​The spirit of volunteering

For many Duke students, spring break is a welcome respite, offering a chance for rest, relaxation and sunny beach visits after two long months of classes, job recruitment and rush processes. For some students, spring break also serves as an opportunity to take the week of free time to give back to their communities. Today we turn to the motivations behind and ramifications of pursuing these various service trips and alternative break programs.

Before even coming to campus, many students have it drilled into them by guidance counselors and parents that an extensive record of volunteer work helps impress college admissions officers. Armed with that message, many students dive into volunteering to boost the hours they can post on their applications. With incentives and requirements from medical school and other post-graduation pathways, some manage to retain this self-serving motivation.

But should good volunteering be reduced down to the simple completion of tasks or does it demand a non-selfish, goodhearted motivation? The first part of the question seems easy to answer. If a person with unashamedly selfish, resume-related motivations goes out for service, their approach and passion are almost certainly not going to be right for the job, service organization and community involved. The second part of the question is more difficult. If a person was motivated by some self-congratulatory caregiver ethic but still worked hard in a genuine effort to better their community, it would be hard to find fault with them from any of those earlier perspectives. In truth, a complicated mixture of possible motives bases the qualities of authentic and meaningful volunteer work on some balance between the right attitudes and practical efficacy.

Of course this is no comment on the commendable students who choose to donate their time to worthy causes with all the right backing mindsets, but it seems evident that those who spend time in the Duke Hospital to get by their volunteering requirements are not really volunteering. Instrumentalizing community service or treating it as some kind of regular photo op does still result in service done to a community but is better to be further tagged as deceitful if not as a narcissistic pat on the back. Though not always flashy or on the beaten path, the best volunteer work has students asking “What does the community need me to be right now?”

Luckily Duke has maintained a great host of volunteering programs from the organizing end of volunteering. The most useful volunteer work involves long-term, in-depth involvement; it asks that students to form legitimate connections with their broader community and seek to better their surrounding environment. Service-learning classes, DukeEngage and DukeImmerse offer students the chance to go beyond service to bond with communities and take the time to learn about and reflect on what is happening through the service work. Intensive volunteer opportunities are out there for students ready to find them. Students need only be reminded that their inertia holds them back, whether in laziness towards volunteering at all or the momentum of continuing to take service work lightly. Organizations like DPS can certainly help students overcome that inertia by regularly sharing long-term community service opportunities, but students must take it upon themselves to actually engage those opportunities.

Duke’s mission statement asks all of us to strive to become “scholars in the service of society.” By engaging in thoughtful volunteer work, we can achieve that mission, better our community and better ourselves.