Justice, Not Charity: Rethinking Service at Amherst

As an Amherst student, I know how easy it is to live inside of our carefully curated bubble. We arrive on campus, go about our routines, and shape our lives around a small, walkable perimeter. Four years later, many of us could greet the — albeit wonderful — staff who keep this campus functioning by name, yet struggle to name a single person who actually lives in the town around us. Personally, I’ve tried to break that bubble through my work on campus and in local political campaigns, but even then, it often feels like scratching the surface.

It’s a privilege to have such a distance. We have the ability to thrive inside Amherst’s stability without directly confronting the inequalities, political decisions, and material pressures that define the wider community. And I get it — I’m busy. We’re busy. College demands a lot, and from that it feels like community engagement is optional. But opting out is never possible, and to believe anything else is simply to miss what’s happening around us, and to suggest otherwise is to entirely disregard the fact that Amherst College exists in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts.

So, I wanted to find out more about how to meaningfully get involved in our community beyond the campus’s illusion of satisfaction. Around that time, an intern from the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion reached out to me, and our conversation opened a door that I hadn’t known existed. They introduced me to Sarah Barr, the Advisor to the Provost on Campus Initiatives and Director of Community Engagement. The Center for Community Engagement (CCE), where Barr works, helps connect students with local organizations and community-based learning opportunities, and I had the pleasure of interviewing her. Talking with her sparked a question I had been carrying: How can students move beyond episodic volunteerism to actually contribute to solutions and build lasting relationships with the community?

It was through these conversations that I realized in how many ways Amherst already encourages students to step outside of the campus bubble — including initiatives like Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Day of Service and Action, which I hadn’t known about until recently. The annual event exists because Dr. King’s legacy was never meant to be honored through passive remembrance alone, but rather through action tied to justice, mutual responsibility, and care for the community. This day is intentionally framed as a “day on,” not a day off, clearly linking commemoration and responsibility. Here, students can step beyond campus to help with food distribution at Not Bread Alone and the Senior Center, visit Ancestral Bridges to learn about Black and Afro-indigenous arts in Western Massachusetts, assemble care kits, hear from a speaker, and participate in discussions of King’s writings, including “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” For many students, it’s one of the few moments when Amherst explicitly insists that learning cannot be confined to classrooms. It’s a moment we can’t afford to waste.

Across Western Massachusetts, local organizations are facing rising demand amid shrinking margins for error, and the stakes are real. Their work cannot be seen as supplementary. It is essential infrastructure, providing stability where public systems have frayed. Local organizations like the Survival Center and Not Bread Alone that serve seniors, working families, and students, increasingly functioning as long-term infrastructure rather than emergency relief.

Federal retrenchment — including cuts to programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), reductions in housing assistance, stricter eligibility requirements for unemployment and Medicaid, and stagnating wages — shifts responsibility for basic survival from the state to local communities. These policy decisions create cascading repercussions that community-based organizations are forced to absorb. Yet these organizations often operate on razor-thin margins: They have limited staff, minimal funding, and little capacity to scale up in response to this rising demand. 

MLK Day and student organizing offer a chance to step outside the bubble, but even well-meaning volunteers need to understand the complexity of how service organizations function. At organizations like the Amherst Survival Center, volunteers are not a burden, but the backbone of the work — neighbors helping neighbors. With only a few staff members and more than a hundred volunteers each week, the center depends on sustained community participation to deliver urgent services. Yet, it is important to consider that each new person requires integration into existing workflows. For organizations providing urgent services, intermittent or one-off volunteer engagement can strain systems, delay support, and create extra work for staff already stretched to their limits. While coordinating volunteers does require time, that collaboration is also what sustains the core services these organizations provide. 

Understanding these dynamics is crucial for anyone stepping into service work. Good intentions alone are often not enough — it is sustained engagement that prevents compounding the very challenges these organizations exist to address. This doesn’t mean that short-term volunteering is a bad idea — but that such efforts are most impactful when we aim for real, ongoing connections with the organizations and communities we aim to support. If you have wanted to start volunteering at a community partner but were too scared or unsure of how to, then MLK Day is the perfect opportunity to learn.

Many of us are lucky. Amherst exists within this landscape while largely shielded from its consequences. Students enjoy guaranteed housing, reliable meals, health care, and other protections that buffer daily life from the instability many local residents face. That security isn’t inherently wrong, but it becomes alarming when it makes political turmoil feel foreign instead of entangled with student life. That distance makes engagement both necessary and uncomfortable. The town absorbs shocks — rising rents, surging food prices, shrinking public assistance — while the college can go on operating smoothly. Ignoring this is not possible; it allows one to benefit from a system that displaces risk onto others.

We can do something about this ignorance, but only if we understand the stakes. The real concern of those behind MLK Day isn’t that students skip it; it’s that showing up can start to feel like enough. Too often, participation becomes a checkbox, a few hours to count as solidarity instead of real engagement. Barr puts it bluntly: “This is not service rooted in charity — it is mutual aid rooted in justice.” Charity, in this sense, is transactional: We give a little, feel good, and move on. Justice is different. It demands that we look beyond our own comfort, confront the structural inequalities that create need in the first place, and commit to supporting the people and organizations already doing the work. It’s ongoing, relational, and often inconvenient.

MLK Day isn’t here to make us feel good. Though, feeling proud of the work you’ve done isn’t the problem — the issue arises when that sense of accomplishment becomes the end of our involvement. If we let that momentary satisfaction stand in for sustained action, then we’ve missed the point. Some people treat it like a once-a-year checkbox — a soup kitchen shift or food drive — and that’s not enough. The day is about reckoning with what we owe, consistently, to the community that sustains our education. Dr. King’s campaigns remind us that justice requires sustained effort: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, for example, lasted over a year, demanding persistent organizing, coordination, and sacrifice from the community. 

As Barr emphasized, MLK Day is meant to be a door of entry — a beginning, not an end — an invitation into the relationships and responsibilities that already exist within the community. The day itself is easy; anyone can show up. What matters is what comes after: Whether students return, whether they remain present, whether they actually let themselves be shaped by the work and the people dedicating themselves to it. That choice — stepping fully through the door or hovering over the doorstep — is the clearest measure of whether we’ve truly understood the meaning and potential of MLK Day. 

Our classrooms teach justice in the abstract; engagement teaches it in reality – under constraint, with limited resources, urgent stakes, and real consequences. Volunteering at a public library in my hometown, I saw firsthand how tight budgets and small staffs shaped every decision — from which programs could run to how many people could be served in a day. My experiences made it clear that justice isn’t just an idea; it is practiced through labor, presence, and return. I’ll be honest, I haven’t yet done enough for the Amherst community, but I want to follow my own argument — to step through the door, engage meaningfully, and put these lessons into action here.

Students who commit to long-term partnerships gain clarity — about their values, their limits, and their responsibilities to others. I’ve experienced this myself: Listening to library patrons navigating housing and food insecurity or speaking with voters about policies with personal impacts, forces you to stay present even when there’s no tidy solution. You learn to be accountable without needing control, and to center the community’s needs rather than your own sense of moral satisfaction. These are central to a liberal arts education at Amherst, offering practical and ethical training that no syllabus alone can provide. Theory comes alive when tested against real-world challenges, and ideals are sharpened through sustained engagement, reflection, and action.

If students want to take advantage of Amherst’s resources to learn leadership, critical thinking, and civic responsibility, then engagement can’t just be optional. It’s where what we learn in the classroom meets the messy realities outside, and where we’re forced to confront the systems we might otherwise only study from a safe distance. And here’s the truth: It’s powerful that Amherst opens that door. Programs like MLK Day, partnerships with local organizations, and other initiatives show the college wants us to step outside the bubble. But those opportunities don’t mean much if we don’t take them. Amherst can offer the invitation — but it’s up to us to take it seriously, to show up not just for ourselves, but for the community that already supports our lives here. So go ahead: Reach out to the Center for Community Engagement to get involved, but also, mark your calendar for this year’s MLK Day of Service and Action on Feb. 11, and actually do something.