Theme 1 – Goals and Motivations of Madison Community Organizations

Shannon Bell and Rebecca Carlson

Rough Draft

What goals and motivations do our community organizations bring to service learning? In considering a service learning project, community organizations focus on four main themes: how service learners compare to volunteers, the costs and benefits of using their own resources to educate the student, what services they can expect from the student, and what other benefits the relationship may bring.

Service Learners vs. Volunteers

Sixteen of the organizations defined the work that service learners do as the same or similar to their volunteers, even when they are given the option to do different and more advanced work. 1Service learners are an essential source of volunteers for some of these organizations’ activities:

We could not do all of the things we need to do without volunteers and students are our primary volunteer base.

Where course goals are a larger part of the service learning expectations, students participate more in the general administrative functions, in terms of working with directors, attending staff meetings.

I think one of the things that tends to be different is often they have some type of learning objectives, contract or agreement that we talk about at the beginning… about exactly what type of things they are going to do and what they are going to learn and there is often some mid-point check in and in the end there is often some reflection on their part.

An organization would involve a student in higher level work if the student was committing a larger amount of time to the organization. Most service learners in this category were involved in specialized projects such as doing “a lot of analyses, research, help[ing] write narrative reports, [and] qualitative and quantitative reports” or to “mostly attend meetings and observe the process and the board of directors.” Work study students or interns, in particular were “placed in a more employee type role, and [should] have more responsibility” than a volunteer.

1 Almost all of these sixteen organizations are involved in direct service, such as teaching children; however, in two of the cases the organizations volunteers do a diverse range of activities unrelated to direct service. A final way that organization representatives distinguish service learners from volunteers is that they see the relationship as serving the needs not just of the organization but the student also:

I do think that service learning programs differ from volunteering in that volunteering is more task-oriented. Service learning programs seem to be more of collaboration between the students and the organization.

Educating the service learner

Many community organizations that were interviewed claimed that part of their motivation to host service learners was to teach them something. On occasion, that ”something” was either left undefined or defined through a generalized knowledge base, such as “I want them to be able to walk away with gaining some sort of skill from us.”

Other organization representatives were more specific regarding what they wanted to teach service learning students. One group of organizations wanted to teach students about the organization, including getting the student enthused about the mission behind the agency itself:

[W]e were able to get students excited about the work that we were doing, sort of spread the word in whatever way you can spread the word, you know? I think that’s a really great thing.

We benefit in a lot of ways. Like I said, the interaction, just having kids get exposure to different people. We benefit because [the service learners] take the good word out about [the organization]… you can’t pay for that kind of good word, you know.

As an agency we are very committed to education. Not only are we committed to the work we do…but there’s a large opportunity to educate, not only the patients and families and the community we work with but those people who hopefully will go out and do that sort of work.

Outreach is typically a huge part of a community organization’s program, and many see service learning as a key component of that outreach process. Some supervisors will go to volunteer fairs or out to classrooms in the higher learning institutions to recruit service learning students as well as promote their organization’s work:

We are trying to get our staff to do more outreach, because they can pitch and educate people more about their programs than I can. And they have the time to focus more on a certain class or professor at the schools and they have had better luck that way. [Students can be] our best advertiser—that’s the key thing…The real value is exposing those students to new ideas—getting them off campus.

Our outcomes would be to have another advocate for what is the work that we do, that is in the public…That is one of the goals we have, we describe it as building a fan-club, building a fan club-base that understands and promotes our work.

There is also a real motivation to teach service learners about a cause in its community context—getting students out of the classroom and away from textbooks to see the real world of specific social/environmental/economic/educational issues:

I believe it helps [the service learning students] put a face to the disease, in working with clients. I believe, part of our mission of course is education and prevention, and by virtue of being around all this and going through the trainings and the orientation, they learn more about [the organization’s cause].

I’m not interested in just having someone do some mundane task just because they’re here. I want them to walk out of the experience being somewhat changed by it.

What you have is an undergraduate student who needs to be introduced to a population or an issue, and they’re not going to have this kind of investment and time…I think just hanging out here in this agency in the building and spending time is eye-opening.

A large number of the organizations, 27, expressed a motivation to teach the service learner about what it takes to work and do projects in community organizations. One issue raised is that students have very little exposure to the non-profit world in academia and service learning provides that avenue:

[O]ne of the reasons why I am so supportive of service learning programs [is] because they expose students to non-profit organizations beyond just volunteering, but get the students to think that this could actually be a career path for me. A lot of students, especially at that age, want to do something good for the world, but then they get to the reality of looking for a job and they don’t know how to connect their skills and interests to the non-profit world. Non-profits are just not something they are exposed to as possible careers.

With the relationship we have right now the learning [service learning] is more of an observational process. If you [the student] are interested in how a grassroots statewide network functions and how it can function pretty well. It’s good to have the students come in and ask questions and observe that process. And then the service part is to just have them help with whatever is going on.

It’s a way to let someone see what your organization does and why it’s important but it’s also a really valuable experience for the student to be able to learn by doing and to be able to really be immersed in something and see how it works. I mean we can sit here and talk about how [this organization] works but you can only get a very limited idea of what actually happens here. So I can see how it’s really valuable for the students.

Another value in giving service learners a hands-on experience in community organizations was to provide the community with graduates who came out of their program with a community competency of sorts. In other words, it is a motivation of the organization to invest time in a student because that student might eventually be working in the nonprofit organization world:

But we are also doing it because we are wanting to further those programs as well. I want to personally make sure we have good social workers out there. I like supervising social work students and furthering my field. I think that the other direct service staff feel the same way when they get students in from their field.

Part of the reason we obviously have student learners is that they are really useful to us, but a huge piece of it is also that if we are going to continue doing what we are doing we have got to train sort of the next generation of leaders who are going to do this. I think it is really important that we are finding those students who want to learn how to do this kind of stuff and teaching them and sort of nurturing them along so when they graduate they have options in this field. Three of the staff here were people I had personally worked with when they were students and when they graduated they came and started working here. So it is definitely, to me, the way to kind of make sure what we are doing is sustainable.

[J]ust because a service learner comes in here today and doesn't set the world on fire, doesn't mean that the information they gained, the education they gain here, doesn't change them dramatically 10 years from now or 15 years from now. So in some sense we have to take a longer view of our role. Frankly, if we were going to look at what a service learner gives us, or gives to our clients, we would never do this. There's more to it than that…Because someone’s got to be doing this work twenty years from now…That’s why the longer view is really important when it comes to this. We kind of just immerse them in the fire…To me, the most valuable experiences are putting them into the situation because they are going to have to do that when they get out there…Sink or swim…

One hope of the organizations interviewed is that the service learning experience in the real world results in a win-win situation—where the organization benefits, the community benefits and the student benefits in the long term scheme of hosting a service learner:

It’s an opportunity for people to develop some work-related experience that may be useful to them, but then it also has a benefit for the non-profit organization ourselves, because we have limited resources, or to the people that we serve. So, it’s one of those things that benefits everyone involved, I think.

Serving the organization

An additional motivator of Madison community organizations for having service learners is that students can provide a service to the organization. Nearly everyone mentioned that the service a student provides to an organization is one of the essential goals of service learning. However, the service that students were expected to provide varied.

One of the service goals highlighted by organizations is that service learners should contribute to the organization by working with their clientele in various capacities. Almost all of the organizations that provide direct services mentioned that serving the clientele is one of their goals for service learning because their “…first and foremost priority is making sure someone gets served in the community…” and that “the direct service component is really important to understanding what [the organization is] doing.” Some direct service organizations used students serve their clientele to keep the ratio of staff-to-clientele lower, especially in many of the organizations that work with children. A handful of direct service organizations commented about the appeal of working with the clientele for the student because it has many benefits such as flexible scheduling and provides a closer relationship to the organization:

It also helps to make a stronger volunteer-to-program connection, volunteer-to-our [clientele] connection…You can tell that [they’re] really involved in the class and I think that helps to grow and give volunteer satisfaction…Versus having them come and say, ‘Well today we have this office project for you to do,’ if that’s not something they’re into.

I like to think that when I bring people into my program and into my clients’ lives that they have a meaningful role.

There was at least one direct service organization, however, who did not feel that their goal should be to have service learners work with their clientele because they provide a critical service that requires a lot of experience and training to their clientele and students working in that capacity is not a good fit for their organization.

Many organizations also have service learners do projects that the organization does not have the capacity or the skills to do. Eighteen of the sixty-seven organizations highlighted the contributions service learners have made to their organization ranging from an “intern taking on a big project the organization has always wanted to do” to working on websites and other projects that the organizations does not have the skills for noting, “students add new energy, new ideas, creativity; they keep [the organization] rolling forward with stuff.” Many of those eighteen organizations commented that “one of the things that [they] like about the service learning programs is that they tend to draw from different disciplines” and thus “college students come with a lot of great skills, a lot of different ways of looking at things” which the organization would otherwise lack:

The learning curve for us, this is something that we have no idea what to do or how to do it. We look to the students for some guidance, you know, you learn it, tell us. Rather than us learning it, because of that kind of time commitment.

Because you have that many people you also have that many brains, that many people with ideas, that many people with energy, with drive, with different backgrounds that can come in and say, ‘Did you ever think about doing this?’ We have done awesome things because students have come in and said, ‘I would like to try this,’ ‘I know about this, I know about that.’

Many of those eight organizations also highlighted the unique qualities that students bring to the organization compared to adult volunteers:

I think that the energy is just the moving force. The college volunteer, they have an energy and an outlook that is completely different from other volunteers. I think it’s something that’s contagious.

I think that’s why the college students are such a good fit for our program, they can relate better, they can establish a relationship in trust faster [referring to a relationship with their young clientele]. The college student has really been our key solution.

Some students have offered their own project and research ideas to the organization. A couple of organizations interviewed said that they preferred service learners who presented a relevant project idea to them because they would not have to expend the resources to create something for the service learner to do:

Where it has worked best is when a student comes in with a project or activity that really fits with what our organization is doing…things we’ve always wanted to do that a student wants to do for a class that brings stuff in that we haven’t had the capacity to do.

A couple of other organizations, however, commented that proposed projects worked less well if they fit the needs of the student better than the needs of the organization so “…making sure that we have meaningful projects that are going to satisfy both the volunteers’ or service learners’ requirements as well as do something really good for the organization” is important. One organization described a strategy to negotiate those different interests:

It was sort of an iterative process of, ‘Okay your project has to incorporate certain things for you. We’d like to get certain things done.’ You sort of iterate until you define something that’s good for everybody.

Academic motivations

Fourteen organization representatives spoke to the major underlying connection to the universities. This link to the higher learning institutions of Madison not only helps many of these organizations define service learning but is also a motivating factor to hosting service learners, anticipating that the relationship will lead to connections to professors, courses, and the latest research in the organization’s specific field.

Working with students sometimes helps create new links with faculty members and helps to just get our name out there too.

[The service learners are] able to bring some of the materials that they’re learning, more in terms of, ‘Oh, we just studied that in this course that I was taking and this is really been helpful’ or ‘I’m going to be taking this course next semester and this is giving me some perspective that’s really going to help in this next class.’ And I just love that kind of synchronicity of it all and I think that’s really important.

Personal motivations

Three interview participants highlighted their motivation for hosting service learning came from, or at least was influenced by, their personal experience as a service learner or a volunteer prior to their work in their community-based organization.

I had been a work study student myself in the past when I was getting my master’s degree I had several different work studies.…[S]o I learned, I had first hand experience of how great from the student’s perspective it can be to do that because you get to make contact and you get the professional experience. So I had that background.