What Is Service-learning?

If you were asked who benefits from the partnerships we've built with community organizations in Detroit, your immediate answer would probably be the communities that we partner with. While you would be right that these communities benefit from our partnership, the service we engage in often benefits the volunteer just as much. While volunteering, you’ll probably learn something about the community you're working with or something new about society as a whole. You may even learn something new about yourself.

This aspect of volunteering may feel abstract; it's usually subconscious and something we rarely think about, as our main focus is on community needs and how we can help fulfill them. However, if we take the time to consciously reflect on these experiences and integrate them with knowledge we have from academic study, we can learn a lot about society, the communities we work with, and how to volunteer in the most effective and compassionate way. We can use this newfound knowledge to do more impactful and effective work in later volunteer experiences and fuel further study. This quickly becomes a cycle; you volunteer, you reflect, you learn, you apply what you learned the next time you volunteer, you reflect again, and you learn more. We use the term 'service-learning' to describe this cycle that integrates academics and service; a term you’ve probably heard before if you’ve participated with DP or perused our website or social media.

Service-learning is a major part of DP’s mission, so we work hard to facilitate it as much as we can. If you’re a weekly volunteer, you participate in a weekly reflection session either in the car to and from Detroit for in-person service, or at a Zoom meeting for virtual service. These weekly reflections provide volunteers with additional information about specific topics and problems in Detroit as well as a space to reflect on how the last week of volunteering has gone and how that week's topic may tie into the service that they’re doing. Topics for these reflection sessions range widely; one month you may be learning about the history of voting rights in Detroit, and another month the topic may be how COVID-19 impacted food insecurity in Detroit communities.

While service learning is a core piece of our weekly programs, it reaches beyond our weekly programs as well. Our major events involve a service-learning component, even though these are one-day events. The lessons you learn from that one day can be carried over into volunteer experiences organized by other volunteer organizations, the same way your impact on Detroit communities at these one-day events lasts longer than just one day. Volunteering with the Detroit Partnership can be incredibly helpful for the communities that we partner with, but the knowledge and experience our volunteers gain through this work should not be overlooked.

Written by Grace Schaefer (Education Director 2023-2024)