Visual Diary 4 Post 1: Community Work Day
For my first visual diary post, I am reflecting on a service experience that I've previously participated in. During college, I participated in a community work day on a local farm. While volunteering my time in this way would typically fall into the category of helping, I believe this experience was instead an example of service. As we learned in our reading, serving is a mutual experience where both parties equally benefit, and there is no "debt" for the receiver. These community work days were uniquely designed so that the volunteers gained a lot from the experience as well. While volunteering, we got to learn more about Hawaiian farming practices and were taught many new skills on how to care for the land. At the end of the day, we even got to enjoy a free meal as a group, which was intentionally prepared using produce from the farm, in order to show us the full cycle of what the land that we worked on produced. In this experience, a mutual service is taking place since the farm benefitted from the extra hands and support, and the volunteers benefitted from the knowledge gained and the meal. In this serving relationship, the power and resources reside with both the helper (volunteers) and the receivers (the farm). A major pro of this service design was that by taking the time to share so much knowledge and skills with us, all of us volunteers were then better equipped to continue volunteering in the future. Overall, I think it was a richer experience for both parties. The image above shows what the work days look like (retrieved from the organization's website. which also has more information about the program). In the image, the program leader is taking a moment to teach the participants.
