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Clint Armistead (left) and Soeren Palumbo represented Special Olympics at the ServiceNation Summit in New York City on 11-12 September 2008. |
On 11-12 September in New York City, 500 leaders of all ages and from every sector of American life came together at the ServiceNation Summit. Their charge was to celebrate the power and potential of citizen service, and lay out a policy blueprint for addressing the country’s greatest social challenges through expanded opportunities for volunteer and national service. U.S. Presidential Candidates Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama addressed the Summit.
ServiceNation’s vision is to will unite leaders across society with hundreds of thousands of citizens in a national campaign to call on the next U.S. President and Congress, leaders from all sectors of society and citizens to create a new era of service and civic engagement in which all Americans work together to try and solve the country’s greatest and most persistent societal challenges. Special Olympics is a member of the ServiceNation Organizing Committee, which includes state and national organizations and associations committed to expanding service opportunities in their communities. Soeren Palumbo and Clint Armistead, two of Special Olympics’ youth leaders, attended the Summit. Following are their thoughts inspired by their experience.
Soeren Palumbo
The creation or perpetuation of second-class citizens or, even worse, second-class human beings, is everyone’s problem. History has witnessed the results of mass dehumanization and no one, least of all people with intellectual disabilities, need be reminded of these results. Whether or not you have an intellectual disability, whether or not you have a family member with an intellectual disability, whether or not you have a friend with an intellectual disability, this is a problem. This is a problem on par with poverty, as pressing as any disease, as troublesome as our educational woes.
So what can we do about it? What role does Special Olympics have to play in this issue and in the larger public service panorama? I believe that Special Olympics is an organization serving two distinct audiences and must therefore serve two distinct roles. First, Special Olympics serves the 3 percent of society with intellectual disabilities. To this population, Special Olympics provides fun, confidence and pride. It allows for sport, for camaraderie, for teammates, for friends. It gives the opportunity for talent, for achievement, for success to a population that deserves all this and more. Sport can achieve all of these things, and Special Olympics can, does, and should continue to provide sport.
The other audience that Special Olympics does, and must continue to, address is the remaining 97 percent of society without intellectual disabilities. The field of a Special Olympics sports event is indeed a reprieve of acceptance from a discriminating society, but we must not let it become a bubble. We must take the lessons learned on the playing fields of Special Olympics and educate society. No amount of respect earned on the playing field is enough for the athlete who gets disparaged as a “retard” when he goes to school the next day. Efforts like the “R-word” campaign are necessary and powerful and hopefully are a sign of similar work to follow.
While service-related quotes were abundant during the ServiceNation Summit, one in particular stuck with me. Albert Einstein said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." To address the challenges faced by the community with intellectual disabilities, we must change the way we think. We must be able to present our challenge as the compelling social and human rights issue that it is. We must change the way other people think. We must address the 97 percent of society. But we must not change our mission.
Together, we can make a better world for people with intellectual disabilities. But it won’t happen by accident.
Clint Armistead
Why do we as human beings volunteer? How does one find it in oneself to serve others? I asked myself these questions on September 11 as I attended the ServiceNation Summit along with other leaders young and old from various service-oriented organizations and nonprofits. Together, we united on the common principle of fostering a generation of service. We desired to increase youth involvement in service activities. But before I could give advice on how to encourage service, I first needed to understand why I have volunteered for eight years with my local Special Olympics organization. Why do we, as humans, ban together, unite and assist one another, whether in our times of need, during disasters or simply every day?
Throughout the summit, I was reminded of the most recent piece of literature I had read, Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s “Discourse on the Origin’s of Inequality.” Rousseau offers up the idea that the replacement for morals and laws in savage man is pity. Man naturally has an inclination toward self-preservation, but every now and then empathizes with a fellow of the same species. Man pities his neighbor who lacks something and thus volunteers to assist him. Man feels if he were in such situation, he would want assistance as well.
However, through pity, man is not volunteering. He is not doing something without asking for anything in return. In Rousseau’s theory, man makes a social contract to better his self-preservation. He agrees to assist his peer on the condition that should the roles be reversed, his brethren will assist him. With this mindset, man hopes for some kind of service credit for later use down the road. Likewise, the people who say they volunteer because they want to “give back,” only attempt to pay off a divine service tab they have run up.
At ServiceNation, I heard another theory, one without pity as the driving force. As part of a panel on faith-based service, [Special Olympics Chairman] Dr. Timothy Shriver described how faith-based organizations can come together in their common goal to do good. In order to do this and not divide from one another as often occurs between religions, one must drop one’s identifier of religion. That’s not to say a Jew must stop practicing Judaism, just that one breaks away from that aspect of one’s life and identifies oneself as a human being before religious affiliation.
Spirit, rather than religion, glues interfaith service organizations together. The spirit we all have – the human spirit – bonds everyone. Once man starts identifying himself as a human being, as being part of a whole, then the world’s inhabitants become appendages to oneself. Thus, when one person falls, everyone as humans fall. We all are in this life together and one man’s hardship should be a burden shared by all. As human beings, we cannot innately watch one of us struggle and not lend a hand. It’s in our spirit. |
