Meaningful Service and its Impacts

by Maxanne Millerhaller

This trip really helped me realize how service can be made meaningful. A lot of the opportunities I’ve encountered in the past have been about one donation or a single day of service, and then they are just forgotten about. We have a sophomore service requirement at SPA where each student has to complete 12 hours of work with nonprofit organizations. The opportunities I used to fulfill this requirement were things where I could go in for a day and feel good about it, but then I would go home and forget all about it. I know that a lot of my peers did the same thing. Something about this has never really sat right with me, but I didn’t think about the benefits that more sustainable forms of service could have for my community. The models that we got to learn about and visit in India were all long-term solutions that showed me what meaningful service looks like.

The NGOs put an emphasis on preparing people for the rest of their lives. At Butterflies, one of the programs is the Children’s Development Khazana (CDK). The CDK serves as a bank for the children where they can save their money. The volunteers at the school teach the kids about the importance of saving up and help them decide what is important. We heard stories of some of the students that were able to start their own businesses with the help of Butterflies. They review the students’ ideas before funding them to make sure they have a solid plan to become financially stable. Financial stability and independence are super important aspects in a person’s life that we don’t talk about much in the SPA community. We also saw this emphasis on financial independence at Pardada Pardadi. The girls all have some idea of what they want to do after they graduate, and the school is set on preparing them to be able to accomplish these things. Surekha, the student who was showing me around, told me that she really wants to be a dancer, and if that doesn’t work out, then her Plan B is to become an engineer. She and all of her friends have a much better idea of what they want to do then I do, and they have a plan of how to get there. We saw this focus on long-term plans at Wildlife SOS as well, because the organization reaches out to the former masters to try to help them learn to be able to interact with the elephants in a more positive way. Part of what makes all of the NGOs we visited so successful is their ability to plan for the future of everyone in the organization.

Another aspect of the sustainability of the NGOs is the commitment of the volunteers. The volunteers at Pardada Pardadi give up their lives in more luxurious places to live in the guest houses and work at the school. Everyone there is dedicated to staying and making meaningful connections with the girls. It was difficult to visit the school for only one day because it felt like we made connections with the girls in a short period, but we will probably never see them again. A lot of us exchanged emails with the girls, but it may be difficult to really be able to stay in contact with them. At Butterflies, they actually had an emphasis on the fact that we were not to make connections with the children. Because we were there for such a short period of time, it’s hard on them if we create a bond and then don’t come back. We weren’t supposed to tell them that we would stay in contact with them, and we weren’t even supposed to take pictures with them unless we specifically told them what it was going to be used for. Similarly, we weren’t allowed to touch the elephants at Wildlife SOS because they should only be touched by people that will be there in the long-run. It could be confusing to the elephants if we’re petting them and playing with them and then we just leave forever. The workers there are people that are committed to staying and creating real bonds with the elephants.

I didn’t realize how much work and planning goes into these NGOs until I actually visited and learned about them. They have developed models that are more sustainable than any other form of service I’ve encountered in the past. I’ve been thinking about the opportunities in my own community that would be more sustainable than the kind of service I normally do. I think that SPA could work on providing the students with opportunities for more long-term service projects. 12 hours isn’t really enough time to make a lasting impact on a community. Raising the number of hours that are required could be good, but I don’t think that it would really inspire the students to make a more meaningful impact. It would be better to expose the students to service that is impactful so that they actually want to do the service. If students could find an outlet to do service that they really care about, we could all make a lasting positive change.