional base for helping community-based economic development in general and civically engaged development. It is true that USC developed cooperation with the community partners of South LA and encourages us to engage more in social activism, which contains what is missing from the education provided. Universities often seem like walled-off cities with unique, narrow concerns to those who have dealt with them, either from a poor community’s perspective or those who seek to help achieve community development goals. The communities outside the “wall” are skeptical about whether the knowledge and perceptions inculcated by the academic institutions can be appropriately applied to the exact condition of the community partners. In part, universities can improve their core intellectual and academic work by giving students and faculty real-world experience that can inform research and teaching. That is why universities and students within need to participate in the service-learning; however, how can we prove that, in turn, the community partner needs the service we offer.
“Acts of service are steps in a larger strategy to bring about change, quite often assessed as the redistribution of resources or social capital.” (Morton 118), service is more about doing good to society. The meaning and power brought about by this action lead to the bigger picture. The community partner with which I choose to be engaged in Water Drop. Three USC students founded Water Drop LA in response to the inaccessibility of clean drinking water in Los Angeles’ homeless communities. Due to the lack of permanent and temporary drinking fountains in unsheltered communities like Skid Row, many people experiencing homelessness in Downtown Los Angeles struggle to obtain a fundamental human right: clean water. Water Drop LA is running weekly water drops of 1000–2000 gallons in Skid Row while advocating for permanent solutions to water insecurity. “In this compelling description, one moves from charity to advocacy motivated by a growing care and passion for the people served, and by an increasingly complex analysis of the situation that created the need for service in the first place…advocacy is seen as a more mature expression of compassion” (Morton 118). From the example of Water Drop, the upper stage of service can be referred to as advocacy, a more sophisticated and significant level for the participants to explore and expand, encouraging a core engagement in the service “out of charity and towards advocacy.”
I think that the differences I encountered during my experience put me on hold at the charity level, thus damage to my engagement with the community partner Water Drop. The labels attached to me are shown in my school life and during my service. Water drop still considers existing differences when assigning tasks to participants. Local students will be assigned to groups closer to the Skid Row, where they will be located closer to the tents on Skid Row, where they will be able to serve and work directly and feel more involved. Several Asian students, including me, were uniformly assigned to the truck, where supplies were distributed directly without the need to enter their tents. People there could pick them up by themselves. It is a different arrangement based on the label of difference, but it is also possible protection for security from measuring the label. We find out that people there need food and clothing more than water. At last, much water was left, but snacks and clothes were distributed early. It seems that there is a problem with meeting their actual demands. “Service experiences responsive to these realities are framed with the understanding that students bring diverse experiences and backgrounds, including ones like those of persons being served in the community. Serving and learning are treated as fluid rather than fixed constructs to acknowledge the shifting roles students and community members adopt as they work together in communities and classrooms.”(Mitchell and Donahue 462). For the unhoused neighbors in LA, their demands consist of resources and shelters. I relate to it because of the lack of absolute acceptance of my belonging community here, which is relatively immaterial. To achieve the meaningful interconversion of service and learning, universities play an unimportant role in this process.
Universities have become an important driving force for community development with their knowledge and intelligence advantages. The community also provides rich practical resources and opportunities for the university’s development. For the common interest of both sides, the university needs to build a deep integration and symbiotic development relationship with the community. The first stage is that universities begin to adapt to the needs of social development, establish cooperative relations with communities, and promote the development of community economy and cooperation between universities. The second stage is when the university actively participates in social change and produces stable relationships in the process of realizing symbiotic development with the community. It becomes a critical power source for community change. Universities should take on a more active role in providing social services and take the initiative to build more diversified mechanisms and approaches to provide a powerful impetus for the development of local communities and national economy, and society.
