Snapshot #3: Be the change you want to see

What was the most significant event or experience in your CSL placement? Refer to “Specifying the Scholarship of Engagement” and identify how this event or experience fulfills or illustrates one or two of the listed objectives.

 

The most significant experience in my CSL placement was actually the work I did for my final project proposal. While I understand that the work wasn’t done as part of my actual BMHC placement, I found myself more excited and passionate about the work I was doing for the final project more than I was for the work I was doing at the BMHC. My final project proposal, which was for the creation of a comprehensive support services and organizations guidebook for BMHC clients, is something that was developed out my experience at the BMCH. In hindsight, I wish I was able to initiate the proposal sooner and incorporate it into my placement. I was however, able to spend the last couple weeks of my placement at the BMHC speaking to Bavie as well as the clients about the proposal.

I once made the comment in class that I believed that in order for students to truly get the most out of a volunteer opportunity such as the ones students were involved with in CSL, they must be engaged in something that really speaks to them. It’s not necessarily something that students should be interested in beforehand, but it is something that at the end of the day a student shows grows and an increased interest in. Because of the nature of my placement and role developing a blog, I was not able to explore opportunities within the BMHC as much as I would have liked to. Producing the blog was something that really didn’t require involving myself with the clients of the center and therefore created a disconnect between me and the BMHC. I felt like I wasn’t fully participating in the experience because up until the Women’s Group, I had no interaction with clients. Even when it came time to participating in the Women’s Group, I wasn’t able to engage in ways that I was expecting to coming into the placement. It wasn’t until I started developing my proposal that I really found ‘my calling’. It was this experience that allowed me to engage with clients the way I had initially wanted to and actually do something I was interested in and found productive. I knew this project was something I was really interested in because I actually got excited about it, something I can’t necessarily say about some of my other experiences.

One of the main things coming into the placement that I was really looking forward to was doing community based research. I wanted to engage with clients in a way where I would be able to produce knowledge or develop some kind of understanding of commonalties between their experiences or issues. Not to make it sound like I wanted to turn my placement into a science experience and treat the clients like my test subjects; but my overall objective for the placement was to able to develop research skills.

By working on my proposal, I was able to develop some of the research skills referred to in “Specifying the Scholarship of Engagement” that I was looking forward to working on from the start. Unfortunately, my role in developing the blog did not allow me to develop research skills and relied on social media skills I had already developed. I was looking to find opportunities to do surveys, ask clients specific set questions, and use that data to actually produce something. Perhaps I was subconsciously drawn into developing a project that would require the utilization of these skills. I believe that allowing myself to develop this passion will help in future endeavors in this area.

The picture I chose for my snapshot is a quote I found in the office of one of the BMHC councillors that I feel really speaks to my situation. “Nothing changes if nothing changes”. I’ll admit, the first half of my placement really didn’t create a change in me or drive any sort of passion. I enjoyed my going to the BMHC when I did, but because I wasn’t engaging with the clients or working on any sort of project, my experience was a bit different. It was upon the development of the guidebook that things really started to change and I began to perceive the placement differently. Something had to change in order for me to change. And this change was me pursuing my true interests and working with clients in a way that I had initially wanted to. I think this quote is also relatable to the concept I previously mentioned about students engaging in something that really drives them. By developing or realizing a passion or interest initiate change in a person. Simply doing a task for the sake of doing it out of a requirement does automatically result in there being a change. A student working in a homeless shelter does not automatically translate into that student developing a passion or interest in something relatable to that area. In a way Dunlap’s concepts of assimilation and accommodation could be drawn into this discussion if you toned down the extremism of the concepts. I also think that this quote and the concept I’m talking about can even be connected back to the different types of citizenship we discussed in class. Perhaps true interest and enthusiasm can be the defining point in turning a responsible citizen into a justice-oriented one?