Community Service vs. Community Engagement

Growing up, community service was an integral part of my life. Being in Girls Scouts, helping out at church, and general volunteer work were all acceptable forms of service. My peers never questioned the process: attend a site, doing the assigned work, and feel good upon leaving because of a job well done. On the other hand I was left wanting more, wondering how the work we did affected the people we were helping and wanting to meet them and talk to them about their lives.

Coming to William and Mary, my needs were answered. Before I arrived I had no idea just how many opportunities existed to serve locally, nationally, and internationally.  I had my heart set to perform service work overseas so that I could help Spanish-speaking populations because I had never had to the option to do so. At the International Service Experience Fair in the fall of 2008, I found opportunities to work almost anywhere including Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, to name a few. Ultimately, I joined Medical Aid Nicaragua: Outreach Scholarship (MANOS) a trip that travels to Cuje, Nicaragua annually over Spring Break.

What sets MANOS (and an analogous project in the Dominican Republic called SOMOS) is that in addition to providing community service, the main focus is on community engagement. MANOS has two components designed to address the community's short term and long term needs. For immediate relief, we host a free clinic and distribute medication. Our long-term goal is to work in conjunction with the community and create solutions to what the community views as the biggest problems they face. Instead of deciding what we think is wrong with health in Cuje, we create interview protocols and go out into the community itself to talk to local residents and asking them about how they organize themselves, how information is distributed, and what are the biggest challenges they personally see in their home.

It sounds simple, but what makes a goal like this tough to accomplish is building relationships with the population we serve. Several NGOs constantly come through Cuje and set up small projects, build wells, or donate clothes without following up on the results of their actions. Because our efforts span over the course of years, we work to create trust between the MANOS team and the Cuje community. We constantly have to demonstrate that we care about what the community wants and that we want them to work with us. That's what community engagement is about. The purpose of community engagement is to avoid an affluent group of people either simply "throwing money at the problem" or trying to create a solution based only from their outsider perspective.

Community engagement's point is quite literal: engaging the community in order to empower them and show that once a group like MANOS leaves, they can continue to succeed and solve problems on their own. The amount of involvement from a needy population in creating solutions to the problems that they face is what distinguishes service from engagement. While any act of service should never be diminished, engagement requires a strong partnership with the community a group is serving. Therefore, you are not only working for a community, but with them, making both groups equal partners working towards the same goal.