Accountability and Why We Need to Articulate Our Mission

I work in the Service-Learning Center at Calvin College as a student coordinator. If you were to ask me what I do, what we do as an office, I could tell you many things. We organize an event called Streetfest that exposes new students to service-learning in Grand Rapids, we establish partnerships with many non-profit agencies in our community and work to build connections on Calvin's campus with those agencies, we work to promote specific longstanding service-learning partnerships in each of the residence halls, and the list goes on and on. Visit out website www.calvin.edu/admin/slc and you will find a myriad of the various things that we are involved in, but you will NOT find an explicit mission statement or a clear vision statement that explains WHY we do all of these things. I am writing this blog post to challenge our lack of a mission or vision statement.

Is our lack of a mission or vision statement a shortcoming on our part? I think it very well might be. I do not think there is anything magical about a mission or vision statement. Just because an organization has a statement of direction and intent does not mean that it actually follows it. In fact, from my perspective, there are many terribly written mission and vision statements that are doing nothing for an organization or the community it serves. Such statements sound great, but are so awash in ambiguity that they fail to have any meaning because there is nothing to actually hold on to, they are empty statements, full of overly sentimental fluff.

My position is that if you are going to have a mission or vision statement, then you need to do it right, which means, be modest, be clear, and offer something that you can be held accountable to. This sounds remarkably akin to a thesis for an essay. We would not regard an essay as well written if it did not have a thesis, but yet we accept our ongoing lack of a mission statement as okay. The notion of accountability is what drives my desire to see our office have a mission and/or vision statement. My fear is that because we are the service-learning center, and connected with this notion of "service" which in our society is generally regarded as a very good and positive thing, that we are then not held to high standards, our methods go unquestioned and are not examined with any significant amount of rigor. I think we should be questioned, examined, and held to high standards. Service-learning is a powerful tool that can do some unbelievably amazing things in individuals and communities, but it can also do some profoundly terrible things. As such, no organization that is oriented to fostering and sustaining service-learning should go unexamined, failing to be held accountable.

I would like to see the Service-Learning Center at Calvin College develop a mission an/or vision statement that is modest, clear, and something that we can be clearly held accountable to. So I ask sincerely, why don't we have a mission or vision statement? Is this a major shortcoming on our part? What are some suggestions for possible mission or vision statements?