Under my umbrell(uh?)

Amongst the balloons, bouncy castles, food trucks and WXDU DJs at the Duke Partnership for Service’s block party Sept. 10 were the service organizations that have given our University a reputation for community engagement, innovative endeavors and passionate activism. The newcomer on the block is Duke Partnership for Service. In only its second year on campus, the organization is finalizing its application for funding and recruiting a diverse staff of students dedicated to streamlining the concept of “service.” It is also building a house on Central Campus with space for group use. A lot of things that dPS has done and plans on doing are cool (and I will talk about those in a moment). However, I also want to talk about the inherent dangers in creating an all-encompassing umbrella. These potentially far-reaching issues result from the umbrella’s undue influence on access to resources.

dPS’s greatest strength lies in its ability to reduce redundancies in member organizations. Duke has tons of resources, and if we’re not effectively harnessing those resources we’re not serving the community in which we live. So if there are 10 groups that specialize in tutoring in Durham schools, dPS can make a recommendation to consolidate. dPS President Becky Agostino explained this role as, “working with students who have ideas and helping to connect them with existing groups.” Indeed, she noted that “a lot of schools just have too many college students running around, and so this makes life easier for our partners... it’s healthier if we consolidate.”

Moving on from this Great Leap Forward, I think that people have different conceptions of service... and I hope this works with the dPS model.

Advocacy is great when you want to procure more funding for like-minded groups. So dPS is good, in the eyes of the powers-that-be, because it possesses the relationships necessary to make recommendations (using a numbers system) for funding. Hooray for funding service groups! Maybe I’m just prone to conspiracy, but dPS’s future success depends on member organizations utilizing its resources and achieving tangible results.

Although Agostino emphasized that dPS will provide what groups need and has the burden of publicizing what it can do, I see a conflict of interest. dPS staff members can best familiarize themselves with service groups that utilize the new house on Central. Therefore, the staff will be more likely to make positive recommendations. This sense of camaraderie and snuggliness could likely result in interpersonal dilemmas all too common to Duke. In the future, a group that prefers to work out of a dorm room or prof’s office or apartment may be at a disadvantage. How does DSG or the Student Organization Finance Committee hold the Umbrella accountable if, as Agostino argues, “all of us do service and so we know the problems that service groups face”?

The issue of whether dPS should endorse a candidate in DSG presidential races is also a point of contention. Agostino’s rationale for their endorsement last year of current DSG President Mike Lefevre is that “we focused our endorsement on the impact that leader would have on service, so we weren’t looking at the leaders as a whole.” Instead, they represented the service community by “asking who’s going to promote the things that we’re working on campus.”

What concerns me is that, as a brand new organization, dPS was endorsing with a mandate that hadn’t been established by elections and with only a year’s worth of experience representing service groups. As a facilitator of service, dPS should stay away from becoming politicized. Think about Duke University Union arguing that it should have the right to endorse based on who would best understand entertainment needs (SNARKY COMMENT HERE).

In blast e-mails, dPS is advertising “Scholar Affiliate” positions. These positions entail potentially infinite degrees of liaising. In an Inception-esque fashion, to get back to the service happening on the first level one has to liaise to the scholars groups who liaise amongst themselves, liaising back to dPS, which then can liaise between scholars groups. All of this “liaising” will amount to simply e-mailing back and forth. And the “Outreach Staff,” which will “interface with student-led social action groups,” fills the apparent demand for a middle-man between the people who do service and the people on Exec who ultimately advocate for groups and their funding.