I really do love community service, but to me, there is nothing more powerful than pairing education with community service. So, most people call that "service-learning" and that's a good name, but I like to emphasize the LEARNING aspect.
The service is good--it is a critical component of the entire equation. But I can tell you right now that it's the educational value that really makes it 'magical.' While I'm not enrolled in any school right now (unless a GRE class counts), I feel like I'm still in school. The OFBCI School of Hard Nonprofit Knocks, if you will (patent pending on that name). I feel like I've learned so much more about nonprofits, community organizing, poverty, leadership, and social change in the 3 months I've been on the job than I did in the 4 years proceeding.
This is, in no way, downplaying the excellent education I received at Indiana. No doubt those skills and knowledge I picked up were the foundation for my success now. But this is just saying that there's no way to learn about capacity building quite like...actual capacity building. And the people I work with are so knowledgeable.
But this is just the way humans learn--we don't learn in classrooms, we don't learn according to current GRE metrics, we don't learn in a book or a room. We learn with our hands, our feet, and our hearts. We learn after talking with people. I've learned more about what I want to do with my life in the past few months than in the rest of my entire life! There's so much out there, and I think that immersion in this world has made a big difference.
(This was a NO FRILLS post. Cooooool.)
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