Comments/reactions to the field trip to Glide? Discuss here

Marcel's philosophy

Marcel (the health promoter who talked to us for about an hour this morning) kept referring to a philosophy known as harm reduction. The Wikipedia article to which I linked provides a lot of information about this. Wikipedia also has a good article about client-centered therapy, a tradition in which Marcel seems to be working. Client-centered and humanistic therapies in general embody strong psychological assumptions about how people can be nurtured into being responsible individuals. What assumptions about the clients of Glide's health services, if true, would make Marcel's approach an effective one? - Todd

I found the Wikipedia article on harm reduction very helpful in understanding Marcel's overall approach. Personally, I think it is an appealing philosophy, but one that can be taken too far. My reaction to Marcel was that he was too reluctant to try to steer clients' behaviors in less harmful directions. Maybe I'm a Gradualist? - Tom

After reading the article on harm reduction, I was struck by how service approaches to societal problems might also be viewed as having a "harm reduction" philosophy. Consider the Red Cross, for example. Its approach is to reduce the harm caused by things like natural disasters and wars, and many who support it seem to assume that such catastrophes are inevitable and that attenuating harm is the best one can do, but this philosophy does not seem to engender widespread controversy in the societal domain. I find it interesting that people appear much more suspicious of harm reduction as an approach to individual problems than to societal problems. Why would most people (as I think they would) find it absurd to say that the Red Cross is helping to enable warfare and human activities that contribute to natural disasters, such as those that appear to cause climate change? - Todd

Hot sauce blunder

Early in the lunch period I noticed that the staffer who had been going to tables serving hot sauce was not in sight, and I volunteered to serve hot sauce. But I learned that there were preferred ways of doing it that I hadn't been aware of - going to tables after people sat down rather than offering hot sauce at the end of the line, and not letting diners handle the bottle. I violated both of these quite a lot. The latter now strikes me as the more serious breach - folks dining at Glide eat bread and other food with their hands and should not be handling a shared bottle. In retrospect, I should have asked for more advice, since I wasn't sure whether to let people handle the bottle or not. Afterward I felt guilty. If I hadn't been there to serve, fewer people would have gotten hot sauce, but now some might get ill because of what I did - I may have violated the maxim, "First, do no harm". This illustrates how good intentions in service can lead to problematic outcomes if insufficient care is taken, a general lesson I keep learning whenever I volunteer. - Todd