Impressions
color in elite, selective environments where identity and service can collide in painful ways. I have been fortunate enough to work with service learning, community service, and activism in independent school settings and often have wondered what it means for me to be doing this work as a Latino and person of color. There is a certain feeling of trepidation and hesitation as I lead groups of mostly white students and faculty to “impoverished” areas, where inevitably, issues of race, privilege, class, geography, and gender form a dangerous undercurrent that is often felt but ignored. Here we run a risk, and it must be a calculated one: There is an explosive danger in simply assuming that all service is good, that we can simply rely on good intentions to serve the “other.” I believe our responsibility is actually to bring forth difficult, uncomfortable questions around identity through service-learning pedagogy. We can and should demand more of our students, faculty, and institutions by using critical service learning as a vehicle and tool for discussion and confrontation of not only the visible causes, but also the underlying foundations of poverty, exclusion, silence, and marginalization of communities, especially those in our institutional ecosystem. This is deeply personal work. Whether we are students engaged in service, faculty leading classes into the field, or administrators shaping the mission of our institutions, we do this work with both our heads and our hearts. Our identities collide with our responsibilities as we look across and see “clients” that may look, sound, or live like us, like the neighborhoods we grew up in and “escaped.” We are confronted with the harsh reality that we have gained elite status and yet still remain outside, on the periphery. I posit that in order to break through not only the questions around identity intersection but also the questions around power 16