Community service has to be one of the most fulfilling endeavors I have ever indulged in life. This is because it has allowed me the avenue to work with different people with varying personalities, and as such has given me room to learn and embrace different perspectives of human life. I can comfortably point out that my understanding of the social location, social responsibility and community engagement has been more informed. Social position at this point for me as a professional reflects on a community's understanding of life, diseases, and such like phenomena that are defined based on such factors as exposure to civilization and education. This means that social location plays a significant role in establishing who a person is, informs their character and personality through the values instilled into them by society. As a social worker, it is my responsibility to consider this societal beliefs, teachings, and way of life in informing my approach to the issues at present. The social responsibility then would imply me as a professional helping the society come up with answers to some of the pressing matters at hand, through incorporating my academic knowledge with their perception of life. Community engagement is the ability to actively involve the society in defining their problems, considering some of the causative factors, and then coming up with solutions together on how these causative factors can be addressed. In this approach, the society is responsible for defining their problems and coming up with strategies to answer to these problems.
The most relevant social issue facing the community I was involved with is social class inequality. It is a problem because the financial imbalance makes it difficult for a given section of the population to access such services as better education opportunities and medical care. In addition to this, there is the issue of poverty contributed by this in which case most people live below the poverty line and find it hard to afford even the basic of the human needs. This is not a matter that can easily be solved because it is contributed towards by some factors such as discrimination and corruption which makes it even harder for the marginalized groups, in this case, to access better jobs and opportunities in life to get themselves out of poverty. Answering to this situation would imply a complete makeover even in the political setting since that is where an imbalance of power and oppressive system stem from. In this society, those with authority and social status due to their financial standing get more recognition than those without. The systems tend to favor them in such matters as education and job opportunities, while the poverty-stricken members of the social struggle to access these services and opportunities. While the poor have no access to better facilities, the affluent are given top priority in obtaining the facilities, and it is even worse because there are no set procedures or avenues to address the social class inequality and ensure that the social discrimination is minimized as much as possible.
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When it comes to community service, reciprocity is one of the most valued aspects of the service, interchange in this context implies the two-way traffic of giving and receiving assistance. This approach differs from the conventional one-way traffic in which one party acts as the receiver of an act while the other acts as the giver. My service experience has been of reciprocity since I learn from the community as much as they learn from me. Personally, my experience has been different since the community has allowed me access to some of the reasoning and new perception that I had not leaned before. This means that my insight and understanding of life matters has grown tremendously after interacting with different personalities. I have become wiser and more accommodative of other people; these are qualities I have been learning as I also offer my insight to the community about some ways of answering their problems. In simple terms, my service experience has been reciprocal in the sense that it has been a mutual learning journey for the community in which we learn new approaches to societal problems together and me. I show the society some of the modern ways of answering their challenges based on my education as they also teach me natural and more liberal forms of approaching life. This is how interchange is supposed to be in the context of community service; a journey of learning together.
Talking of reciprocity, there is this one time when in my service I had encountered a child suffering from an illness I would term as weird because in my entire education career I had never faced such a disease. As such, I did not know what approach to take. I googled the symptoms but could not come up with the best cure since the symptoms did not match any illness known to the medical world. Lost and confused, an older woman approached me and told me that it has some hereditary disease that had no cure but could always be managed with some herbs. She went ahead and introduced me to the herbs, which later on when I took to the lab, I discovered it had great medicinal value. This was an eye-opening moment for me because I learned of an herb that could be developed into drugs to manage the kid's situation. At some point later, I was able to teach the community about the value of medical screening to monitor their health status and be able to dictate a terminal disease in its earlier stage. At the end of my service in the community, I had learned about a new medication method as they did learn about screening. I consider this reciprocity since we both learned from each other things we hitherto had no idea about. These two experiences served as eye-opening insights for me because I realized that no matter the educational background of a person, everyone has their own way of approaching life issues which are never right or wrong based on someone’s criterion for evaluating such approaches.
Hitherto learning about Asset Based Community Development, and applying this knowledge in community service profession, I used to believe that community service was all about seeing a problem within society and then coming up with models and measures to fix it. Mostly I held that these social problems primarily arose from the community's ignorance of such matters as health leading to poor lifestyle, and medical choices. But after learning about the Asset Based Community Development as a model, my perception of community service has changed from providing solutions to an ignorant community to helping these communities realize their potential, and use their resources to provide answers to their problems. In other words, I have been learning that community leadership is not about going into a community with already established models of intervention towards a particular subject, but on the whole, it is about learning to use the community as a model to construct and implement solutions for their problems. This is mainly because the society is best equipped to solve its own problems, such as illnesses arising from poor lifestyle choices and lack of hygiene. In this case, the model has taught me to teach the community the various ways in which it can uphold cleanliness to reflect healthy lifestyles. This would mean therefore that the community would be trained on the responsibility which must be held from their point of perception through strict adherence measures.
My participation in community service has played a significant role in shaping my character as a person. I have been able to transform myself from a self-centered kind of a person to an individual who is more mindful of their surroundings and the people within their community. This is because I have been learning the value of participation in finding solutions to some of the societal issues we go through. Working with other people has a more significant impact on problem-solving than individual efforts. I must admit that I have learned the art and value of team play and I am more outgoing and freer to work collaboratively with other individuals in a particular setting than I was before going into community service. I am more exposed and informed now and more active in communal affairs than I was before, and I plan to integrate this new personality into all aspects of my life going forth. As far as my education career is concerned, I plan to join as many social clubs as possible that engage in such works that call for unity as environment clubs do with their programs of cleaning the city and schools every once in a while. In the community, I plan to become more of an active member who contributes wholeheartedly both in ideas and finances whenever the need arises to come together to solve a community problem. This will go a long way in establishing myself as a more vigilant member of society.
