Disclaimer: This article represents the opinions of the writer and may not represent the beliefs held by Her Campus Nationals or Her Campus JHU.
PDOS = President’s Day of Service
Some Quick Facts:
- A singular day of community service in the fall semester (~10am-5pm)
- Hopkins volunteers “fan out” across Baltimore neighborhoods
- Just finished its 7th year as officially PDOS (originally started in 1997 as “Freshman Involved Day”… it’s as old as I am!)
- Between 1000-2000 volunteers participate
- Community service projects range from beautification to… well mostly beautification
- Volunteers receive a t-shirt, lunch, and a pizza party afterwards
PDOS works out like communism: in theory, it could work to increase interest and participation in service. In actuality, it’s a pretty band-aid over a wound.
To those that don’t know, Hopkins has a nasty history in Baltimore: we’ve evicted of Baltimoreans from their homes, stuck radium rods in people where they definitely don’t belong (without them knowing), refused pay raises, and so, so much more.
A bunch of college kids flooding into the city to cut down some weeds and other manual labor that classifies under “beautification” does nothing to mitigate the damages that Hopkins has dealt. If anything, PDOS enforces the “Hopkins Bubble” that symbolizes the ignorance and apathy to Baltimore that Hopkins discreetly champions (and the consequent rejection of Hopkins by Baltimore).
That’s not to say the student’s don’t want to help, learn, and engage with the Baltimore: students want to have a lasting impact while simultaneously supporting the community. PDOS is just completely ineffective at this.
Service is more than manual labor. It takes on different meanings for different people, but service ties in the context of the community (i.e. population, demographic, culture, socioeconomic level), along with the participation of the community (including their approval), to collaborate and learn from one another.
Reflection is incredibly important, and not at all stressed in PDOS. Reflection helps understand and recount everything that is learned, contextualize the role of the volunteer, and also understand the collaborators on a humanistic level.
So I asked Hopkins students:
Did you feel like you were impacting the community?
- “I only felt like we impacted the community when we cleaned out the storm drains on the street, because the street was flooding. Other than that, I think we were really just helping a woman with her gardening.”
- “No, I was unaware that I would be placed on a project that was a garden specifically used by people (mostly Hopkins faculty) that paid to use the garden. It is not made open to the public and seems to have very little impact on the community.”
- “No. I just pulled vines off of fences and we didn’t even pull the vines up by the roots, thus we didn’t actually address the “problem”.”
- “No I cleaned dirt and weeds an alley”
Out of those surveyed, ⅔ would participate again, but only ⅓ will be going back to the community to do service again.
Wondering their reasoning, I asked:
Why or why won’t you participate again?
- “I want to help the community, but what we did wasn’t impactful.”
- “I thought I was signing up for something that would have a real impact on the community of the city I have lived in my entire life, but I found instead that I was provided 2.5 hours of work to a Hopkins enterprise that was followed by my being invited to a 2 hour PDOS pizza party to pat ourselves on the back for our “commitment to Baltimore.””
- “The concept is good, but execution was poor.”
- “I don’t like pretending to help just to make the university look good. I want to actually make a difference in the comm[unity]”
Rather than fostering a better relationship with the surrounding community, PDOS gives students manual labor.
Clearly, PDOS misses the didactic aspect and reflective aspect of service. About 20% of those interviewed knew about contextualized service, whereas most others hadn’t even understood the concept.
Instead, PDOS is just an expensive publicity stunt where Hopkins brings sheer volume of people to weed-whack and garden the more affluent places spotted throughout the neighborhoods.
The JHMI shuttles stamped with PDOS pictures fly through Baltimore, celebrating the 0.1% of each year that Hopkins pretends they care about the community and stampedes through the neighborhoods wearing shirts proclaiming their affiliation.
Things PDOS can do much, much better:
- Educate the students on context of the community
- Create lasting relationships that can be revisited easily after the day of service
- Have recurring days of service
- Spend less money on t-shirts and lunch/dinner for volunteers
- Involve more organizations that move beyond beautification
- Disperse the groups on different days so that the logistical nightmare is mitigated
Other suggestions from those surveyed:
- Make more focused groups and have specific goals. Make an effort to encourage continued service after the fact to create a longer lasting impact.
- If there was a planned committee that figured out a big problem that could be addressed by a large amount of people.
- Decentralize it to campus community service groups to encourage people to join groups that perform repeated community service so people are encouraged to participate more than just this once.
- Smoother organization, opportunity to turn the service into extended projects
- My primary critique of PDOS is that it is only a 1 day event. Maybe it can be a “showcase” day that allows students to see different service projects. And then Hopkins chooses 4-6 sites where students go weekly to volunteer. For example, we can continue to work in a local farm pretty much year-round (depending on what the farms grow). And while the Boone Street Farm was my experience this year, I believe that this extended program can be applied to numerous other places. Plus, in doing so, Hopkins can truly show the residents that it’s making a commitment to improving Baltimore instead of putting on a 1 day show.
- Communicating in advance what type of work a volunteer will be required to do while participating in PDOS.
- More effort and resources should be focused on the elementary schools we are aligned with (the one that comes to mind is the one that circulated on fb last year with all the trash) and other long-term goals rather than on this one day of sporadic service.
- Don’t make all of those boxed lunches. Really. We are really capable of feeding ourselves beforehand. How much food was wasted? That’s a figure I’d really be interested in, especially knowing if it was donated to the homeless or not.
- PDOS is pointless because it takes time out of people’s day for something that is not going to have any impact at all. The amount of damage that the Hopkins business does to Baltimore can’t be fixed by a day of helping a few people out.
- Create an educational component and maybe minimize the “Celebrating because we helped our community for 3 whole hours” part.