My host site is the Center for Volunteer and Nonprofit Leadership and I am responsible for coordinating and strengthening off-site workshops with diverse communities. Every morning I drive toMarinCounty, one of the wealthiest counties in the nation, situated in the Bay Area. My work is concentrated in three distinguished communities in Marin:San Rafael’s Canal,MarinCityand West Marin.
In close proximity to Downtown San Rafael, the Canal provides a substantial portion of the low-income housing in one of the most affluent counties in theUnited States. The homes are inhabited mainly by Latinos who primarily hold low-income jobs.
In the southern region ofMarinCountyliesMarinCity, a predominately African American community. Presently, it offers subsidized housing to Marin residents. At theSeniorCenter, convened by ISOJI or Grassroots Leadership Network, residents discuss topics about housing, education, transportation and community programs.
West Marin attracts many tourists to the county with its beautiful scenery and sustainable agriculture.Core to the community is the San Geronimo Community Center andDancePalace. These organizations welcome community members to participate in classes, programs and musical events but they also hold meetings to discuss issues such as healthcare and locality.
Now back to my work at CVNL (the Center). I spend most of my time in the office learning about how programs strengthen nonprofits. I find myself asking “what trainings are needed to support nonprofits in the work that they do everyday?” and “what resources doMarinCountynonprofits need?”
Although I simply attend these community meetings, they advise my work and my approach to how we get services to the communities. After several meeting, I began to think that communities have all of these “real” concerns, which can be much more important than capacity building. Ultimately, capacity building activities include any activity that strengthens the performance of a nonprofit such as consulting services, workshops on board training, finance or training on grant writing. Sometimes community members talk about their concerns with housing, parenting, transportation or car impoundments and I try to resolve how community concerns fit in with capacity building.
I have been able to relate community concerns with capacity building by recognizing that if an organization is healthy, so is the community. If there is no organizational support for the community, then we are not working towards the alleviation of many social problems. Nonprofits do the work they do in alignment with their mission for the people that they serve, and management support for the organizations I engage with is crucial so they can keep on doing the type of work that they do in their communities.
Dulce Galicia
HandsOn Corps VISTA: Center for Volunteer and Nonprofit Leadership of Marin
Jubilee REACH is a non-profit community center that is truly making a difference in people’s lives! Our organization’s mission is to “Love, Listen and Learn”. This helps us identify what the real needs are, both tangible and intangible, so we can fill those needs! Jubilee REACH has over 30 programs, and all of them started from a need in the community. As a result, Jubilee REACH serves to mentor kids and be a positive influence in their lives. Our programs provide a healthy, safe environment that keep kids off the streets and out of harmful situations.
To help Jubilee expand our reach, we will be implementing an internship program for High School and College students. This will allow students to gain hands-on experience, be mentored by Jubilee REACH staff, and improve work-related skills. – According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) new college graduates who had participated in internships did far better in the job market than their classmates who had not had that experience.
I have worked to create the framework for this internship program by developing strategic steps for implementation and researching successful internship program structures. I have also created job descriptions for all of our internship opportunities which include Marketing and Promotion, Public Relations, Administrative Assistant, Community Hospitality, Retail, Sports and Volunteer Management. I have also created a welcome packet, and application documents and templates for Jubilee REACH to use.
I am thrilled to have helped develop structure for Jubilee’s internship program. I truly believe it will benefit Jubilee REACH and individuals involved in our programs. This internship program will help Jubilee REACH extend our reach by helping alleviate stress of program and volunteer leaders decreasing the risk of burn-out, giving Jubilee REACH staff the ability to network, helping to ensure we work with excellence by increasing professional development, increasing Marketing and Promotion of Jubilee REACH, and conserves financial resources. This will help build capacity and bring sustainability to Jubilee REACH as a whole.
Rachel Hood Riley
HandsOn Corps VISTA: The C4 Group, Jubilee REACH
In these past few months of AmeriCorps service I have gained wonderful working experience and have made an impact on my community. My host site is the United Way of Lake County in Gurnee Illinois. I am responsible for co-coordinating the Computer Learn and Earn program. This program gives away refurbished computers to parents who attend three computer training sessions. The classes cover basic computer skills, the parent portal at the high school, and parenting tips and graduation requirements. I am responsible for parent recruitment, volunteer sustainability, and record tracking.
Parent recruitment is one of the best parts of this job. I have come in contact with parents who are skeptical about the program and do not want to participate. Parents believe that they will not actually receive a free computer. The area that we service has a large immigrant community. I have found that there is also hesitation to participate because they believe that that there will be a review of their legal status to be eligible for the program. When I explain to them that the Computer Learn and Earn program only requires them to have a child in grades 6 through 12 in district and not have a home computer they are happy to participate. That change that occurs once the parents know there is no threat and the services are provided in their native language. Parents become more receptive to receiving help and accepting new ideas.
At one of my recruitment events I met the Colunga family. They have three children in the Waukegan public schools, and the two oldest daughters attend the high school. I introduced the program to them informing them if they attended three training sessions they could earn a free computer for their home. They started to tell me that they could not afford a computer for their family, and that they really wanted their daughters to attend college. They asked me a few questions about my high school and college experience. I gave them information about possible scholarship opportunities that are available to their daughters locally. They were extremely happy to know that there are opportunities available for their children. They told me that it was nice to see a kid from the neighborhood giving back. This made me feel that my term of service is going to make an impact in the community were I grew up. I feel blessed to have the opportunity to inform people of different possibilities available to them and maybe guide families to support their children’s aspirations for higher education.
I cannot write a blog about my AmeriCorps service without thanking all the volunteers that make the programs that I coordinate possible. Without the time and dedication of these individuals there would be no Computer Learn and Earn program. 177 families would be without a home computer. Parents would be less aware of their student’s academic progress. For the past year volunteers have helped to collect, refurbish, and distribute computers to low income families in the Waukegan area. They have had a hand educating parents about the American educational system. When parents are informed about their child’s educational life they are more willing to address problems that come up. The volunteers of our program have provided families with tools and education that can help students succeed in school.
This year of service has changed the way I look at “problems” in the community. One would think that parents who do not access educational tools to track their student’s academic progress have no interest to do so. Providing families with the proper education in a comfortable setting begins a process for change. Change can be the difference between a high school student graduating or dropping out.
Cynthia Castrejon
HandsOn Corps National Direct Member: United Way of Gurnee Illinois
The most rewarding element of myVISTAservice with HandsOn Northeast Ohio (NEO) is hosting our weekly Homework Help tutoring program inCleveland’s Ward 5. Every Wednesday evening throughout the school year, a group of fourth and fifth grade students (and occasional third grade cousin or sixth grade holdout from the year past) come to the Garden Valley Neighborhood House for a home cooked meal and a few hours of individual tutoring with some of our best volunteers.
Volunteer tutors do not arrive at the Neighborhood House until just prior to6pm, but the prep work for each week begins two days earlier when I design the menu for that week’s session. Each week features salad, an entrée, a side dish, a dessert, and milk. The next day, I prepare each student’s individual Homework Help Notebook and begin putting together the meal. Before serving with HandsOn NEO, I proudly served along the West Coast with the AmeriCorps NCCC. As part of my team Green 1, I learned to cook on a budget for a large group of very hungry people. Though we generally did not have an oven or stove to cook with, I learned how to piece together filling and satisfying meals for large groups on a tight budget. I learned to improvise pans, ingredients, and cooking methods to yield edible results. I’ve taken that skill and applied it to meal planning for Homework Help.
Thankfully, I have stove (and oven!) access and get to bake in a far more traditional way for these students. I bake before I go to bed. Schlepping the baked goods and uncooked groceries acrossClevelandto my bus stop is always a task and sight to see, but I happily arrive atGardenValleya few hours before the students arrive to cook dinner and finish any last minute preparations.
The first students trickle in at5:30pm. They either play games or (most often) volunteer to set up the tables for tutoring and the tables for dinner. We eat our healthy dinner together. Dinner is when I’m most surprised by these students. In all of my years of working with youth, I’ve never encountered a group that loves spinach, carrots, and celery as much as this group. True, we need an official “Rancher” (a position of great honor) to make sure the students have salad in lieu of ranch soup and I can’t get them to touch beans and chocolate is a hard sell for some kids, but I most always send a kid home with the bag of leftover spinach!
We clean-up our meal and tutoring begins. The students are paired with HandsOn NEO volunteer tutors and begin to work through their Homework Help Notebooks. Working from front to back, the students learn about nutrition and healthy living during with their HandsOn Health Workbook. Every week, the students list what food they ate for breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner as well as one healthy thing they did that day. The meaning of our service hits home when week after week students write that dinner is the only substantial meal they had that day. So while I cannot underplay the value of the tutoring, knowing that the students will not go home hungry that night is the most meaningful element of our program. Knowing that I’m not only sending them home with positive, individual academic attention, but bellies full and (more often than not) arms full of leftovers, is what I’m most proud of.
Laura West
HandsOn Corps VISTA: HandsOn Northeast Ohio
To spread holiday goodwill, I reached out to two non-profits in the neighborhood where I work to create a gift-giving program for children living in Ward 7 neighborhoods. Children impacted by these non-profits turned in wish lists, telling exactly what toys or clothes they were hoping to receive for the holidays. I loaded all of their wishes onto an Amazon.com wishlist and spread the word to HandsOn Greater DC Cares volunteers and Ward 7 residents that there was an easy way to brighten the holidays for kids in need.
After entering the gifts onto the internet wishlist, I began to check a few times each day to see if any of the items had been purchased. Each day, one or two gifts would migrate into the “purchased” section and the list of unpurchased presents grew a little shorter. But time was beginning to run out. It was a week before the presents needed to be wrapped and distributed to families before the holidays and there were still nearly 60 gifts left to be bought. I began to think of other options – perhaps each child could get just one gift? Maybe we could at least get some gift cards for kids to pick out their own toys? As I left for home Tuesday evening, I checked the wishlist one last time and saw nothing more had been purchased that day. It was beginning to look like some children were not going to get what they had hoped for for Christmas.
Later in the evening, I decided just to peek at the wishlist one more time. I was ready to be disappointed, but thought I might as well see if one or two toys had been purchased as people came home from week. As the page loaded on Amazon.com, I thought there must have been an error. The number of unpurchased items on the wishlist had dropped to seven! I refreshed the page and it was still true – nearly all of the presents for Ward 7 children had been purchased! In the four or five hours since I had last checked, someone or some group of people had purchased nearly 60 gifts. Now, not only would every child get a gift for the holidays, they would get two! And they would get the specific gifts they had requested. HandsOn Greater DC Cares volunteers and Ward 7 residents had created the perfect holiday surprise for Ward 7 kids!
http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-illustration-4724445-elves-and-toys.php
Torey Hollingsworth
HandsOn Corps VISTA, Greater DC Cares
At the close of my first day working for Grassroots Grantmakers I found myself staring at a stack of books my supervisor, Janis, had left for me to read. I thumbed through a couple of short packets in the stack and looked out my window at Lake Erie’s choppy water. As the four o’clock hour turned to five I grabbed The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods by John McKnight and Peter Block from my stack to read on the train home.
Grassroots Grantmakers is a network of foundations that all engage in some form of place-based, community funding—championing the idea that neighborhood residents know, more intimately than anyone else, what is best for their neighborhood. And as I learned very quickly on the train, academics like McKnight view this form of grantmaking as a way to combat the deterioration of community within one’s own neighborhood. McKnight and Block argue that consumerism has pushed us to outsource all the traditional functions of a neighborhood. The basest example of this would be instead of going to a neighbor’s door for a cup of sugar a person would more likely drive to the store and buy it instead. These ideas resonated with me and challenged the way I live my life. “Do I know my neighbors?”
Within my first week of work I had the privilege to attend a workshop that addressed many of the issues McKnight and Block raise in The Abundant Community. The workshop was to train Cleveland City residents to host and facilitate something called Neighbor Circles, a practice conceived by Bill Traynor at Lawrence CommunityWorks. Essentially, Neighbor Circles is a series of three dinners hosted by neighbors, for neighbors, with the intent for folks to get to know one another and eventually work together on a small project in their community. The principles are so basic they do not feel like they need to be taught but the actions are so impactful that it’s hard not to wonder if there are other forces at work.
Here is the breakdown:
Dinner #1: 6-10 neighbors eat together and do a mapping exercise and discuss the questions “how did you end up living in this neighborhood?”
Dinner #2: The same 6-10 people eat and discuss assets and challenges of their community and chose one main issue that they feel they can do something about
Dinner #3: The same 6-10 people eat and come up with a small action to take that addresses the issue from dinner #2
The workshop I attended simulated these dinners and from the simulation alone you could feel walls between people coming down. One man named Hank shared his story of how he ended up living in Cleveland. He discussed his very first memory, as a young child, riding a train from Tennessee to Ohio. In the years in between that day and now he had fought in the Vietnam War, hitchhiked to Texas, lived in California and periodically made his way back to Cleveland, his home. When Hank told our group that he hitchhiked to Texas as a twenty-year-old, he looked down at his shoes, smiled to himself and said “Boy, that was a good time.” Afterwards you could hear each person in the group’s muffled laughter and see their coy smiles as they remembered the fun times they had as twenty-year-olds. In that moment I got it. I understood that no matter how efficient it may be to outsource traditional community functions the relationships were irreplaceable.
Rachel Oscar
HandsOn Corps VISTA, Grassroots Grantmakers
This morning the DC Central Kitchen VISTA Corp members had the privilege of serving along side the CEO and other staff from The Corporation of Nation and Community Service (CNCS), the organization that administers the VISTA programs nation-wide.
Powerful and unique connections were made as the group chopped onions, peeled turnips and exchanged stories, all while helping in the production of the 5,000 meals that DC Central Kitchen distributes out to the community every day. With the holidays and the year-end quickly approaching, volunteers become an even more vital part of the process to ensure that DCCK can continue to “feed the soul of the city.”
CNCS with staff of DC Central Kitchen including HandsOn Corps VISTA, Matt Schnarr!
CNCS CEO, Robert Velasco, and Americorp Director, John Gomperts got to sit and dialogue with DCCK’s President Robert Egger, discussing the power and importance of volunteering. The group noted that while many choose to volunteer during the holiday season, volunteering is a year-round effort and can often affect the lives of both those doing the serving, as well as those being served.
It was a great morning for CNCS staff, VISTA members and DCCK staff alike, as they were able to see more clearly their common mission and connect through service!
Source: http://campuskitchens.org/blog/2011/12/20/cncs-visits-dcck/
Getting to know my community has been great. We have been knitting, gardening, working at a homeless shelter, meeting local school leaders, and very dynamic community leaders. My days have never been boring and are always challenging.
Our Veterans Day work has been one of my favorite volunteer experiences we have been a part of so far. We worked on an event inMarinCityan underserved population where we have been working to improve our neighboring efforts. We were honored to be able to attend a parade and presentation that honors the Tuskegee Airmen. The original Tuskegee Airmen were some of the first black soldiers in theUSarmed forces. The airmen were the catalysts for the integration of theUSarmed forces. We were able to meet some of the airmen and were able to hear some of the experiences they had with segregation during WW II. I grew up my entire life hearing about their story and watching movies about the men. My father is a Gulf War veteran and had a 26 year long military career; it was an honor meeting the men who helped pave the way for my father. Being a part of the historic event and watching the community rally around the men and celebrate their accomplishments was heartening. We began the day setting up a parade and watching demonstrations by young marine recruits. As the parade participants were all ready to get set up it began to rain and the temperature dropped. Our center was nervous our volunteers wouldn’t show and the event organizers were afraid the event would not happen. Despite the cold and rain people began showing up to support the event and all of our volunteers arrived excited to be apart of the day. We participated in a community barbeque and got to see a lot of familiar faces throughout the day. We have been working hard to attend community meetings and network and meet people in this area, it’s exciting to know that we are building positive rapport and are building our neighboring initiative in the area. After the barbeque we heard a monologue from a young student about the struggles of his great grandfather who was an original Tuskegee Airmen. As the event continued we heard stories from friends and family of the airmen as well as the airmen themselves. We were able to meet with the airmen and thank them personally for their service and their struggle.
Our time on Veterans Day inMarin Citywas great. Getting to spend time with the community at this celebration was great for us because we were able to spend time with the community where we are able to bond over the accomplishment of the veterans who joined us as opposed to the missions of our organizations. We made a lot of wonderful contacts and were invited to be a part of the MLK day coalition. We are really making a lot of headway inMarinCityand we are hoping that in time we will have all of the necessary infrastructure in place to increase our neighboring work.
Ashley Kelly
HandsOn Corps VISTA, Center for Volunteer and Non profit Leadership
Marin County
The past 3 months have been a rollercoaster of activities with all kinds of ups and downs. Working at a national level with nonprofit capacity building has provided unique challenges but also amazing opportunities. One of the biggest projects I have taken on can easily be summed up with one simple word: Surveying.
I’ve done two huge surveying projects thus far. The goal with our surveying has two functions. One is to find out the atmosphere internally with the nonprofits/churches we are partnering with, this includes surveying staff, volunteers, and beneficiaries. The other is to find out what the community feels are the needs and issues and to get some overall information on volunteering. The first surveying project I worked on was one of my first big duties as an AmeriCorps member. I organized a couple volunteers, created the surveys, found locations, and was in communication with the church we were partnering with. We set a high goal of 200 surveys and we hit the streets. When the day was over we gathered around and counted our 30 community surveys.
Fortunately for me I knew in one month I would be able to work on not being so shy and hopefully improve my surveying skills. I would get the chance to do more surveying for a different, and much larger, organization. I was dreading it. With the first surveying experience under my belt I was able to plan the next one with much more efficiency and carefully thought out plans. This time I knew how much energy and time it would take. Although I was still anxious about the whole experience I was much more prepared. I am still wrapping up this surveying process but we have gotten 150 community surveys and over 100 and still counting surveys internally from this nonprofit.
Rose with two other HandsOn Corps VISTAs, Everett and Rachel, at their Survelabration.
The information we are collecting is valuable for working on the infrastructure of a nonprofit or church, building capacity and sustainability with volunteers and beneficiaries, and helping show the real needs of the community. We do a statistical analysis of the information we gather and put it into a personalized Community Engagement Plan (along with many other useful tools). The statistical analysis can really be beneficial to create clarity of areas that need improvement. For example the nonprofit we are working with right now is doing a great job mobilizing large numbers of volunteers and meeting the needs within the community, but through the surveying of the volunteers we have found that many feel they are not properly trained. One solution that is mentioned repeatedly throughout staff and volunteer surveys is that there is no manual for volunteers or staff that can give them essential information about their role within the organization. For a large nonprofit that is continuing to expand, creating a manual could be an excellent starting point for forming a more organized training system. The surveying we do can provide powerful evidence and be used to help assist upper management in making decisions that will impact the capacity and sustainability of their organization.
I no longer dislike surveying because I can see what a powerful impact the results can have. I now feel more like a surveying master rather than a surveying disaster. Of course none of that would be possible without my fellow surveying VISTA Everett Pauls – he taught me about how the TV show “Dog Whisper” can teach you a lot about surveying- and also Rachel Riley and Julia Cain. And of course since it is so important to keep yourself encouraged, last week we had a little Survelabration (a celebration for doing a great job surveying). It was a good time to have a little fun and reward ourselves for our hard work and our enormous improvements!
Rose Waller
HandsOn Corps VISTA, The C4 Group
Issaquah, Washington
My experience coming into the HandsOn Corps family, and more specifically the Neighboring initiative, this past August has been a challenging, yet exciting endeavor. I, like most new VISTA volunteers, was starry-eyed and dreaming of saving the world when I arrived at my PSO in Atlanta. For nearly three full days we were initiated, trained, engaged and then retrained on how best to come into our new lives as warriors against poverty. We all went off to save our respected cities, and I became the Community Organizer with HandsOn Greater DC Cares (HGDCC) for a brand spankin’ new Neighboring initiative in two divergent and unique communities: Eckington and Shaw.
The trouble with bringing new programming into a community (or two) that you have never worked or lived in is that – well, quite obviously – you didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know the culture of the community, the movers-and-shakers, or the best methods to begin engaging community residents. More importantly these two communities, though geographically close to one another, have two specific identities. Shaw, home to Howard University and historic ties to race riots in the 1960’s, is a staple in African-American culture and to the success of the civil-rights movement. Eckington on the other hand, is home to a gentrifying population of active and young professionals, many of whom have never lived in the District or known what it is like to survive in poverty in this city. Still, I did not know these people, what mattered to them, or how best to get them to listen to me.
So, amidst all of my frustration and confusion on how to begin this tedious project of outreach, I reverted back to what I had been doing for six months of unemployment: I Facebooked. That’s right, I said it. On my first day of work, I sat down at a desk and got on Facebook. You know what’s worse? I also opened a Twitter account. I have never used Twitter before and never thought it would be useful to me. But what better way to gage discontent about something than to research what is posted on Facebook or on Twitter? This little tweeting media account was the resource I needed to begin identifying community events in my neighborhood that eventually led to huge resident investment in my neighboring program.
At one such event, which was cleverly dubbed a neighborhood “Tweet-Up”, I met community residents living in eastern Eckington. This included a new pet-grooming business owner, a guy running for ANC Commissioner, a community leader who sponsors and organizes youth basketball teams, a woman who grows and sells produce at the neighborhood farmers market, a Tweeter who warns residents about potential threats within the neighborhood, a representative from a DC-based advocacy group, and many, many more. Each one of these individuals is an outreach opportunity or a potential volunteer leader. They each have unique skills and passions that add value to their community.
Since then, I have been able to explore these skills to better understand different aspects of the community and have asserted the Neighboring Program as something equally as beneficial to residents. I have been invited to many events throughout the city, from a Day of Service at a local high school to a citywide walk for education reform, to speak to people about our program. In the process I have met even more residents with vital skills and connections within their neighborhoods and now feel confident in my ability to serve them.
My point is this: you can listen to as many webinars and attend as many workshops at PSO’s that will fit into three days, but no training session can fully prepare you for the unique experience of coming into a new and diverse neighborhood. It’s about research and exploration, trial-and-error, and getting creative with skills that you already have. Maybe I can’t apply my super Sudoku abilities to work, but at least my obsession with social media has proven useful.
Best,
@am7641a
Amanda Moore, HandsOn Corps VISTA with Greater DC Cares
