My Ties To Citizenship

Growing up, I always viewed citizenship as either voting in elections or participating in community service. I was ignorant in my belief that community service was just a chore that would make a college application look better. I spent my life too concerned about my own well-being at the time and did not look towards what I could do to affect my community and my life in the future. I now realize that every action has some effect on the community around me, and vice versa. The realization of this symbiotic relationship has caused me to put more effort into improving the community around me.

The first change in my view of citizenship came from joining my fraternity. It places an emphasis on human service and this is something that I am currently striving to improve. Too many times it seems that people are only focused on their lives as I was before. Sometimes members of my chapter even fall into this category even though they are supposed to share the same value as me. I see citizenship as any action that positively improves the community that one is a part of. This broad definition stems from the wide variety of citizenship that I mentioned in my previous post.

My fraternity began expanding my view by giving me the opportunity to volunteer at the Ronald McDonald House on a bi-weekly basis. This was one of my first structured acts of community service. As I became more acquainted with the Greek community at Ohio State, I found other ways to serve my community as well. Every chapter seems to hold at least one large philanthropy event annually and I did my best to participate in every one I could. These events can raise large sums of money for charity, but alone my actions were relatively small. Participating in a sports tournament or buying food at a sorority event takes little effort from me. However, the combined actions of the hundreds of people that also participate do add up to a greater cause.

So far these acts I have described can be categorized as bonding, which refers to social networks that have little diversity. These networks can be limited because they can be too focused on a few similar goals. Bridging however, breaks this limitation by expanding the network to include a more diverse group of people. These people can have differing views that can offer positive benefit through controversy with civility. Bridging is an idea that we need to hold in the forefront of our minds, because people too easily fall into the ease of simply bonding. Through bridging, not only between different chapters, but also other non-Greek orgnizations, the Greek community would have the ability to take their citizenship to a higher level.