The University of Delaware Washington Fellows: One Big Happy Family (Drawing courtesy of Katelyn Hosey)
The day kicked off with a return visit to the disability services center Easter Seals for a site visit and to learn more about the effectiveness and challenges of volunteerism within civic organisations.
The discussions with Easter Seals staff highlighted the strong culture in the USA of volunteerism, where helping out where you live, go to school, or pray is almost expected, while still reflecting on the challenges of implementing an effective volunteership program within an organization.
Some of the volunteering challenges faced by the fellows that were discussed:
- How to get volunteers to stay around for longer and continue to be engaged?
- How to create meaningful work for volunteers?
- How to attract volunteers?
- How to get people to work with people with disabilities?
Easter Seals shared some practical insights into how they overcome these challenges, mainly:
- Changing the language around the word “volunteer” as there is some negative connotations around the word, so rather using “internship program,” “pro-bono work,” etc.
- Creating a volunteerism schedule that provides a confined and defined amount of time.
- Creating an opportunity for volunteers to be involved on a routine and regular basis (instead of infrequently and randomly).
- Aligning the work of the volunteer with their skill-set.
- Agreeing on expectations upfront (as an example, Easter Seals creates the expectation upfront of 50 hours minimum per volunteer).
After the discussion, fellows were given a tour of the various programs offered by Easter Seals, such as their child care, adult therapy and adult day care programs. The tour highlighted the professionalism and vast extent of services that Easter Seals provides to people with disabilities and their respective caregivers. For example, the child care service is made up of fifty on-staff child care therapists who travel out to people’s homes and reach over 1,800 children. Within the center, parents can bring their children to interact in a “play day” where they work with a speech pathologist, occupational therapist, physical therapist, and early childhood educator to determine if the child has any early developmental needs.
A brief discussion with Darara, a Fellow from Ethiopia, highlighted how far many of our countries have to go to be able to provide an even remotely comparable life to people with disabilities, with even “simple” things like wheelchair access not existing, never mind world class day care facilities.
After Easter Seals, we had a powerful lecture by Dr. Yassar Arafat Payne on the Participatory Action Research (PAR) that he did attempting to answer the question “To what extent does available economic and educational opportunity predict physical violence?”
His research challenged many of the “accepted” beliefs that society holds on people who live in low-income communities, or what he called “the streets.”
Beliefs like:
- People who live on the streets have low self-esteem.
- People who live on the streets are unhappy.
- People who live on the streets don’t care about their community.
- The majority of people who live on the streets are violent and perpetuators of crime.
The results of his research showed how these beliefs don’t hold true. The results showed that low income black youth have some of the highest self esteem in the population, believe that they are useful to be around, and feel a responsibility towards their community (despite many of the respondents being involved in crime). His research also highlighted a strong correlation showing that as economic well being is improving, violence goes down.
He also spent some time highlighting the positive impact being involved in PAR had on the researchers themselves, with many moving on from being involved in crime to receiving university scholarships, becoming published authors, and almost all giving back to their community, proving how effective a technique like PAR can be in better understanding the context of a problem you’re trying to solve and empowering the community members themselves to try and solve it.
In-between all the learning, one of our Fellows, Jordan from Cote D’ivoire, went on his own adventure to get a Q-tip removed from his ear. Who knew cleaning your ears could be so risky?!
To celebrate Jordan’s triumphant recovery, we concluded our day with some “good ‘ol” Boston Market chicken, concluding another exciting and action-filled Washington Fellowship day!
