The Status of Community Service, Past and Future.

During the time that I was working full time, I saw the benefit of connecting up with other organizations like mine. As the director of a Pastoral Counseling Center, I was in league with other social service agencies that shared a similar vision of providing needed services to the community at large. Like the counseling center, most of those agencies were non-profits, and serviced a particular area of local human need, such as mental health, or child and family health, or disability. Together we took care our local area.

The conjoint agency was called the Community Coordinating Council, and we met once a month to keep each other up to date. Then, once a year we had a banquet where the CCC officers for the year recognized somebody’s outstanding service to the community. We celebrated little increments of progress from our efforts and hard work.

I always thought it was ironic that what we all were doing on a daily basis year round was considered “community service”, a term that just happened to be used by the judicial system to indicate a level of punishment for some convicted man or woman. Those being punished were caught in criminal acts, but, for one reason or another, were not sent to jail. Rather they had to perform a menial duty to right the wrong they did. Often it was some task that no one else wanted to do.

What we in the CCC were doing was not usually menial, but was labeled with the same term that others did as punishment. How is it that the term, community service, gets attached to both activities? We were, as professionals, certainly not down on the social scale with offenders. But work that serves others and raises human dignity does not often get recognized in the same way that corporate work does. Our “shareholders” are often volunteer boards of directors. If we had a profit motive, we probably wouldn’t be so effective.

Whenever a school or prison shifts away from a service model, I am suspicious

I read recently that artificial intelligence and robotics will eventually, in the future, put more and more people out of work, permanently, so that the (income)tax base will shrink. No work; no income; no income tax. There will be little or no money for social services.

The same article suggested that people, who would otherwise be quite willing to work, would have to rely on economic assistance because there WERE NO jobs left for humans. The author suggested that in exchange for receiving financial assistance, people who could not be retrained for the few jobs that robots could not do, would be encouraged or required to do what he calls “service jobs of love”, nuanced activities, like accompanying someone to the doctor.

So, before the predicted era of this mass unemployment, there was this group of people who were already performing service jobs of love, known as social services. I was a part of that.  Except my colleagues and I were doing it for pay. That was when there was money for it, albeit on the low end of the pay scale. I hope, that amidst the major changes caused by artificial intelligence, there will still be a place for those educated in the social services, and that there will be public monies to pay them.