I have been going to conferences like it's my job lately. I will, I will, I will (I promise) write about them very soon. I went to a global mission and world hunger consult meeting in October on the border in Texas. This week I attended/presented a poster at a conference about the scientific study of sex. Simultaneously, I attended a conference about hunger and charity at my church (the end of the week was certainly busy...I'm ready for a nap!). Eventually I'll write about all of that, but first I wanted to just put my thoughts out there on a theme that I've noticed between all of those conferences and my classwork this semester.
For my Health Behavior class, I've been doing lots of reading on health behavior theories and frameworks for interventions for particular behaviors (ex: smoking cessation programs, nutrition classes, frameworks for increasing vaccination rates or condom use or whatever the behavior is). The more recent research in any of the theories we've explored is about how people will respond better to an intervention if they have a little "buy-in" into it. Something like...people are more likely to make more positive health behavior choices if they think they are capable of it and they think it's important/want to.
Okay, that makes complete intuitive sense. Absolutely. The trouble is, too often researchers, public health peeps and doctors (or whomever else is involved) spend their energies simply telling people/communities what they need instead of asking what the person/community thinks they need. Turns out, this doesn't produce as favorable results. That also makes complete intuitive sense to me...I mean, who really likes getting told what to do? Not me!
So then I thought about the service learning work I did in college. It was completely focused around finding out what the community you were going to help actually wanted or needed. It doesn't work to serve others by just showing up and doing something that doesn't help them. You can see lots of well-meaning work like this in the mission trip phenomenon. Often youth/young adult groups go to impoverished areas domestically and abroad to "go and help the poor." Okay, awesome. I'm with you on that. But then the youth group comes in and paints a wall that has been painted a million other times by other youth groups. Or they slap a house together that wasn't built well and didn't really need to be built where it now stands. Or something else like that. That does nothing to further the community and doesn't really fill a need.
The best way to serve others is to have an open, honest and authentic conversation around what their needs actually are and how to work together to get to the end goal. It shouldn't be about the group of people "with the stuff" helping the people "without the stuff"--one group with the power and the other, powerless.
This idea is not new within the service learning community.
And then I've been going to these conferences and studying the things I study and each of the respective places mentions this concept (in their own terms, common to the language they use), like it's the newest, most amazing concept in the whole world. Do I think it's an amazing concept? Yes. Definitely. But I don't really think it's all that novel. Whether it's called "accompaniment," "community engagement" or whatever, it's the same sort of thing. I think in some areas of work/study, the concept probably is pretty new.
Maybe, just maybe, it makes sense to stop working in silos and have a free-exchange of ideas between business, service learning, health, church work or whatever it is you do. I am willing to bet that this idea of" listening to the people that surround you" is not the only truly groundbreaking concept that we can learn from each other.
Just some food for thought, I guess...
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