Focusing Columbia Community Outreach

This Saturday, Columbia students committed to a day of service and positive engagement under the auspices of Columbia Community Outreach. Unfortunately, many students spent more time in transit than they did actually taking part in the service, and still more time trying to figure out whether their activities actually constituted the meaningful work they had spent hours trying to get to. To be sure, there is something to be said for sending students to parts of the city—the farthest reaches of Staten Island and Coney Island, for instance—where they may never have gone otherwise. These locations are part of New York, and we would be remiss not to acknowledge that they are worthy of service. Similarly, there is something to be said for alternative types of service projects. There is also surely a valuable lesson to be learned from working on service projects, and a project’s size should not determine its worth. And yes, CCO should work to empower Columbia students, and ideally, its participants will feel good about themselves by the day’s end. However, the people who worked so hard to organize CCO should take the time to reflect on what participants felt went wrong this year in order to improve upon the experience in the years to come.

Sending people two or three hours away from campus wastes their time and energy—those are four to six hours that could have been spent on service, which is particularly frustrating when one considers that some of the projects seemed to have been designed simply so that students had something to do. Even some who were closer to campus felt this frustration—one group appeared at a woman’s apartment only to find that its resident did not know what day to expect them. And while the experience of shoveling sand that seemed to have been dumped in the park specifically so that it could be shoveled (as one irate Columbia Journalism School alumnus described in an email sent to CCO) was only one experience out of many, that this was even a project at all speaks to the confusion and disorganization that dilutes the positive potential of CCO.

The CCO coordinators now have a full year to plan their next annual day of service. Perhaps the speeches delivered by deans Michele Moody-Adams and Kevin Shollenberger, exalting CCO as leading students out of the “ivory tower,” would ring truer if student groups’ efforts were consolidated into larger, more meaningful service projects. This would avoid the confusion associated with sending 100 different groups out in as many different directions as possible at the beginning of the day, and would eliminate at least some of the frustration as well as the diminished productivity and positivity by its conclusion. The most important part of doing good is showing up. But if it takes three hours and multiple subways rides to do so (and if one questions one’s purpose upon arrival), it’s time to re-evaluate how to make good better.