Question about short term service trip

[mom2scouts]

My teen dd is in a group that is planning a week long service trip. Few people have signed up and there's some pressure to get more people to go. I have several reasons not to send her including cost (although there is financial help) and other plans for the summer including work we need done at home, but the main reason is that the trip is to the Tenderloin in San Francisco. I did mission trips and hung out in some shady areas at that age, but I'm just not comfortable sending this particular kid there right now as she can be a bit naive. It's been years since I've been to SF, so what is the city like now? Would you send your daughter to work in that neighborhood? I showed her some recent videos of the area on youtube and she doesn't seem all that eager to go, but it may just be reaction to my initial negativity when I heard where they were going. Am I being overprotective?

[Catwoman]

Honestly, the fact that she doesn’t seem eager to go would be enough reason for me not to send her.

[Selkie]

She doesn’t want to go and you don’t want her to go, so don’t let anyone pressure you into it.

[Arcadia]

I am wary of SF, not just the tenderloin.  We were there last month for my DS16’s high school proficiency exam and we walked around the 94134 neighborhood while he was in the exam hall. We were in the Market Street 94103 area in February to run paperwork errands.

[fairfarmhand]

If she doesn’t want to go don’t make her. 
i have mixed feelings about teens and service trips anyway.

[Katy]

I agree with others, but if you need more logical reasons, I haven’t been there in 12 years, but judging by friends social media posts that area is the last place I’d take kids on a service trip.

If the trip is church oriented it will not be received well and will expose kids to a lot of things some adults don’t want to see. If it’s financially oriented, there are plenty of billion dollar corporations in the area that can sponsor volunteers and write grants. This doesn’t seem well thought out to me. So much so that I would seriously question the motives and judgment of the person planning the trip and be reluctant to let them take a naive kid anywhere, ever. 

Have her volunteer for a local habitat for humanity project. Not all of them are home building. Some of them are things like weeding. I had a pastor once give a quite convincing argument that we should focus on helping the needy in our own area first. 

[Lecka]

My daughter is going on a trip like this and the location is chosen because the youth group leader and a denomination ministry have connections there and they will be able to stay free and hook up with people in the denomination there.

However I could see it being inappropriate for some youth based on the location.  They are going to an area that is high in poverty and I think it is also high in racism.  I don’t think every teen is ready for the same thing at the same age.

I think it will be a growth opportunity for my daughter.

But my sons aren’t going and I don’t think it would be awesome for them.

And, my daughter is excited to go, and she has read a related book and is very interested.  
 

I just would not send her for a week if she didn’t want to go.  
 

However I think it’s possible this is a well-planned trip and supervision would be high, that they would be — this is my mental image — helping with a Vacation Bible School program for a related denomination, where their help was organized and welcomed.  I don’t picture them — wandering around with pamphlets.  If they are going to a church facility and spending their time at the church facility, and then a fun day was spent going to tourist areas, for example, I would feel comfortable for safety if I trusted the leaders and sponsors for the trip, and thought they were realistic and had good judgment for the situation.  
 

If not, she shouldn’t go anywhere with them and that is okay!

Edited March 22, 2022 by Lecka

[Lecka]

Also, we are in a suburb of a city.  Just saying “they are going into this part of town” would not sound great.

But if reality is they are going to the large church in that area and doing projects at that church, not wandering around, and not being out after dark, etc, I do think it is safe.  
 

That is for the city we live near, that definitely has areas I would not want my daughter. 
 

But reality is if they go up there, it’s to a large church campus, or they might go to a service project (sometimes they do service projects for church members there) but the location is one the church there knows about.   
 

But if they were going to wander around, or if somebody in charge seemed to not have safety concerns, then I would be concerned!

 

My husband had some incredibly sketchy, poor-judgment things happen with his high school church.  I would not at all think everything is okay just because it’s a church and the people in charge are Christians.  And unfortunately, while there is much more to it, this is something that contributes to a lack of respect for his parents’ judgment, because they participated in some very poor-judgment things through that church.  And part of it is that they would think some things might be a bad idea, but never were able to do anything but go along with whatever was going on at church.  It comes across like they put their own popularity at church above their kids’ well-being.  They were worried like “what will we say to people at Sunday School, what will we say if the youth group leader asks us why our kids aren’t participating,” and it is not a good situation for a teenager to think that is what is going on.  There were many other issues but it was one, and it’s frustrating for me because my husband is distrustful of things that I wish he were not, and it effects our kids now.  
 

Edit:  if it’s more that there is pressure on your daughter, I think as a parent you can model how to decline and potentially lessen involvement or make a bigger change if the pressure is unreasonable.  If it’s reasonable and she just needs to be okay with not going on this trip, I think as a parent you can support and encourage her in that.  

 

Edited March 22, 2022 by Lecka

[KatieJ]

It’s your job to protect your daughter. You have concerns, she is not eager, so the answer is no.

Is it possible a lot of parents feel the way you do and that’s why there are not many signed up?

And maybe lack of participants will let the group rethink their mission trip.

[lmrich]

Trust your instinct - it is coming from a place of wisdom. 

[Faith-manor]

She doesn't want to go, you have concerns, that to me adds up to a know. That said, in my experience with service trips, teens rarely have a skill set valuable enough to be worth the trip, effort, money, etc. and often the organizers spend far more time keeping the flock of teens organized than getting anything done. So I am not a fan. 

I think your gut is sending you an important message.

[fairfarmhand]

28 minutes ago, Faith-manor said:

She doesn't want to go, you have concerns, that to me adds up to a know. That said, in my experience with service trips, teens rarely have a skill set valuable enough to be worth the trip, effort, money, etc. and often the organizers spend far more time keeping the flock of teens organized than getting anything done. So I am not a fan. 

I think your gut is sending you an important message.

Yep. You said it.

And, I would add that many times the teens in my circles who ask for $ for these trips are not serving in their home city/town. If a teen really wants to serve there is no reason to spend lots of $ to haul them to another city/state/country. I do know of teens who do serve consistently in local ministries. If those teems had asked for $ to go on a trip, I'd do it. Interestingly, they are so invested in their local ministries, that they don't have the time to go someplace else to do it.

But that has nothing to do with the OP's dd. That's my own individual soapbox. Sorry, OP

[Harriet Vane]

Speaking as someone who lived for fourteen years in a high-crime, dense, urban neighborhood and who volunteered extensively in the Robert Taylor Homes back in my youth:

Worry less about the area and more about the group, both the group she is going with and the hosting group at the other end. Chances are they have it organized to keep everyone within totally reasonable and protected parameters. 

So if she wants to go and you can work it out financially and you trust the people organizing the trip, it's fine. 

[Pam in CT]

If she doesn't want to go... for me, that would be that.

 

(As a general matter that doesn't seem to apply in this particular case, I concur with

32 minutes ago, Harriet Vane said:

Speaking as someone who lived for fourteen years in a high-crime, dense, urban neighborhood and who volunteered extensively in the Robert Taylor Homes back in my youth:

Worry less about the area and more about the group, both the group she is going with and the hosting group at the other end. ..

If it's a well run program with solid leadership, it'll be OK safety-wise just about anywhere. And alternatively if it's a seat-of-the-pants half-baked shoddily-supervised program there are real safety risks in any location, including those risks the kids themselves bring along with/in, their own physical/psychological baggage.)

 

But if your daughter isn't inclined to go, I can't imagine a reason to pressure her. To the extent there are benefits of such "service" programs, the benefits accrue vastly more to the kids whose world is widened, than to the putatively recipient communities who are blessed by the kids' unskilled labor or baby-hugging or earnest wisdom or etc.

[Lanny]

San Francisco is the last place in the USA I would want my daughter to go to, because of the crime and drugs and other things there. I read the news and know what goes on there. She has no interest and you have no interest so that should be a dead issue.

[Carol in Cal.]

I was there last Tuesday, driving through the Tenderloin, taking my dad to a doctor’s appointment.  It’s … very random.  Menacing, and randomly so.  

I wonder what the objectives are of this trip.  If it’s to see how scary it is when people are out of their minds, drug-addicted, and living on the streets, as a cautionary tale, it will teach that very well.  But I doubt that a mission trip would have that objective.  If it’s to see how intractable some social problems are, it will teach that very well also.  But again, that doesn’t sound like a mission trip to me.

If it’s to do some good, and/or to teach that people are the same all over, and/or to teach great compassion, I have my doubts that it will have that effect.  It might, but it might not.  

My dd and I both did volunteer work at a school in a very tough part of Silicon Valley that had a shooting right on the sidewalk outside of it one day when she was standing right there.  We had serious talks about how likely that was or was not to happen again, and about whether and how to continue.  Ultimately we both did, but that was a very different circumstance.  The people we were helping were victims or other helpers, not perps. We had a safe spot to work from, and we could adjust to avoiding dusk and night there without a lot of difficulty because we were driving to and from each time we went.  We were part of a team that was common minded and yet individuals with our own sense of agency.  Those things made it reasonable to continue, although I would have supported DD (and told her so) if she wanted to stop.  And we understood the whys of the shooting and that we were not among the targets, demographically, although we could easily have been collateral damage.  So I don’t come at this from a standpoint of ‘Safety always.’

With that in mind, I would still say, no to this particular mission trip.  You’re proposing something much less predictable, much farther away, and much less well understood.  I think that this is a very bad idea.  Say no to this one.  It’s probably not going to do any good, and it could very well result in significant harm.

Edited March 22, 2022 by Carol in Cal.

[Carol in Cal.]

9 minutes ago, Lanny said:

San Francisco is the last place in the USA I would want my daughter to go to, because of the crime and drugs and other things there. I read the news and know what goes on there. She has no interest and you have no interest so that should be a dead issue.

I go there pretty often, and it’s honestly not like this all over.  But the Tenderloin certainly is.

[GracieJane]

No way. I’ve been on many service and missions trips, and lived most of my life overseas. I am extremely concerned with the blasé way churches go about collecting teenage girls to „witness“ in dark places. Teenage girls are magnets for sick men and are frequently not emotionally prepared (nor should they be) for the language and attention directed towards them in these places. I was sexually assaulted by a homeless man once, and a few years later, I was required to serve in a homeless kitchen for community service, where I was sexually harassed again (all of this in my teens). It was a nightmare and I would never ask another teenage girl to serve in a city setting for these and other reasons. 

There are so many wonderful things teenage girls should do in their community, there is no reason to send them into dark and hostile environments.

Edited March 22, 2022 by GracieJane