AmeriCorps: The Ultimate Service Learning Experience
AmeriCorps is helping, building, connecting, growing, inspiring, encouraging, empowering, achieving, serving, learning. It is the ultimate year-long service learning experience. Our nonprofits and communities become the perfect classroom, and our cohort of service members becomes the perfect class to discuss things like the roots of social inequality, educational achievement gaps, and strategies for alleviating poverty. We use our service experience to come together to reflect, brainstorm, strategize, and learn.
I have served as an AmeriCorps VISTA for the past two years with Habitat for Humanity of Minnesota and with the Community Design Center of Minnesota under the St. Paul VISTA Program. Through my service experience, I’ve learned about the inner workings of nonprofits, the importance of good evaluation methods, the craziness of grant writing/reporting, and the multiple hats everyone must wear. I’ve learned to utilize Excel to analyze survey data and databases, learned to juggle multiple projects and manage people, and learned to communicate with a variety of audiences through writing, speaking, video, and other media. I’ve also learned the benefits and challenges of living on a budget and of social services systems.
Most of all, the people I serve have taught me so much about perseverance and the power of the human spirit. Habitat homeowners are overcoming incredible challenges and transforming their lives in so many areas. They are attaining higher education and their kids are doing better in school. They are achieving financial stability and paying down mortgages. They are increasing their emotional and physical wellbeing and are connecting with and becoming leaders in their community. The high school students I work with have found a family in our out-of-school-time programming and are making healthy life habits, increasing their 21st century skills, making their community and the environment a better place, and are persistent, hopeful, and determined to achieve their dreams. Ultimately, I’ve learned to never underestimate the power of the underdog, the shy kid, the troublemaker, because given the right opportunity, they are rockstars; sometimes a helping hand is all someone needs to find that path to open the doors to greatness.
