Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from July, 2010

Life of Service

I am just over 8 months through my year with Americorps VISTA and the past few days I have been thinking a lot about the idea of service.  And not just any service but service that is complete where someone is giving everything of themselves for another person.  I see it a lot at Sugartree Ministries on Main Street here in Wilmington.  Everyone from the Director (who has recently been ignoring his own health to take care of things) to the daily volunteers give everything they have to the project and the mission at the kitchen.   I think the world should have more of that.  I try really hard to put my entire self into what I'm doing, I put my heart and soul into my work.  I wish more people did that, as many times as I see people who have hearts for service and are truly there to help people, I also see the opposite: People just there for the glory, to get in the papers, to get recognized, or to get extra this or that.  There is just as much greed and "me-me-me" menta

Perfectionism vs. Professionalism

I was recently talking to one of my co-VISTAs about what it is like to supervise our Summer Associate volunteers.  Our Summer Associates are 10-week volunteers who signed up for our program and get a small stipend and education award when they complete 375 hours of service.  We supervise them and put them to work with the various projects that are involved in our program.   As we were talking about this she mentioned that she found it very difficult to delegate work to a Summer Associate because she was a perfectionist and therefore felt as if she would just re-do their work once they brought it back to her.  I found this point very interesting because I too, have difficulties delegating work not only because I want everything to be perfect but because I never want to make a Summer Associate feel that I am MAKING them do something that I would not do myself.   For example, I often bring the Summer Associates to Sugartree Ministries to do random work that gets forgotten about in