You wouldn’t head out to hike in the wilderness unprepared would you? Well maybe you would, but most of us would study a map, pack a snack and gear up. We’d savor the tranquility as we trekked, take some photos along the way, and share the experience with our friends when we got back in one piece. Like a hike in the woods, service is about more than just the “hike” itself. At the Pace Center we believe that service is a learning experience that involves preparation, engagement and reflection.
This Field Guide to Service is designed to help you learn to do service well and have a positive impact in the community. It provides you with what you can do before, during and after your service experience to ensure it’s as successful and rewarding as possible.
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How do I get a Field Guide?
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For the 2020-2021 academic year, we are unable to provide physical copies of the Field Guide to Service as our staff is working remotely, away from campus.
In the interim, you may download a PDF of the Field Guide to Service
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How do I use the Field Guide?
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We are thrilled that you want to use the Field Guide to Service! We welcome you to use it in service and share it with others. To do so, we ask that you respect the guide and its contents:
- Please credit the Pace Center for Civic Engagement and Princeton University when sharing the guide with others, in presentations, or when using it or its exercises.
- Please keep its appearance and content intact. We hope you are inspired by the guide to create exercises or content of your own. When doing so, please avoid directly lifting language or design elements and using them as your own.
- And last but not least, please share a photo and short narrative with us at [email protected] about how you used the guide and what you learned so that we can continue to improve the Field Guide to Service as a resource and tool.
See you out in the field!
Preparation
So you’re ready to get involved and engage in service. Great! Before you head out the door, pull up your sleeves and dive in, we want you to ask yourself one question: are you prepared?
To do service well and have a positive impact in the community, preparation is key. It serves as an important foundation for your work. It helps you understand not only why you want to engage the way you do, but also lays the groundwork for you to be able to engage in a thoughtful, respectful, and empowering way. These resources will give you the tools you need to identify your values, assess community need, clarify your own assets, understand how to plot your course and build your service team.
Understanding your values gives you a foundation for making decisions and communicating your intentions to others.
Taking time to understand the issue your plan to work on and how it manifests in real time for the community is crucial to developing a successful, meaningful, and sustainable effort.
Taking an inventory of the strengths you bring, as well as the areas where you might need some support, will give you a baseline for what you can contribute and what you need to learn.
Your vision, goals, and objectives will provide you with clear and succinct ways to talk about your work, as well as the ability to measure impact over time.
Acts of service and civic engagement are only made stronger when folks come together, combine their assets, and work toward a common vision.
Service
So you’re ready to get involved and engage in service. Great! Before you head out the door, pull up your sleeves and dive in, we want you to ask yourself one question: are you prepared?
To do service well and have a positive impact in the community, preparation is key. It serves as an important foundation for your work. It helps you understand not only why you want to engage the way you do, but also lays the groundwork for you to be able to engage in a thoughtful, respectful, and empowering way. These resources will give you the tools you need to identify your values, assess community need, clarify your own assets, understand how to plot your course and build your service team.
Being welcomed into a community is an act of trust; one we should honor and respect. The people and communities we work with don't need a savior, they need an ally.
Every task you do has a purpose. Even when the work you are doing feels small-scale, it is playing a role in reaching a large-scale goal.
Effective communication can help you build a strong rapport with others and generate support for your work while starting a dialogue about this issues you are passionate about.
In service and civic engagement we are able to explore the ways concepts and ideas we see on the pages of textbooks manifest in real life. We get to ask hard questions of ourselves and the world around us.
Reflection
Congratulations! You’ve just finished your service experience. Think your work is over? Not quite. Reflection is a core component of learning through service. Reflecting on your service experience helps you connect your work to prior experiences, analyze inaccurate perceptions, clarify your values, and better adapt to new people and situations. Reflection is often linked with the Experiential Learning Cycle. As we move from asking “What?” to “So What?” and “Now What?” we evolve and grow, and then start all over again! These resources will help you learn how to process your experience “the Pace way,” analyze the intersection of your values with those of the community you serve, offer strategies for saying “thank you” and give you a chance to develop your very own reflection tool.
Reflection allows us to evaluate our experiences, acknowledge thoughts and feelings, recognize learnings, and embrace areas for growth.
When we examine how our values intersect, we gain insight into how we can use commonalities or differences to deepen our service and civic engagement and move forward.
Taking time to show our appreciation to others and what they have done is a way to ensure those we work with feel valued which in turn helps to nurture our relationships with others.
Developing your own reflection exercise is a great way to stretch yourself creatively while simultaneously exploring the questions and themes that came from your experience.