Chapter 2: Distant or Direct: Students’ Interactions With Service Recipients While Completing Ontario’s Community Involvement Requirement

Community involvement activities can be partly distinguished according to the extent of opportunity they offer servers to directly interact with service recipients. By direct interaction, I am referring to face-to-face exchanges between the providers and beneficiaries of community involvement assistance. Existing literature tends to advocate community involvement activities involving sustained contact with marginalized social groups. For example, Billig (2002) reviewed dozens of studies from the 1990s and concluded that servers’ positive personal gains were likely to be maximized with increased in-person interaction among community members. More recently, Reinders and Youniss’ (2006) longitudinal survey of 620 middleupper class secondary school students in Washington, DC revealed that servers’ ongoing exchanges with people in obvious need was positively associated with servers’ self-awareness, helpfulness, anticipated future civic engagement and intent to volunteer in the future. Thus, community involvement experiences that involve opportunities to build personal relationships over time may play an important role in fostering the development of the server’s civic-related outcomes.