#compassionboom

In the moment, I genuinely enjoyed myself and the service opportunities available during our High Holiday campaign. Fellows organized a total of seven separate service projects during the three-week campaign. Alongside the volunteers that came out, we spent time reducing food waste with 412 Food Rescue, gardening at a handful of local community gardens with the East End Garden Group, canvassing with the local advocacy group, Just Harvest, and cooking meals for East Liberty’s Circles group. In hindsight though, I’m wondering about the effectiveness of our good deeds.

At the time of the campaign, everything was still so new to me: the city, the “job”, the people, the experiences. I had finally escaped the monotony of my life as a waitress in the upper Mid-West and was ready to be a part of something bigger than myself as a new 2015-2016 Fellow of Repair the World: Pittsburgh. The bliss of this honeymoon stage elevated me to a new kind of high, yet simultaneously blinded me from the realities of my actions. Here I was, an utter stranger to Pittsburgh and its East End, patting myself on the back after a few hours of volunteering, thinking that I was on my way towards making a real impact.  

Now as I take a step back and reflect on the actual experiences of our High Holiday campaign, I am left wading through a puddle of confusion. Where I would have previously applauded and encouraged these types of service opportunities, today I’m not so sure who or how it actually helped.

Our service opportunities were a fine example of “one-and-done” volunteering, and I am currently straining to see the ripple-effects, if any, of our work. I see this as a type of campaign model that does not align with the mission of our organization. National offices, please correct me if I’m wrong. Not once did I see a recurring face during our High Holiday campaign, but instead a random group of do-gooders who happened to have some spare time on that given day. To me, that says our projects left the volunteers feeling fulfilled enough to get them through a few more months of going about their normal lives until the guilt of privilege starts to set in again.

Going deeper, this indicates to me that our compassionate volunteers evaluated their actions by the personal reward received through their service, rather than the benefits received by the people being served. I see this as a failure on my part to make the volunteerism a meaningful experience. With that though, I’m also left questioning who actually benefitted from the campaign’s services.

Not a single Garfield resident took part at any of our volunteer days at Garfield Community Farm. Why was a community farm being maintained and manicured by a group of volunteers who live, work, and play outside of that exact community? Wasn’t that simply encouraging dependency? By doing for the Garfield residents what they themselves are capable of in the first place, were we simply destroying their personal initiative? I surely don’t want to contribute to the disempowerment of anyone. So is there a possibility that we were hurting more than we were helping?

As I’m making an effort to reconcile my cognitive dissonance between the purpose and effect of our volunteerism, I’m also questioning the feasibility of making an impact in a new community within just a year. Despite the mass efforts of time and energy put into making the High Holiday campaign what it was, I have to ask myself if the campaign truly served any of the needs of our community. Were we Fellows actively listening to our neighbors’ needs? And with that, why am I so quick to assume that our new neighbors would trust us enough to disclose their realities after just a few weeks of us living here? Hadn’t they seen the previous years’ cohorts excitedly swoop in for a year, only to leave once the fellowship was up, even if the community’s needs were never met? What makes our group any different or more trustworthy?  

I don’t expect my questions to be answered right away, but I do expect my curiosity to compel me to work towards creating a dependency-free East Liberty. Although the High Holiday campaign failed to specifically speak to the mission of Repair the World, it gave us the opportunity to be genuinely intentional in the future with our actions. I hope to get to a place in the future where neighbors and Fellows are all sharing ideas, and where Pittsburgh Fellows are working alongside the community we are apart of.

In the end, I consider the High Holiday campaign a success overall because its effects were the catalyst that sparked my critical thinking.

Written by Annie Dunn, a food justice fellow of Repair the World: Pittsburgh.