DiReCT SeRViCe

HuMaNiZiNG DiReCT SeRViCe

Direct Service: Working to address the immediate needs of individuals or a community, often involving contact with the people or places being served.

There is a tendency to think of direct service and volunteer work as inherently good, and as work that automatically reflects the goodness of those who participate. It is work done during one’s free time, out of the goodness of their hearts, and for no money. While that may be true, there must be a more nuanced understanding of direct service and the actual impact it makes upon a community for this pathway to reach its potential within a fully humanized field of social impact. Often, those who engage in volunteer work are underqualified, untrained, and unaware of the historical and social contexts of the social problem being addressed, the community being served, and the organization facilitating. The current status quo leaves little space for critique of organizations, or investigative research to determine whether their social impact and community-facing philosophies

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and methodologies are effective, sustainable, and ethical. However, such critique is absolutely necessary in order to build relationships of trust and to engage with vulnerable communities in a dignified manner. No amount of community harm should be tolerable simply because those perpetuating it were intending to help.

Direct service is a good entry point into social impact work because it is actionable and accessible. In order to humanize direct service, participants must seek a candid and thorough understanding of the ethical implications of involving themselves in communities that they may or may not belong to with the express purpose of altering them in some way. There also needs to be frank acknowledgement of the structural and systemic inequities as well as the historical and socioeconomic contexts that leave some communities needing more or different interventions than others. Additionally, direct service dehumanizes when it is approached with a savior mentality, due to the inherent power imbalance that comes with intending to save someone who is in a comparative position of disadvantage due to systems that advantage the “savior.” Humanizing direct service looks like listening to community members with lived experience and close proximity to a social problem, and respecting how they are already engaged with the issue and implementing interventions to help reduce harm and support their own communities. Alignment and collaboration with those who have lived experience should involve relationship building as well as being accountable to those relationships. When we center the humanity of the people we work with and for, we can restructure our understanding of and interaction with the world. For example, Indigenous relationality theory often refuses hierarchies. There can be no relational saviors, only co-equal designers of better systems. When we commit to relationality, we commit to prioritizing trust, empathy, and humility.

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An example of this type of intentional relationality can be found in the Food Justice Coalition based in Salt Lake City. The Food Justice Coalition (FJC) is committed to the dignified and equitable distribution of healthy plant-based meals to the unhoused population in Salt Lake County. Rather than hosting food donation drives and collecting the generally unwanted and unhealthy food items from people who miscalculated at the grocery store, FJC is not only feeding unhoused people healthy foods, but also educating the public on how to improve their own nutritional health in a cost-effective way. FJC demonstrates compassionate relationality by immersing themselves in the community they are helping. They work in proximity to and with unhoused folks, treating them with dignity and respect, which is especially important for the unhoused population as their humanity is often stripped away when people refuse to make eye contact or interact with them in any meaningful way. They maintain humanity for the unhoused by recognizing that distributing the rest of society’s rejected food is not adequate; rather, unhoused individuals deserve high-quality, healthy food in the same way any other human does. By building trust, forming committed and empathetic relationships, and seeing others as whole and deserving human beings, we can engage in direct service that is effective and humanizing. Direct service will function as a powerful entryway to other forms of social impact and as the needed immediate relief that precedes deeper systemic change as it is practiced in a way that promotes relationality and humanization.