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When reading your post, the question that stood out to me the most was, "How is it that we can stop thinking about teaching or volunteering, or public service not as giving back to “underserved communities” but rather to the world and ourselves?"

First of all, because it calls to mind our motivations for teaching or volunteering, something that's been bothering me more and more over the past several years. Throughout high school, the concept of "giving back" was a mantra repeated by my peers, teachers, and mentors as a selfless ideal. But maybe the ideal is to be SELFISH: Take care of the world so as to take care of yourself. Recycle and reduce so that YOU won't suffer later. Be kind to your neighbors to promote an overall community feeling of safety and self-worth which will eventually benefit you. Maybe. Perhaps we need to revise the terms, “giving back,” and “selfishness.”

One of the readings that really had me questioning motivation and “giving back,” was Ivan Illich’s To Hell With Good Intentions. (It’s really short, I definitely recommend skimming it, at least!). He writes about the hypocrisy of Americans who volunteer abroad. I think some of his suggestions may be useful for our examination of the meaning of working in “underserved communities”: 

“If you have any sense of responsibility at all, stay with your riots here at home. Work for the coming elections: You will know what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how to communicate with those to whom you speak. And you will know when you fail. If you insist on working with the poor, if this is your vocation, then at least work among the poor who can tell you to go to hell. It is incredibly unfair for you to impose yourselves on a village where you are so linguistically deaf and dumb that you don't even understand what you are doing, or what people think of you. And it is profoundly damaging to yourselves when you define something that you want to do as 'good,' a 'sacrifice' and 'help.'

“I am here to suggest that you voluntarily renounce exercising the power which being an American gives you. I am here to entreat you to freely, consciously and humbly give up the legal right you have to impose your benevolence on Mexico. I am here to challenge you to recognize your inability, your powerlessness and your incapacity to do the "good" which you intended to do.”

So, that’s a little discouraging. However, he has a point about attitude that I think is important. The fact that we might assume we have the power to help someone else is, potentially, a sign of the oppressor system being firmly rooted in us. He is calling for students to wait for people to ask for help. And to problematize that interaction, too. Further, he's calling on students to recognize their privilege and use it more effectively - even if acting might make you feel good, it's not necessarily the most useful response to a percieved problem. Could a solution be some fusion of selfishness and self-awareness?