Recognition, Realization, and Reflection: Understanding the Relationship Between Privilege, Service Learning, and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex at Puentes de Salud

Abstract

Puentes de Salud is a non-profit migrant health organization that addresses structural violence surrounding access to health, education, and social services for the immigrant community in South Philadelphia. This project explores the relationships between privilege, service learning, and the non-profit industrial complex as they operate in Puentes de Salud's education department, the volunteer model it employs, and the volunteers themselves. Through interviews with the education department staff and volunteers at Puentes de Salud, I discuss how these elements operate individually and collectively within the volunteer model and the organizational structure of Puentes, as well as highlight the efforts put forth by the staff and volunteers to address the effects of each of these elements on the work they do with their students. I argue that Puentes and its volunteers remain complicit in the non-profit industrial complex due to the extensive utilization of the volunteer model on the part of Puentes, as well the service learning framework that brings many volunteers to work at Puentes and impacts their awareness of their own privilege. However, there still exists the possibility of breaking free from their complicity in these systems through a development of a critical consciousness, movement towards accompliceship and accountability, and organizational changes that disrupt Puentes' education program and the volunteer model that it employs.