When I was fourteen, I was made to go on a volunteering trip down to a local neighbourhood to pick up some trash. This event was part of a series of countless volunteering events which I’d faithfully completed in a bid to fulfil my secondary school’s CIP (Community Involvement Programme) hours. That title is long gone, of course, and has now been scrapped in-place of the Values-in-Action (VIA) programme.
At the end of our session, my teacher sat us down at the void deck and went through the painful routine of asking the standard debrief questions. What stood out to me was one question in particular: What did you learn today?
“I,” as in the focus was on me and my learning, and not on the beneficiaries involved?
It was confusing at the time, but the answers revealed themselves. People—including me, because I cannot spare myself from moral accountability—talked about the values we learned, and how we were reminded of our privilege by spending a few hours in ‘less fortunate’ circumstances.
It was quite curious that from that point onwards, I became more aware of this pattern that reproduced itself in numerous volunteering events. Generally speaking, Singapore’s volunteering culture deeply appeals to the individual’s ego. This can either mean that people perceive volunteering as something that reminds them of their fortunes, as an activity that value-adds to their portfolio, or as a commitment through which they can feel virtuous by having been part of a ‘greater’ cause. In my opinion, these views aren’t without reason, but they can become deeply problematic if allowed to mature without paying heed to their harmful possibilities. After all, it seems that in an attempt to cultivate altruistic values, Singapore’s volunteering culture has instead driven the focus towards individual ego and self-centred ‘virtue.’ Somehow, we’ve made volunteering, the very act of helping someone out of the goodness of our heart, self-serving.
Let’s get this straight: Volunteering is important
I want to first preface this with a disclaimer: Being in Social Work, volunteering is something I hold close to my heart, and something I’ve always esteemed. Volunteers provide precious resources, skills, and manpower for one of the most understaffed and burnt-out sectors of all time. As a whole, they provide a crucial foundation for the system of social work to continue the good work that it is doing, be it small or big.
I don’t find it problematic if your motivation to volunteer is because you seek fulfilment from it. Nothing in this world is a zero-sum game, and everyone needs a reason to continue doing the work that they do. As such, deriving self-gratification from volunteering is but one crucial way to ensure that the individual is motivated to stay on in the programme.
Heck, even when I volunteer today, my motivation to volunteer somewhat stems from the self-fulfilment I gain from it. After all, everyone likes to feel like they are a good person. Be it befriending older adults, working with kids on a weekly basis, or teaching free tuition, you can find me pledging to one cause or another, and committing between six months to three years.
What’s the problem?
It is okay to be motivated by self-fulfilment. However, when self-fulfilment starts to come at the expense of others, we should really take a step back and re-examine our volunteering culture.
Among its various issues, Singapore’s volunteering culture seems highly ego-driven. This is not the fault of individuals, but rather, the larger system. At this point in time, our volunteering system has become a mobius strip of self-spawning machinations that can frequently inflict more harm than good. I am no academic, but as the topic is rather complex, perhaps I will try to break it down.
- Using volunteering to develop individual values
In the first place, changing the title from CIP to VIA suggests that the focus has already shifted from bettering the “community,” to harnessing an individual’s “values.” Developing one’s values is all good and fine, but using less-privileged people, and then funnelling them through rote and often redundant programmes to ensure that the students can ‘benefit,’ seems awfully unethical and vulgar to me.
Thinking back to my experiences in educational institutions, I was often forced to do meaningless community clean-ups when the locality could have benefited more from other activities, such as rice donations, or house clean-ups for residents who struggled to maintain their daily activities as before.
Another frequently occurring (and still occurring) event is when my schools would hold food donation drives. More often than not, these drives have donated food like oatmeal—which not many Singaporeans eat, as Teo (2017) extensively writes here—or food that does not cater to individual diets. Here, I speak of persons who may be diabetic; which, according to a 2016 speech by Minister Gan Kim Yong, makes up 400,000 of Singapore’s population. With many food donation drives providing stale canned beans and unhealthy instant foods, we have to ask ourselves, do we really care about these people’s health and wellbeing or are we just participating for our conscience?
Simply put, in an effort to ensure that every student goes through these programmes to fulfil their hours and ostensibly achieve ‘moral development,’ the programmes become widely applicable and wide-ranging, to the detriment of the individuals they claim to help. Such structures fail to procure any pluses for beneficiaries, who have little choice but to be subject to such menial programmes.
Ironically enough, then, volunteering wasn’t made for the beneficiaries, but for the volunteers instead. And at the end of the day, one question remains: Why should I find the need to develop my values at the expense of another human being’s well-being?
- Just for the sake of it
During many volunteering events, my friends would often fool around and skive off from doing actual work. Oftentimes, it felt like I was forced to do compulsory group work even outside of school, which plainly sucked.
While I’m not absolving 14-year-old me from the need to be mature and serious about things that matter, a few constraints were that: 1) we were teenagers, and, a bigger problem: 2) we likely didn’t connect well enough with the programme to take it seriously.
Several extraneous factors seem to contribute to this disconnect. Time constraints are a given, especially as most sessions must be neatly boxed up into two or three hours. On top of this is the fact that several begrudging teachers have to bring us along to these volunteering trips (…even though they could be doing something else like marking papers). Worst of all is the unabridged gap between volunteers and beneficiaries. I’ve tried my best to dig up past memories, but I can’t recall many moments where I’ve met the beneficiaries of a programme I was in. In also accounting for cases where there is no concrete ‘beneficiary’ per se, such as in beach cleanup programmes, there is hardly any education done to share the impacts of volunteering, and the real meaning behind what we do. Most of the time, then, I was cleaning up for a phantom beneficiary, or I was collecting rice rations for a self-imagined beneficiary.
If anything, most of what I did at that age—unlike now—was going through the motions. Those hours were just another way of clocking numbers and getting things over and done with. I mean, our government loves statistical figures and numbers, and I confess that I do, too. Sadly, as our system solely counts volunteering by the hours, as opposed to impact, people have often seen volunteering as a numbers game. For many, we’re only doing this so that we can clock a few hundred hours and achieve an ‘A’ grade for our co-curriculars, which, in turn, allows us to dock two points off the grades from our national exams.
It is indefinitely hard to confront that fact, but these rote and mundane programmes do not achieve what they set out to do. Probably infused into the marrow of our extremely capitalist society, the numbers game has placed an emphasis on quantity over quality, and output over process. That being said, without going in with the intention to help, do we really find meaning in the work? That’s a really scary thought. Volunteering should be about connection, empathy, and more. We shouldn’t have to wait till the tertiary level of schooling to become aware of that.
- Appealing to self
On top of this, the appeal of volunteering programmes often leans into the fact that one can be seen as ‘virtuous’ in doing so. On Telegram, I often see posts from volunteering projects that stroke one’s ego, typically through catchphrases like, “do you have the heart to serve?,” or “strongly passionate about helping (blank)?”
Before tearing this down, I want to first assure you that sometimes, I too, fall for these ‘holier-than-thou mindsets,’ where I submit to the ‘oh-the-work-I-am-doing-is-so-good’ mindset. Well, sure. Suspending self-interest is impossible, and like what I said before, it’s okay to feel good. It’s only natural to do so. At the same time, while self-interest is an inevitable component of volunteering, it is distasteful to only do the work because you think you’re virtuous for doing so. In fact, that’s pretty self-centred. This can also lead us to lose sight of the very people we claim to help, and ignore target goals that don’t appeal to our egos.
To counter this, a personal practice of mine is to make an effort to understand that volunteering isn’t a black box, and that real people are being affected by my very actions. In turn, instead of only looking inward, we can perhaps make it a practice to directly ask participants if we can do better, and in what way we can do so!
It isn’t all bad
Nonetheless, volunteering at a younger age can encourage people to continue volunteering at older ages, and with more meaningful programmes as well! Observing the state of Singapore’s volunteering scene, it seems that volunteering has inspired the younger generations to further the work of past ages, and what’s more, to even lead them to carefully consider and produce better programmes that actually serve the community. I’ve seen many friends who go in with a heart to serve, and genuinely look more to the beneficiary’s needs than their own.
At the tertiary level, I also notice that a rather large fraction of groups is premised on strong empirical research and ground-up goals. This is good—great, actually! Still, we can do better. As previously mentioned, we shouldn’t have to wait till we reach the tertiary level to produce good volunteering work that has meaningful outcomes. If volunteering is going to remain at the primary- and secondary- levels—and even be mandated by the state—then it should be properly and meaningfully done.
There is no panacea to this, and we cannot expect the system to change overnight. And while it’s only natural that altruism is often endowed with self-serving intentions, this doesn’t mean that we cannot positively impact lives. In the coming years, I hope that we come to see a volunteering culture that’s less for ‘me,’ and more for the better.