As commented on my previous entries, the Alzheimer's Foundation is leading the food-item collection/drive in the whole school to encourage people to bring their respective designated food items per grade level in order to support the free lunch provision to the patients at the day-care center.
This is the second week of the collection campaign and it has really made me think very thoroughly and reflect on what service, donations and raising awareness are actually about. Perhaps because I am a leader of a student-run community service group and have gained so many expectations, privileges as well as responsibilities, over the past few months, especially during this semester, I spent a significant amount of time inquiring about and reflecting on our motive and work.
OSC promotes a lot of service spirit around the whole campus and befittingly, we have various kinds of service activities, projects and campaigns such as the Alzheimer's food collection in order to help the less fortunate ones in the local community. Befittingly, we spend much time raising awareness and announcing especially during morning assemblies about our different programs, such as the food-drive, raffle tickets, donations and so many other creative projects. However, there was something bothering me deep inside me as well. A lot of donation campaigns promote 'prizes', such as pizza parties and points systems etc to award those who earned most points or brought in largest number of items. This is only a personal opinion which I wanted to express, reflect and evaluate as part of my reflection blog as this is part of my personal development. Do we donate because we honestly want to or do we donate because we gain something from that in exchange? Do we donate because it makes us look good or because we are surrounded by a some sort of competitive spirit and donating some small things may mean spending a little but can make our homeroom win a pizza party?
It was the first time when Harini and I in this project organized a food-item collection and we had to be risk-takers in order to plan and initiate our ideas. We communicated openly with each other about our opinions and thoughts on donations. We spent a significant amount of time expressing our opinions and goals as to what we hope to achieve in this project. We both shared a common view that donations should be made out of a pure motive and giving some prizes in return of those donations may exploit the purpose of a donation. I feel extremely privileged to work with such a person who shares the common viewpoint. However, when we made presentations and announcements during assemblies, I felt 'small' for a while because we had nothing to offer in return, unlike many of other service groups. It certainly helped to raise their awareness on the disease called Alzheimer's Disease and that a new daycare center was recently opened where meals are provided and we could all support them by donating some food items. BUT, I didn't tell them that pizza is also part of it, because it simply isn't.
This is where I think that we need to 'think', explore and reflect on the concept of 'service', 'donations' and 'caring'. It seems to me that sometimes we are exploiting these words, whether knowingly or unknowingly, such as caring and showing sympathy, based on our awareness of the environment, that we actually forget the whole purpose or the meaning behind these words.
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