Service and cooperation in Baha’i activities
14 Mar
Thyolo, Malawi (© Bahá’à World Centre. All rights reserved.)
Day Thirteen of the Baha’i Fast. Yesterday, Negin and I were preparing for junior youth group. As it turned out, no one was home. But the preparation was great. Since we are in the midst of expanding the group, we reflected on some of the initial conversations we might want to have with new participants. And given our experience with a service project last week, we tried to assemble a set of concepts related to service.
With the help of Releasing the Powers of Junior Youth, the fifth book in the Ruhi Institute, we determined the following sequence of ideas:
- That we all need other people; that we all depend on one another.
- A question: Who do you depend on? Can you imagine a world where we never received help from anyone?
- A definition: service is any act undertaken in the spirit of helping others
- We just had an experience with service last week. Use the three elements of cooperation to analyze our service project.
- A common goal: What was the goal of our service project?
- Collaboration: How did we all participate? What did each of us contribute, and in what ways would the service project not have been possible had we lacked the contribution of any one of us?
- Coordination: How did we coordinate our actions? Possibly provide external examples of coordination. e.g. Imagine two people meeting to construct a fence. If one comes on Monday, and the other on Tuesday, they cannot build the fence.
It was wonderful to realize that the concepts introduced in earlier books (in the context of teaching cooperative games to young children) are not separate from the concepts used later on in the sequence.
This is really useful, to employ concepts on cooperation and coordination from Teaching Children’s Classes to junior youth service projects. I will certainly be keeping this in mind. Thank you for this insightful contribution.
P.S. Your effort with the junior youth is quite literally in my prayers.
Thank you for your prayers, Jeremy! We literally met some new junior youth today, and had productive conversations with a number of kids in the neighborhood, which included discussing the purpose of junior youth groups, how they are distinct from children’s classes, and even sampling some of Breezes of Confirmation. Thanks for being a part of these efforts!