My motivation to engage in social justice work has been ingrained in me since I was very young. My parents would often encourage me to question why it was fair that families who lived just a few miles away from me lived in boarded-up homes and had no plans about how they would be eating the next day, while my youth in suburbia did not include this insecurity.

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My parents enrolled me in a private school starting in Kindergarten, where social justice was built into the daily curriculum, as the founders of the school were motivated by witnessing the injustices of 1940s Germany. The nine years that I attended that school have had a profound impact on my responsibility to work towards repairing the world. When I started college, I knew that this was a passion that I wanted to keep exploring. I have dedicated my four years at Michigan to learning as much as I can about different social issues and how to effectively and respectfully engage with different communities through my Sociology major as well as many different service engagements such as teaching weekly writing lessons at the County Jail and leading a summer camp for high schoolers from the Detroit area.

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The service opportunity that sticks out most in my mind, though, is this past summer when I spent two months in Cape Town, South Africa working at a home for girls who have been sexually or domestically abused and were court-appointed to reside at the home. This was a formative experience in my life for a multitude of reasons, but throughout my time there, and since I have been back, I have had a lot of thoughts about the effectiveness of service work, especially in communities in which I enter as a stranger, which is the case most of the time. Despite the relationships that I built with the girls at the home through spending every weekday with them for two months, I felt like there was still a strong barrier between us, and that my work was not as effective as it could - or should - have been. Plus, I knew that they were skeptical of the system in which volunteers came in and out of their lives, rotating through new young, white, American women every few months. While I am proud of the work that I did, part of it felt, and still feels, wrong.  

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I know that I’m not the only one who’s engaged in community service/social justice work. Many high school and college students decide to do service work in one form or another, whether it is through a mission trip, study abroad, or some other type of program. Some argue that this is important for young adults doing the work to understand how fortunate they are, to engage with different cultures, to use their privilege to give back. I did plenty of volunteering in high school, and it made me feel good inside, as if I really had a responsibility to do this type of work given my social positioning as an educated, motivated young person. Many high schools have a community service requirement for their students, and most colleges also recommend that students have this type of experience as well. The same can be said about those who work for nonprofits, for-profit philanthropic efforts or any other type of work that focuses on doing good or giving back. 

 

In fact, it’s been scientifically studied that doing something good actually makes our brains feel better. According to Stephen G. Post, PhD, a professor of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, humans feel a lowered stress response and improved immunity when one of feeling empathy and love which, he says, can come from giving to others. 

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Given this, I guess it makes sense that I have always thought that I would pursue a career in non-profit work. All of my internships have been with non-profit organizations, working both behind the scenes and doing hands-on engagements with the communities that the organizations target. The social structures that are currently existing provided me with a perfect pathway towards doing this type of work. My neighborhood, my schools, the communities that surrounded me helped create this ethos that because I am who I am, that I am capable of making change. Because I had the motivation and the resources to do so, it was never something that I thought that I needed to question. 

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My experience in South Africa changed everything for me. It has made me re-think whether or not this career path was the right one for me and ultimately led me to consider the effectiveness of service work, especially abroad service work, also commonly known as “voluntourism” which is a combination of volunteering and tourism. This was mostly because of the aforementioned reflection that I had on this experience being somewhat ineffective for the girls and emotionally straining on me. It feels as though the work that I did while I was abroad or was very surface-level, and sometimes made me wonder whether or not I was doing more harm than good. At the rate individuals are deciding to partake in this type of work, it doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere, but I think that we need to take a closer look at what it really means to do good and figure out how or if we can do better.

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