When Service Becomes Extraction
How volunteer culture can unintentionally use places instead of entering them.
By Josh Singleton | Founder, serving as Lead Cultivator, The Neighborhood Garden Project
Requests like this happen more often than people might think.
A message comes in that says something like, “We have a group of youth looking for a service opportunity. Would the garden be a good place for them to volunteer for a few hours?”
On the surface, nothing about the request is wrong. The intention is good. Adults want young people to serve, contribute, and learn compassion. That desire is honorable.
But beneath the request sits a cultural structure that most people do not even realize they are operating inside.
It is the structure of extraction disguised as service.
Most institutions teach the same pattern.
Find a need.
Find a place.
Send people.
Complete the task.
Once the task is finished, the group leaves with the feeling that something meaningful happened. The people who organized the event feel successful. The participants feel generous. The system checks a box that says “service.”
Then everyone moves on.
But something deeper rarely happens.
No relationship forms between the people and the place.
No ongoing responsibility develops.
No long term stewardship emerges.
The place simply hosted an activity.
How We Arrived Here
This mindset did not appear overnight. It developed slowly as modern culture shifted how we understand contribution.
For most of human history, people contributed simply by belonging to a place. Families farmed the same ground for generations. Communities maintained the same wells, roads, and fields. Participation was not called service. It was simply life.
Modern culture gradually replaced belonging with achievement and performance.
Contribution became something measurable. Schools track volunteer hours. Organizations record service projects. Community engagement becomes something that can be counted, documented, and reported.
Once contribution becomes measurable, it slowly shifts from participation to performance.
At the same time, society became faster and more mobile. People move more often. Schedules became tighter. Institutions adapted by designing opportunities that could fit into busy lives.
Instead of long term participation, we created events.
Service days.
Volunteer weekends.
One time projects.
These structures made service easier to organize, but they also made it brief and episodic.
When contribution becomes episodic, ego quietly enters the system. Not always in an obvious way. Often in the simple desire to feel useful.
People begin asking questions like:
What did we accomplish?
How many hours did we serve?
How many people did we help?
The focus slowly shifts toward the experience of the volunteer rather than the health of the place being served.
The location becomes the backdrop for the volunteer’s sense of generosity.
That is where extraction often hides.
The Garden Is Not a Service Site
The garden interrupts that pattern.
The garden is not a place designed to absorb one time labor. It is not structured around projects that can be completed in an afternoon. It is not a venue where groups rotate through in order to fulfill service hours.
A garden is a living system.
Living systems operate on rhythm, repetition, and relationship. Plants do not grow because someone showed up once and worked hard for three hours. Soil does not become healthy because a group completed a project. Pollinators do not establish habitat because a team visited briefly.
Everything meaningful in a garden happens through ongoing presence.
Beds are tended week after week.
Soil improves season after season.
Gardeners learn by returning again and again.
Over time something changes.
The place begins to shape the people who spend time in it.
The Cultural Model of Service
The cultural model of service focuses on what volunteers can do for a place.
The garden operates from a different starting point.
The deeper question is what the place might do for the person.
When someone enters the garden slowly and consistently, something shifts that no service project can manufacture.
Their attention changes.
Their pace changes.
Their relationship to work changes.
They begin noticing insects they never saw before. They start recognizing the stages of plant growth. They learn patience when seeds take longer than expected. They feel responsibility when a bed depends on them returning.
The work becomes less about completing tasks and more about learning how to live within a system that is larger than themselves.
That is stewardship.
Stewardship Cannot Be Scheduled
Stewardship is not something that can be scheduled for a group between ten in the morning and one in the afternoon.
It emerges when people show up often enough that the place begins to belong to them, and they begin to belong to the place.
That belonging changes the posture of the work.
People stop asking, “What can we do today?”
They begin asking, “What does this place need right now?”
That question only arises when relationship exists.
A Different Invitation
Because of this, the garden does not organize one time service opportunities.
Not because service is unimportant.
Not because young people should not learn to contribute.
But because the garden is offering something different.
The invitation is not to complete something.
The invitation is to enter a rhythm.
Come if you want to learn how to live here.
Come if you want to understand soil, plants, insects, and seasons.
Come if you want to participate in the slow work of cultivation.
Come if you are willing to return.
What the garden offers cannot be experienced in a single visit.
But for those who choose to return, something far more valuable begins to grow.
Over time the question shifts.
People no longer ask how they can serve the garden for a few hours.
They begin asking how they can help care for something that has slowly begun to care for them.
