This is part of a series of the collected thoughts and sayings of influential members of the Johns Hopkins community. All the following quotes were taken verbatim from a personal interview with Matthew "Dag" D'Agostino, assistant director of the Center for Social Concern.
I was a photojournalist. When I started shooting photos, it was always part of a social activism type of thing, always documenting work and connecting to other people. If you got a camera, it is a good excuse to meet someone else very different from you. You can look very deeply into their lives and how they live them in a way that is respectful and responsible. So that pathos continues throughout the work I've been doing here since then. I've been trying to connect with people on terms that magnify the dignity of all the people involved in the project.
Two weeks ago, I gave a guest lecture at a photojournalism class and they asked me, "Why did you leave photojournalism for here?" I see a lot of the issues as the same. You are trying to connect with people, trying to make relationships that are beneficial to everybody and trying to represent others as the people that they are.
There are two things I've wanted to do since I've come to Hopkins. One, to bring the Center for Social Concern around to become educators, to make us part of the educational enterprise of the university. If you are a volunteer, if you're working for the JHU Tutorial Project, or if you are working for Salud or the Baltimore Rescue Mission, you're taking things you might be working on in class and finding a place where you can use this knowledge. We need to think about the skills that we want to give students. If you are going to be working for us, we want to make sure you want to be successful. If you want to start a volunteer group, it takes some managing, grant writing and people skills. It can be frustrating if we don't provide you with tools that allow you to do what you want to do.
This is really a good job. I get a lot of freedom to work out what I think is really good with regard to community service and service-learning on campus, and in that I have a lot of autonomy. The other interesting thing is that I work with the best students on campus. I'm not teaching a course; I don't have to deal with people who are upset about their grades. And people who come here are already highly motivated and intelligent; I don't have to complain about people slacking off because they don't come here to slack off. Why would you even bother come up the steps if you didn't want to do something extra, if you didn't want to help out the community?
The Baltimore CommunityMediation project has been the state model for community mediation. When I took it two years ago, it had to be the best personal/professional development program I have ever taken. It's all lecture until someone forces you to practice it; you practice listening really well. You practice so much it's like taking a yoga class and breathing.
Taking the mediation course makes you start to see how you deal with conflict all the time because someone has taken you and said, "All right people are gonna be screaming at each other, what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do to make it better?" They've got their method, and it works magnificently. All of a sudden you're part of this mediation group that is so important and big in their communities, a group that's motivated, diverse and from all walks of life. It's an incredible way of getting to know Baltimore in a constructive way. You're getting out and interacting with people and soaking it up. It completely challenged my conception of race and class in socie ty. It made me think how simplistically I was thinking about this issue.
The fact is the Baltimore City school system sucks. So if you're tutoring in this town you're subsidizing a losing system. But you have to subsidize it because they're children. You don't throw away people, let alone children. So you offer what services that you can, and you learn about the problem in general. Maybe this inquiry will lead you to write an article or talk to congressmen. The lessons you can learn from the public school system are lessons you can take anywhere.
At the CSC, we want to take volunteering away from what a person does discretely by putting it into the idea of service as part of one's life and a sustainable portion of one's life.
This idea of service is all about one's character and virtue, in a Platonic, Socratic type of way --- the education of the self in a broader sense.
Volunteering is great, but being socially concerned is about taking it one step further.
