At Realized Worth, we spend a lot of time thinking about what actually changes as a result of corporate volunteering — and what doesn’t.
The easy answer is that volunteering changes communities for the better. (Whether or not that’s entirely true is a topic for another day.) A more honest answer is that, while volunteering may solve a short-term problem or address an immediate need, volunteering only changes communities long-term to the extent that it first changes individuals. Systemic impact is almost always downstream from internal shift. The person who comes home from volunteering seeing differently, thinking differently, and carrying an altered sense of who counts as “us” is the person who, over the next decade, changes how their company hires, buys, speaks, and invests (among other things), and that’s where the real leverage lives.
This is why we pay such close attention to the mindset volunteers arrive with. Even the most well-intentioned among us can step into a community with a sense of saviorism. We see ourselves as the one who came to help, the one with something to give, the one who can make a difference. It is almost never conscious, but when it’s there, it reinforces the very us-and-them machinery — the othering — that volunteering has the power to dismantle.
I’ve been watching people encounter the ideas of ‘othering’ and ‘un-othering’ for years. Three questions tend to surface whenever this language is new:
1. What is othering?
Othering, at its most basic, is what the brain does when it decides that someone is outside the group it knows. Importantly, it isn’t an opinion and it isn’t a choice. It’s a neural setting. When we categorize another person as not-us (by color, class, language, faith, zip code, accent, uniform, anything) the region of the brain responsible for mentalizing, for imagining another person’s inner life, throttles back. We still see them, but we stop processing them as fully real, fully human. This default was hardwired through evolution to help our ancestors stay loyal to their own tribe because their own tribe promised safety and, ultimately, survival. It is neither rare nor a moral failure. It’s simply the operating system we’re all running underneath the conscious mind, in every room, every day.
2. What is un-othering?
Un-othering is the deliberate, trainable practice of keeping that mentalizing machinery online across group lines. To be clear, I’m not talking about a feeling of universal love and I’m definitely not talking about colorblindness. The work of un-othering is made up of small, specific neurological acts: continuing to imagine the interior life of someone the brain has already sorted into “not mine.” Because the default runs underneath awareness, un-othering cannot be willed into place by good intentions or extensive training or any level of cognitive information. It requires repetition, proximity, and structured reflection. It is closer to a muscle than a mood. It is strengthened through practice and it is lost through disuse.
3. How does volunteering help with un-othering?
Volunteering, when designed well, is a reliable environment for strengthening that muscle. It places people in proximity with other people (often through storytelling) they would not otherwise encounter, around a shared task that dissolves the hierarchy of helper and helped, long enough for the brain to begin processing those people as individuals rather than categories. Decades of intergroup contact studies (one meta-analysis pulled from more than five hundred of them) show that structured cross-group contact reliably reduces prejudice, and that friendship-level contact produces roughly a third more change than casual exposure. Stories activate mentalizing, mentalizing releases oxytocin, oxytocin strengthens trust and bonding, and repeated experiences turn the moment into a durable pattern.
The qualifier matters, though. When designed well. A volunteer day that never closes the distance between volunteer and community — that keeps the volunteer in the role of benefactor and the community in the role of grateful recipient — does not produce un-othering. In fact, it often produces the opposite. This is why the design of the experience carries so much weight, and why the work we do at Realized Worth focuses on building the facilitation architecture that turns an ordinary day of service into a transformative experience.
The concept of othering (and un-othering) is complex. At last year’s Social REV LIVE, some of our more discerning participants asked questions or offered reflections like this:
- If you’re asking me to stop othering, are you asking me to stop seeing?
- To stop naming that my community has been redlined, surveilled, underpaid, underestimated?
- To stop noticing who is in the room and who is not?
- If un-othering means flattening us into one undifferentiated “us,” then I can’t go there. I’ve spent too long being told I’m welcome on the condition that I show up like everyone else.
The last century gave us an entire vocabulary for what “one of us” can do when the terms of belonging are set by the dominant group. Melting pots melt. Colorblindness often turns out to mean choosing not to see the color that was just used to deny someone a mortgage. Assimilation has too often been the price of entry. If that were what un-othering meant, the instinct to refuse it would be correct. But that isn’t what it means.
Othering, in the sense we teach, is not the perception of difference. Othering is the withdrawal of moral concern. It’s the small, almost imperceptible shift in the brain that allows us to stop processing a person as fully human. It’s when we can walk past a “homeless” encampment without registering the people inside it, or when we read about the removal of protections for trans youth and feel nothing, or when we hire from the same three schools for the fifteenth year in a row without noticing who we keep leaving out.
The neuroscience says that when we categorize someone as outside our group, the region of the brain that handles mentalizing — the ongoing work of imagining another person’s inner life (read more here) — disengages and turns that person into a category, putting a wall between “us” and “them.”
Un-othering starts with noticing that wall. Once we accept that othering is a survival tactic inherited from early humans, and once we recognize that separating ourselves into factions of “us” and “them” no longer serves us, we can adopt the work of un-othering as a practice.
Un-othering as a Practice
Un-othering as a practice is when we intentionally put ourselves in situations (like well-designed volunteering!) that help us notice the mental habits that come online when we’re in proximity with people whose backgrounds and experiences are different than ours. When we notice these mental habits and critically examine them, our perspectives begin to change. (Listen to Chris Jarvis talk about the neuroscience of volunteering.)
This is where “belonging” sometimes gets misheard, and I don’t blame anyone for mishearing it. When we talk about expanding the circle of belonging, we are not talking about expanding a uniform. We are talking about expanding the group of people we treat as fully worthy of moral attention, fully real, fully inside the scope of our care. The people inside that circle are not the same as each other. They were never supposed to be. A circle that demands sameness is not belonging.
There is a posture underneath all of this that I keep coming back to which is the difference between doing something for someone, to someone, and with someone.
- For is advocacy at a distance, often practiced by people who never meet the person they claim to stand beside.
- To is charity in its least generous form, the benefactor and the beneficiary with their roles fixed in place, dignity often exchanged for a donation.
- With is the only one of the three that produces what most of us actually want when we do this work: partnership, mutual change, helper and helped dissolving into participants in the same unfinished project.
A with posture does not require anyone to become like anyone else. It requires that each person be seen in the full texture of who they are, and that the relationship between them be rebuilt on different terms. (Read more in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.)
When people arrive at this work carrying the weight of having been othered themselves, they are sometimes asked to consider whether they can extend the same moral attention outward that they wish had been extended to them. That is a hard ask, and it should be. It does not mean forgiving the systems, softening the truth, or pretending the line isn’t there. It means holding the line clearly and refusing to use it as a reason to withdraw your humanity, or anyone else’s, which is in many ways stranger and often more demanding.
Building the Capacity for Empathy
The systems are real. Redlining is real. Eminent-domain highways that tore through Black neighborhoods and stopped halfway are real. The segregated dining halls some of us still remember sitting in, more recently than the country likes to admit, are real. I can walk anyone through the history. I can draw the lines on the map. And at the same time, the invitation of this work is to keep the mentalizing circuit online across those lines. To keep imagining the inner life of the person on the other side of the room, even when they have not yet extended that imagination to you.
I think this is the piece that can get lost when the concepts move fast and the time in the room is short. Un-othering is not a request to be less honest about who we are, or what has happened to our people, or what is still happening. It is a request to be more precise about where the damage lives. The damage does not live in the perception of difference. It lives in what we do with that perception, and specifically, in the moment when difference becomes a subconscious excuse to dismiss the humanity of another.
This is why corporate volunteering matters to us at Realized Worth, and why we spend so much time talking about transformation. A well-designed volunteer experience is one of the few structured environments in adult life where people are repeatedly placed in proximity with someone outside their usual circle, around a shared task, long enough for our perspectives to shift. What we are actually building is the capacity for empathy — experience by experience, reflection by reflection — until what used to require conscious effort begins to show up as the default response to difference.
When that capacity takes hold in a workforce, it travels into the next hiring panel, the next vendor decision, the next conversation with a colleague whose experience sits outside their own. The community the volunteer served for a Saturday morning isn’t the only one that changes. The company they work in, the team they lead, the dinner table they sit at — over time, those change too. Volunteering, done well, is not a gift handed down to communities from the outside. It is a practice we undertake so that, over time, we become the kind of people who build the conditions in which fewer communities need that kind of help in the first place.
