Service Trip Response

How can service and movements for social change support and inform one another? Are there ways that service and activism are fundamentally different or opposed? (Please note: Dajanne participated on the"food justice" service trip option in Sacramento and Davis, California.) 

Social movements, to me, mean people that come together with a common ideology who try to achieve certain general goals, while service means work done by a group or one person that benefits another. With those definitions in mind, they are connected because they both consist of a person or group of people getting work done to either achieve a goal or benefit people/ a person. 

The "food justice" trip consisted of a lot of service in addition to elements of social movements. We did a lot of weeding, gleaning, and distributing food for Soil Born Farms and Harvest Sacramento. Soil Born’s vision is to practice and teach sustainable agriculture within the city of Sacramento, because they care about the environment and want to help raise awareness to people so that they too can help the environment and food and nutrition access. 

While I was on my service trip, I realized that service projects can be a form of social movement or social action. The reason I say this is because while we were gleaning trees, we were not only benefiting the people that were donating the fruit, we were also helping those that really needed the fruit in terms of needing healthy meals. I realized this on the third day, which was Thursday, of the service trip when I saw that oranges we had picked being given away, for free, to low income and homeless people. This picture was sad but enlightening. Sad because I too come from a low-income household and I know what half the people were going through and I feel as though we should not have to go through those things. Enlightening because I contributed hard work and time to pick the fruit that was being distributed, not knowing that it was for a good cause such as this one.

Although this experience wasn't new for me, because I've done work like this before just not in the same context, it was still a wonderful one. I enjoyed all the tasks we did. 

Activism to me is a course of direct and aggressive action to achieve a political or social goal. With that said, service and activism can be fundamentally different but also the same in many ways. Different because service consists of a smaller scale of work done to help out people. While with activism, it helps on a much larger scale. They're the same, because they both tend to educate while helping out. I feel as though service projects can be a form of activism. Activism can start out on a much smaller scale, such as service, then go to a bigger scale like creating social movements.