College and university students working with the community at large means many things to many people. Volunteer work should be meaningful to the volunteer and to the community at which the service is performed. Volunteers need better preparation and performance and impact needs to be measured. Communities would be better served if community service was project-based. Professors need to tightly integrate classroom learning with community service work. The best way is to remove boundaries between classroom and community and to regard the surrounding City and County as a Learning Lab.
Long View
Guilford College Bonner Center for Community Service and Learning and UNCG Center for New North Carolinians (CNNC) have long traditions of working together to advance the interests of refugee and immigrant communities in Greensboro. Students from both institutions have worked directly with newcomers and community leaders to learn from them and to know more about the rich experiences they bring to the area and that have made Greensboro and Guilford County among the most culturally diverse places in North Carolina.
Some Other Ways of Being
Recalibrating your cultural frame: Wade Davis on TED (22 minutes)
Brave Promotoras: Santa Ana Health Crusade (24:50 minutes)
Overcoming physical limits: What you can do with just a bicycle (5:38 minutes)
Overcoming physical limits: Technology with a purpose (3:08 minutes)
Multicultural, multiracial and off the radar screen: Breakdancing in GSO (7:06 minutes)
Southern culture meets Southeast Asian culture: Montagnard youth in GSO (10:11 minutes)
What an increasingly mixed race, ethnically diverse Greensboro look like, using your face: Face of the Future
Reframing the Guilford Volunteer Experience
It is an opportunity to be accepted into another community.
It is active or engaged learning — learning through doing.
Kinesthetic engagement is memorable and often life changing because it is effective.
It does not compete with “required” courses and individual’s time, it complements and completes the individual’s learning — especially if that individual’s learning takes place only in a “bubble” — a highly mediated, limited and protected space that minimizes risk, challenge or
Success is measured by the impact the individual makes
1. on the community-based project, on the community's needs or on the lives of community members
2. through the formal documentation and presentation of the individual’s findings
The Greensboro-Guilford Learning Lab
The more quickly we erase classroom boundaries and redefine the City of Greensboro and Guilford County as a Learning Lab, the more quickly we will achieve the goal of active learning and community-engaged problem solving and social change. Community engagement must be community-centered, not student-centered. Community service must be an integral part of a course, not an “add-on”. Relationships with service agencies and organizations must be on-going, not ad hoc.
The City of Greensboro and Guilford County are undergoing rapid demographic and economic transformation. Neighborhoods and communities must benefit from the resources and talents represented at academic institutions just as academic institutions must take an active role shaping the future of the region’s neighborhoods and communities. Students as citizens have a stake in community engagement. Often, they are members of local neighborhoods and communities that could benefit from collaborative enterprises. Or, they become temporary or permanent residents upon graduation — contributors, entrepreneurs, innovators — exactly the agents of social change required in an environment of rapid demographic and economic transformation.
The Learning Lab model looks at people, neighborhoods and communities from many vantage points.
Local is good; it keeps academic institutions accountable where community outreach and meeting community-based needs really matter, and where they ultimately pay off for the benefit of the institutions and region.
POSTSCRIPT: Towards An Organized Effort to Reframe the Region
In American history, the South has played a unique role with an influence far beyond its borders. To its Quaker tradition, industrialization and Civil Rights heritage, Greensboro and the surrounding region have experienced new diversity and multiculturalism, economic struggle and an uncertain future. The Greensboro-Guilford Learning Lab is a vast territory with needs that have not been fully assessed, with services, agencies and organizations scattered across a sprawling urban region. Engaged scholarship, volunteering, community building, and community service are all terms that reflect tens of thousands of hours students in the region’s institutions of higher education put into community-based projects each year. Handled on the micro-level, they will yield micro-effects.
Long View
Guilford College Bonner Center for Community Service and Learning and UNCG Center for New North Carolinians (CNNC) have long traditions of working together to advance the interests of refugee and immigrant communities in Greensboro. Students from both institutions have worked directly with newcomers and community leaders to learn from them and to know more about the rich experiences they bring to the area and that have made Greensboro and Guilford County among the most culturally diverse places in North Carolina.
Some Other Ways of Being
Recalibrating your cultural frame: Wade Davis on TED (22 minutes)
Brave Promotoras: Santa Ana Health Crusade (24:50 minutes)
Overcoming physical limits: What you can do with just a bicycle (5:38 minutes)
Overcoming physical limits: Technology with a purpose (3:08 minutes)
Multicultural, multiracial and off the radar screen: Breakdancing in GSO (7:06 minutes)
Southern culture meets Southeast Asian culture: Montagnard youth in GSO (10:11 minutes)
What an increasingly mixed race, ethnically diverse Greensboro look like, using your face: Face of the Future
REFLECTIONS ON VOLUNTEERING, COMMUNITY SERVICE AND COMMUNITY BUILDING
What Community Volunteering is NotVolunteering is not a frivolous or minor activity that comes second to “serious” academic work, athletics, Greek life, or other “essential” campus life activities.Volunteer work is not amateur hour.Volunteer enthusiasm cannot take the place for experience and expertise when they are needed.Volunteer work is not about the volunteer.It is not charity work.It is not about unlimited, selfless giving, followed by exhaustion and burnout.It is not an activity that could just as well be performed by high school students.Community Service and ServantsGovernment civil servants are not servants, but highly skilled career professionals.Refugee service providers grew out of the volunteer tradition but have sought to professionalize the work without clear standards or career track.Community service is sometimes motivated by religious or political motives, for example when someone says she is serving in the name of God, or in the name of her country or people.In olden times, only servants served. However, we no longer live in a time of Downton Abbey. And in America, we never accepted the idea of class. Community service is also associated by some with onerous chores that might be assigned by a judge to a first time offender. Very confusing.
Community Organizer, Community BuildingSarah Palin famously mocked Barack Obama for being a “community organizer” on her way to defeat in the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. This was an odd criticism to level by a social conservative, since community organization implies building and preserving social order.
It is an opportunity to be accepted into another community.
It is active or engaged learning — learning through doing.
Kinesthetic engagement is memorable and often life changing because it is effective.
It does not compete with “required” courses and individual’s time, it complements and completes the individual’s learning — especially if that individual’s learning takes place only in a “bubble” — a highly mediated, limited and protected space that minimizes risk, challenge or
Success is measured by the impact the individual makes
1. on the community-based project, on the community's needs or on the lives of community members
2. through the formal documentation and presentation of the individual’s findings
The Greensboro-Guilford Learning Lab
The more quickly we erase classroom boundaries and redefine the City of Greensboro and Guilford County as a Learning Lab, the more quickly we will achieve the goal of active learning and community-engaged problem solving and social change. Community engagement must be community-centered, not student-centered. Community service must be an integral part of a course, not an “add-on”. Relationships with service agencies and organizations must be on-going, not ad hoc.
The City of Greensboro and Guilford County are undergoing rapid demographic and economic transformation. Neighborhoods and communities must benefit from the resources and talents represented at academic institutions just as academic institutions must take an active role shaping the future of the region’s neighborhoods and communities. Students as citizens have a stake in community engagement. Often, they are members of local neighborhoods and communities that could benefit from collaborative enterprises. Or, they become temporary or permanent residents upon graduation — contributors, entrepreneurs, innovators — exactly the agents of social change required in an environment of rapid demographic and economic transformation.
The Learning Lab model looks at people, neighborhoods and communities from many vantage points.
Local is good; it keeps academic institutions accountable where community outreach and meeting community-based needs really matter, and where they ultimately pay off for the benefit of the institutions and region.
POSTSCRIPT: Towards An Organized Effort to Reframe the Region
In American history, the South has played a unique role with an influence far beyond its borders. To its Quaker tradition, industrialization and Civil Rights heritage, Greensboro and the surrounding region have experienced new diversity and multiculturalism, economic struggle and an uncertain future. The Greensboro-Guilford Learning Lab is a vast territory with needs that have not been fully assessed, with services, agencies and organizations scattered across a sprawling urban region. Engaged scholarship, volunteering, community building, and community service are all terms that reflect tens of thousands of hours students in the region’s institutions of higher education put into community-based projects each year. Handled on the micro-level, they will yield micro-effects.
