Cultural Understanding for Effective Service
This entry is part of a research project for Cultural Interfaces and Cross-Cultural Rhetoric at Stanford University. For more about this assignment and the class projects, click here.
Undergraduates who plan to pursue careers in public service or the nonprofit sector should gain deep understanding of the people they are going to serve. I am conducting a research project for the Cultural Interfaces class on how undergraduates can take advantage of service opportunities to learn about people’s specific culture and context.
You can get an idea of the range of service opportunities available by looking at what is offered at Stanford. The Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford offers summer fellowships in which students initiate service projects or help existing community organizations (http://haas.stanford.edu/index.php/item/448). One such fellowship is the African Service Fellowship. Another is the East Palo Alto Social Venture Fellowship. While the former service opportunity takes place on a different continent, the latter takes place a short drive from Stanford. What both of these programs have in common, however, is that they both encourage deep cultural and contextual understanding.
One way to ensure cultural understanding is to work with a community partner. For the African Service Fellowship, the Haas Center insists that students work with community partners. Examples of community partners suggested by the Haas Center are the Catholic Action for Street Children in Accra, Ghana and The Center for Human Rights in the University of Pretoria, South Africa. When I spoke with Nick Cheng, the Leadership Programs Assistant at the Haas Center, he emphasized for me that the value of a community partner was to ensure that you understood people’s needs rather than waltzing in with your own preconceptions of what would help the community. For instance, he told me that many student groups from Stanford conduct service projects in East Palo Alto high schools. If you attempt to start your own program, you should learn what programs already exist. Otherwise, you might duplicate existing programs. Furthermore, this could saturate the high schools with too many programs that end up interfering with each other.
In addition to the Haas Center programs, there are study abroad opportunities. Two of my friends are studying in South Africa this quarter. One of them is keeping a blog and sharing his experiences with students back at Stanford (http://listeningtosa.blogspot.com/). He discusses how he gained cultural understanding through his time in South Africa.
Another way to participate in service is through design programs. In these programs, students design products or technologies that are useful for people in developing countries. For instance, the Stanford Design School has a masters-level class called Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability in which students design affordable products to help people who are living in poverty. Students used methods they learned in the class to produce the d.light, an LED light that helped replace unhealthy kerosine lighting. Here is a quote from someone who took the class: “We traveled to SE Asia and spent weeks meeting with families, taking pictures, and listening to stories. And more stories. And more stories.” This illustrates how the people in this design project made the effort to acquire a deep contextual understanding as they developed the d.light product. (http://www.socialedge.org/blogs/let-there-d-light/archive/2007/08/21/d-light-design-is-born).
The service opportunities at Stanford reflect the range of opportunities available for undergraduates. As students prepare themselves for careers in service, they must take advantage of these opportunities to gain a deep understanding of the people they are going to serve.