NYLC Welcomes New AmeriCorps Promise Fellows

NYLC is pleased to announce the additions of two outstanding AmeriCorps Promise Fellows, Lana Peterson and Irina Vaynerman.

Lana Peterson supports the Generator School Network in various capacities including professional development trainings and resources, helping teachers and AmeriCorps members and teachers practice high-quality service-learning. She is excited to be a part of NYLC and says she is looking forward to deepening her knowledge of service-learning, the achievement gap, and quality professional development. “While I am learning all this from NYLC, I am also excited to give all I have in my year of service to build capacity and make our programming stronger,” she says.

Lana holds elementary education degree from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and served as a service-learning coordinator last year through AmeriCorps in the Duluth Public Schools. While service-learning in the classroom is a “no-brainer” for her, she’s interested in learning more about why some teachers familiar with service-learning do not use it. She also hopes to learn more about the research side of service-learning, particularly “why [it has] been so difficult to get quantitative evidence when we know service-learning is so powerful.”

Having already served a year as an AmeriCorps member, Lana says she loves the Promise Fellow program because “Our supervisors at the Minnesota Alliance with Youth utilize our talents as a corps to better serve and support each other as AmeriCorps while also serving the greater community.”

To learn more about Lana, read her staff bio. (http://www.nylc.org/pages-staff-bio-Lana_Peterson?oid=9495)
Learn more about the GSN(http://gsn.nylc.org)

Irina Vaynerman joins NYLC as the Youth Initiatives AmeriCorps Promise Fellow, developing and conducting trainings on service-learning and the achievement gap and providing support for the annual National Youth Leadership Training.

Irina sees service-learning as an innovative way to engage students in their schools and communities. While a student at Harvard, she volunteered at the Mission Hill After-School Program, where she was reminded daily of the achievement gap as she worked with students primarily from two housing projects. Her passion for youth development and social justice, as well as interest in engaging in the service-learning world, led her to NYLC. Here, she anticipates that her year of service as an AmeriCorps Promise Fellow will continue her commitment to “improving education while dedicating a year of service to alleviating the achievement gap, particularly from a systemic level.”

She says she is most excited about working with “an amazing group of individuals who carry a wealth of knowledge and experience” and hopes to learn a lot, as well as contribute her own experiences. In particular, she’s looking forward to developing her skills in “fostering partnerships with a diverse array of individuals and organizations; becoming an outstanding trainer/leader of training sessions; becoming an expert on the achievement gap and ways to alleviate this gap through tangible and realistic means; forming a strong bond with members of YAC; and learning more about nonprofit management.”

To learn more about Irina, read her staff bio. (http://www.nylc.org/pages-staff-bio-Irina_Vaynerman?oid=9493)

Learn more about the National Youth Leadership Training. (http://www.nylc.org/pages-programs-initiatives-National_Youth_Leadership...)