An AJWS alternative spring break participant spends about 25 hours engaged in active volunteer work—usually performing manual labor—during his or her week of service. In the impoverished regions of Central America where most of our groups travel, hourly wages run about $5 or $6. That’s something like $150 worth of labor. The direct cost of sending said college student—including airfare, room and board, insurance, group leaders, etc. (but leaving out, for simplicity’s sake, salaried staff and administrative overhead)—averages around $1,800, a cost shared by funders and participants’ families. So, for an investment of $1,800, we’re delivering about $150 worth of manual labor to a poor community in the developing world.
What if the time horizon of the program isn’t limited to the weeklong field experience, but instead begins when participants are accepted into the program and lasts the rest of their lives? What if the desired outcome isn’t only a new fence or community center but also the volunteers’ deeper, more personal understanding of the challenges of the developing world that leads to a lifetime of activism in pursuit of justice? What if we measure the effectiveness of these programs based on what we’ve termed their “double impact”—the value they create for the beneficiary community and the transformative impact they have on the volunteers? When we stretch our perspective this way, field-based service trips become more promising, if still complex, endeavors. To do them well, and to make them a net positive for the world, we’ve laid out six principles to guide us when we consider service-learning trips.
· One, build long-term relationships with partners and work with them to make sure that the projects matter.
· Two, a week is better than a day; a summer is better than a week.
· Three, create an atmosphere of “productive discomfort.”
· Four, skip the predictable Jewish texts; introduce new and thorny ones instead (see also “productive discomfort”).
· Five, integrate the community into the service-learning experience.
· Six, study the context.
Suggested Discussion Questions:
1. What common critique of service-learning trips is Dorfman responding to in this text?
2. Do you agree with his defense? How can we make our service-learning experience continue to shape us for the rest of our lives?
3. How does each principle contribute to this?
Time Period: Contemporary (The Yom Kippur War until the present-day)