What John Donne was saying is that no human being can live in absolute solitude and be fully human. The human experience is one of relationships. The relationship with our family, friends, neighbours, work colleagues and passers-by make up the everyday events that ultimately fill our lives. No man is an island because the events that culminate in a man’s life are rarely if ever solitary. Donne progresses to say that when one of those many interactions stops, our lives are the lesser for it. We are diminished as individuals because our relationship with the external world has diminished. Implicit is a relationship with mankind as a whole and a recognition that we are in need of one another.

Furthermore, SERVE has had this belief reinforced each year by learning first-hand from the experience of the Volunteer Programme. Irish volunteers have witnessed themselves being welcomed and participating in the communities where our partners operate. They have seen how easy it is to make links with people and even communicate where there are language barriers.

Because we are all connected the question of ethics arises. Implicit in the concept of solidarity is the belief that at base we hold more in common than in difference and that we all benefit from the Common Good. As we all benefit from the Common Good it is our duty, all our duty, to uphold the Common Good. And more than that, this principle leads us to the corollary that our dignity and individual worth is born from a humanity that is common and shared. Any attack on the dignity of another is an attack on the shared humanity that gives rise to that dignity. Ultimately an attack on the dignity of the poor is an intimate and insidious attack on the dignity of humanity itself. Our response to this attack, our unwillingness to accept it and our insistence that each person’s dignity and human rights be fully restored is the essence of solidarity:

“Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in the oppression of others, and from the deep recognition of our most expansive self-interest. From the recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable.” (Aurora Levins Morales)

At no other time in history has our interconnectedness and our dependence on other people right across the globe ever been more intense or more expansive. The age of globalisation and economic globalism means that our economies, the production of our wealth and material livelihood, are no longer regional or national but instead intricately linked with almost all other economies. The production of goods and the rendering of services requires cooperation with people on separate continents. As we become ever more closely linked to people in such a visceral and tangible way as the trade of goods like food and clothing, as our global community gets smaller and more immediate our responsibility to one another increases and becomes ever more certain. Not least of all does our responsibility to the marginalized and vulnerable increase; to protect them from the worst excesses of the global capitalist system.

SERVE’s ethos of solidarity impacts directly on how the organization operates. Working with the most marginalized and vulnerable can no longer be envisaged as optional. It cannot be understood as charity, rather it is an issue of justice; it is an obligation. A recognition of our shared humanity and intrinsic equality means that SERVE cannot operate according to a power relationship which places the poor at the whim of the wealthy. Instead SERVE strives to work in partnership with the communities of the developing world:

“Unlike solidarity, which is horizontal and takes place between equals, charity is top-down, humiliating those who receive it and never challenging the implicit power relations.” (Eduardo Galeano)

The SERVE Volunteer Programme places Irish volunteers in communities where they not only work with, but take the lead from, SERVE’s project partners. At its best solidarity is defined by the impetus that urges volunteers to give up their time and effort to work with SERVE’s partner communities. And SERVE is at its best when it grows and strengthens that sense of solidarity among the volunteers.

‘Solidarity is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortune of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the Common Good, that is to say, the good of each individual because we are all really responsible for all.’ (John Paul II)