Molly McGrath Tierney

June 2013

What does help really look like in a service environment? There are two places to look: the servant and the recipient. Traditionally, the servant’s role is to help the recipient How can we tell the difference between something that helps the recipient and something that protects the role of the servant?

Beware social service programs that blame their performance on their intended recipients. For instance: GED programs report the cause of their 40% success rate on the students who drop out or don’t attend. I suppose one option is that there is something wrong with the people. An alternative option that deserves exploration is that there is something wrong with the program.

This conclusion offers a nuanced view of programs. Programs actually have two purposes: help the recipient and protect the role of the servant.

Servants are good hearted people who are considered selfless in their choices to build a career or pattern of volunteer work off of helping. These good hearted people  design or select roles for themselves because the honestly intend to be helpful. The way they identify who needs help is through a sense of feeling sorry for a particular population. Abused children, drug addicts, the homeless, poor people…. They take this sincere feeling and build programs around it designed to help. They keep programs going by returning to their sense of feeling sorry for people. They want to help and the way the know they are being helpful is this persistent sense of feeling sorry for people. If I maintain this feeling then I can easily identify those who need help and keep helping.

The challenge is that I don’t think you can have both. I don’t think you can maintain the sense of feeling sorry for someone and also help them. I think many servants are actually leveraging their helping activities in order to maintain their sense of feeling sorry for people.

If what I want to do is help, and I do it by maintaining my sense of feeling sorry for poor people, then I — either consciously or sub-consciously — make decisions that ensure my programs or services sound like very good ideas but in implementation miss important details. They miss the very details that ensure the poor person will fall short of success — and I? I will get that familiar feeling that affirms my existence. I will feel sorry for them. And I will keep trying to help.

Over-rides my interest in actually helping someone.

Its difficult then to tell the difference between things that actually help and things that serve my interest in “helping”.

Until I seek something else — say, liberation for another person — I will keep “helping”. Lucky for me, that will ensure plenty of people for whom I can feel sorry.  Liberate them from whom? Why, from me, of course.