Wartburg College Social Change

In the IS 101 class, we look at different ways that people can contribute to social change.  They gave us a sheet of paper with information where we can see different activities that we can do at Wartburg College in order to contribute to someone’s concept of social change. There are some good suggestions but I hope that the people who received that piece of paper have defined before what is the change that they want, before participating in an activity, just because of doing it. For instance, some people may think that feed starving children is just a short term ineffective solution when the real problem is the bad distribution of resources (I mentioned the waste of food on a past blog entry). Also,   I think that some of the activities suggested in that paper does not contribute to any social change, instead they are just ways to keep the social structure the same. For instance, even though there are people who believe in service as way to improve the world, there are many others who do service as a way to obtain individual benefits.

By looking at the social change wheel, I think that I have done many different types of service through my live, but what I really think has contributed to social change is much less than that. This “Social Change Wheel” gives the feeling to people that just by doing easy things as “follow the student handbook” they are contributing to social change when they are not. Thus people feel happy and comfortable, because they justify their lack of action by believing that they are contributing to social change just by “follow the student handbook”.

With which type of social change I identify myself the most? Since that is a personal preference question I feel free to say that with any of those mentioned in the Wartburg College Social Change wheel. I feel that I still need a lot to do in order to say that I am contributing to social change.

I believe that if we want to see a big change we need big actions and especially big sacrifices in our lives.