Psychology major

Social Service 101: Listen and Learn

Out of all the community service projects I did at Eckerd, it was a spring break service trip to Chicago that had the most impact on my life. During that week we visited and helped several agencies, which included everything from a homeless shelter, to a hospital, to a refugee center. One of the most memorable parts of this trip was talking to the people at each agency and learning their stories. I know that I had done this many times before during other projects, but perhaps I had never talked to such a range of people in such a short time before. We heard from men who had belonged to gangs, those without shelter, and parents with terminally ill children, among others. Those stories were the best way to put a face to the somewhat vague idea of "social service" that is talked about so often. For me, this experience illustrated for the first time that social service is not about charity or "hand outs". It is not about helping the "needy", because "needy" implies a judgment that these individuals have fallen drastically short of someone else’s standard. The term seems more than a little derogatory, and represents an image that often forms in the minds of people when they hear of "social service". This work is simply about caring for human beings, and the experience in Chicago taught me that every person who receives help, also has help (perhaps in the form of knowledge) to return.

This experience also gave me my first glimpse into the world of social work, which would become my future career. It was several years later before that glimpse would lead me to Washington University in St. Louis for a Masters of social work (MSW). Entering my second year in this program, I work on a Suicide and Crisis hotline. Work on the hotline is building on one of the most fundamental lessons for this career, a lesson that started in Chicago: Before doing anything, listen and give the clients space to be who they are. Sometimes, this is powerful enough that they need nothing else. Sometimes it is not. In either case, any action intended to help will be misguided if the social worker does not fully hear the client. It sounds so simple (and it is) that it is almost cliché, but the simplest things can be the easiest to overlook.