By SARAH ALLISON
COLUMNIST

Most of you have volunteered at one point or another, possibly working at a soup kitchen, tutoring or picking up trash. Volunteering is admirable; it takes generosity and compassion. If you take time out of your schedule to volunteer, I salute you.

There’s a lot of hype about community service. Volunteering is a pretty surefire way to earn kudos in any circle, especially at a Jesuit university. Fordham grooms its students to be “men and women for others,” after all. There are worse educational missions.

There are also a lot of people in this world who need help. Too many, I think, who rely on the benevolence of others for survival because of the circumstances into which they were born.

For a long time, I was convinced that community service gave me brownie points. Helping other people made me feel pretty good. On a subconscious level, I think I wanted to make up for all the privileges I have because of my white, upper-middle class background.

Unfortunately, community service does not let me, or you, off the hook. All the more bitter a realization because of said brownie points. Volunteering is only half the battle in the war for positive social change. Charity temporarily alleviates the suffering of millions of people and provides much needed services, but it is not a sufficient or sustainable solution to social injustices. While a Band-Aid may remedy a scrape, it won’t do squat for a hemophiliac in the long run.

The real threats we need to fight are the systems which perpetuate the visible, tangible elements of injustice. We don’t usually talk about these monsters. They tend to make you feel like plankton up against a pod of whales (can you say soul-crushing?).

Take the public education system for example. That’s a real whopper. Since the 1970s, most states’ public schools have been funded by local property taxes. This means that wealthier neighborhoods have better public schools, which means that graduates of those schools are better-prepared for college or jobs and have better opportunities. The reverse happens in poor neighborhoods: Poor quality of education limits those students’ choices, perpetuating the cycle of poverty.

I volunteered at the Boys and Girls Club last semester, and I will be the first to say that it is a whole lot easier, and instantly gratifying, to tutor kids in inner city neighborhoods than to attack complex tax structures or to try to change the way public education is funded. Tutoring is still important as it may help kids who need extra attention to succeed. It will not, however, equalize the disparate quality of public education between wealthy and poor neighborhoods.

In order to successfully help a sick person, you cannot simply treat their symptoms; you have to attack the cause of the disease. Doctors need to ease painful symptoms while trying to solve the root problems. Community service is not superfluous.  Volunteering is necessary, but it isn’t enough.