How does a BA in Political Science, a person who fumbled her way through the general undergraduate science requirements, still uses a flip phone, let’s just say did not win the popsicle stick bridge contest in 5^th grade and heart still races when having to apply basic mathematics-come to find a biology lab thrilling, proved capable of holding subjected-related conversations with PhDs in Physics, Biological Sciences and Computer Engineering; now fantasizes about being  a Hydrologist, gets excited when hearing the word statistics and has spent the last 8 months focused on Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM)?  Simple, by  serving as the Massachusetts Campus Compact(MACC) AmeriCorps*Volunteer in Service to America (VISTA),  STEM Community Based Learning Coordinator for Smith College’s Center for Community Collaborations (CCC)and Five College Inc.’s Community Based Learning Committee(FCCBL)!

Yes, long titles are just another perk of being a VISTA and typically follow with sequences of questioning, like: “Say that again?”- “Oh, that sounds interesting…”-“Wait, what is VISTA?” – “So, are you out of school?”- “Did you major in a STEM discipline?”- “Are you an Alumna of the Five Colleges?”- “Can you help me with [insert anything you would assume to be a capacity building activity]”-“Wait, you are doing all this and you’re JUST a volunteer?”-“Okay, I have to admit, I am very confused.”

After experiencing at least two of the above questioning encounters, I quickly learned, as many longed title VISTA positions do, to practice the very thing repeated over and over by professors of Public Speaking 101: To Know your Audience. In other worlds, before you speak, find out who is/are the listener(s) and use language/ phrases that allow that person, group, community or institution to not only hear the message, but also understand it.  Over the past 8 months of my service, I have been fortunate enough, on a daily basis, to interpret and frame my VISTA title to an array of audiences.  Here is a sample of my daily interpretations.

To Academics/those working in the academy: “Building pragmatic capacity for  Smith College’s Center for Community Collaborations  and the entire  Western Massachusetts Five College Inc. Community Based Learning  Committee’s initiatives that seek to engage and support underrepresented students in STEM disciplines.”

To Community/Full Service Organizations:  “Leveraging college resources to  assist in expanding the access and success of  youth/young adults/adults  who are not interested, think it’s too hard and feel discouraged, to see Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math(STEM) as a fun and accessible subjects for all types of  learners!”

To Members of Massachusetts Campus Compact:  “Leveraging Five College recourses to support community organizations and programs working to get underrepresented students on and stay on the STEM education Pipeline!”

To Fellow VISTA Volunteers:  “Getting things done for America through engaging and supporting underrepresented students in STEM!”

To Relatives/Friends: “Leveraging your tax dollars to support me in serving America’s next STEM workforce.”

By no means, do I feel I have mastered the art of interpreting and applying my VISTA title, but they say, practice makes perfect and I am practicing 7 days a week, 24hrs a day!

Putting all humor a side, the fact that a BA in Political Science, self-proclaimed STEM-phobic has in 8 months gone through a major paradigmatic shift(seeing her applicability and abilities in STEM),speaks volumes not  only to the impact national service has in the communities served, but also the broad impact it has on its service members.

So, thank you to the Corporation For National and Community Service, AmeriCorps*VISTA, Massachusetts Campus Compact, Smith College and Five Colleges Inc., for not only giving me the opportunity to serve my community, but for allowing me to see that it is never too late to conquer your fears and through that courage allow others to, too!

Monica Freeland

MACC AmeriCorps*VISTA

Smith College and Five Colleges Inc.

In collaboration with the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and the Community Economic Development Center of Southeastern Massachusetts, the VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program) was able to process 1,187 tax returns in New Bedford Massachusetts, making the total refunds $1,691,629! The taxes were prepared by 34 UMass Dartmouth student volunteers whom generated over 1,632 volunteer hours throughout tax season. The  CEDC also partnered with the Mayor of New Bedford, Jon Mitchell, to do a tax day at City Hall!

Courtney Kurzweil

MACC AmeriCorps*VISTA

UMASS Dartmouth

As the semester winds down here in the so-called five college area of western Massachusetts, you start to see the signs. I see students waiting near the Peter Pan bus stop with their luggage, students sleeping in the library’s comfy chairs, and the printers constantly whirring, printing final papers. The lecture halls on the way to my office in Dwight Hall have signs that say, “Closed Book Exam room”. Ah, yes I remember this time as a student. But how strange to be here yet not dragging around the ball-and-chain of final exam stress.

This is not because you’re not busy when you’re a MACC VISTA, oooh no. It’s just that you experience stress on a different schedule than when you were a student. Life lesson 101: once you graduate from college, you are no longer on the student schedule. For example, people in the real world don’t have a “summer vacation” per se but you have vacation time. People in the real world have positions that are for example, a 10 or 11-month position or you are a part time employee. But before taking this position as a MACC VISTA, that was something I didn’t know was possible. Although most people I know who have these special positions work way more than what their position calls for.

As vacation time can vary in the real world, the times where you are working non-stop can also depart from the student schedule. The past few weeks that have led up to this final exam period have been a highly trafficked time for work. Notice that I didn’t say “stressful” because with this type of work, it’s a different output than when you are a student. When I’m working at full capacity, I feel more in control and more satisfied with what I’m doing. I’m still learning; it’s just not coming from a book.

For example, looking at my day planner for the last couple of weeks is like jumble of colors and lines and scribbles that to any other person, would look like a total mess. But this is what my last few weeks have been like: a mix of colors, smiling faces, and take away messages. “IT Capstone Final Presentation: reserve space at Picknelly Adult Education Center” reads one bullet on a to-do list, next to a lovely splotch of a coffee stain.

Cut from this spattering of ink on the pages of my planner to a large well-lit room with desks and a presentation screen at the front of the room. Standing at the front of the room in their collared, ironed shirts and casual business attire are the Umass Amherst students who I have been working with since September. All seniors about to graduate, they are presenting their research and findings for their IT Capstone Projects. The IT Capstone course is a service-learning course in the Community Engagement and Service Learning (CESL) program at Umass Amherst. Before this course, many of them had been focusing on business, entrepreneurship,  and subjects like math in traditional courses.

As they spoke about their work in the Holyoke community, it was very evident that many of these students had experienced a paradigmatic shift in their thinking about learning and school. “Being in this course has been responsible for my new interest in education, combined with a book that we read earlier in the semester”, said one of the students Jenna. “The company that I will be starting with in June has a service learning program and I will certainly be getting involved with that as a result of my experience in this course”. It was good to hear this.

And then I started thinking: when I started I had never taken an interest in information technology. I didn’t really even know what it was. And with each class that I went to, I felt that the bond between these students from all different walks of life, was becoming stronger. And it was all because of this common bond; this common language of technology.

And as they became more cohesive in their teams, taking the strengths and challenges as they came, this bond became a common syntax for their specific projects in the community. Not that that the outcome was at all obvious to these students. As I listened to them present each week about what they had done, it became apparent that this was an undertaking in the unknown for all of them. Even with the unpredictability of the service-learning aspect of the course, technology was a deliverable and tangible outcome that they could provide.

“I don’t know where I’m going to be, what community I will end up being a part of, but from this course I now know the value of what it means to be in a community. That’s something I want in where I end up”, said one of the students in the final presentation.

I was on a bike ride looking out at the rolling purple hills overlooking the rows of harvested farm land in golden afternoon light. As I was going, I was wondering how one might go about writing a thank-you note to the AmeriCorps VISTA program or the Corporation for National and Community Service. Do they ever get thank you notes? I mean, here I am riding my bicycle through this beautiful area of western Massachusetts thinking that I definitely would not be here if it weren’t for AmeriCorps.

Since I am a MACC VISTA for the Five Colleges, I spend a lot of time thinking about how many young people graduate from college to work at a Dunkin Donuts or to move back home and find a part time job to save money. That seems like a pretty bleak prospect. So the question remains, how did I get so lucky as to have this opportunity to serve as a MACC *VISTA for AmeriCorps? This is a job that I was able to get right after graduating which gave me the freedom and structure to gain a ton of valuable work experience.

I guess if I could write a thank you note to AmeriCorps this is what I would say: I started this year with a pair of dress pants, a new gmail account, and came out of it with so much more. I came out of it knowing how to organize students, what it takes to organize a big event, how to delegate tasks, and way more experience with writing. Moreover, I’ve had the opportunity to put my energy into valuable projects that are changing the lives of young people.

So say what you will about politics or the government, but there is one thing that I can say: that this opportunity has made me feel supported. I think it’s important to be critical. I grew up with activist parents. But what I’ve learned is that it’s also important to recognize when a program is truly successful and truly a benefit to civilians.

So thanks, AmeriCorps. You’ve made my life so much better by taking me in and making me feel like my education and experience is useful.

Sarah Wentworth

MACC AmeriCorps*VISTA

Five Colleges, INC; Mount Holyoke College

For National Volunteer Week (April 15 – 21), SouthCoast Serves leads a week of events with the theme of Spring into Service in the SouthCoast! We were able to engage 371 volunteer in 1,388 hours of service in just 6 days as part of the Massachusetts Service Alliance’s YOU GENERATE VOLUNTEERS campaign! On Monday, groups from the Boys and Girls Club of Fall River, the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park and UMass Dartmouth went out to Mass Audubon Stone Barn Farm Property where they participated in a clean-up of the property and helped prepare their garden for planting.

On Tuesday, a group of students from the Fall River Public School and UMass Dartmouth volunteers were at the Trustees of Reservations in Fall River where they transplanted cedar trees in the Copicut Woods. On the next day, UMass Dartmouth students and community volunteers were at the YMCA Farm in Dartmouth where they planted a peach tree orchard that will produce fruit for decades to come. Then on Thursday, students from UMass Dartmouth, Fall River Bank of America employees and community members spent the morning with the Buzzards Bay Coalition at their Acushnet River restoration site where they helped spread grass seed, clean up the property and do some trail maintenance. On Thursday evening, community members and UMass Dartmouth students worked with local artist Lynne LaBerge to create a mural at the CEDC (Community Economic Development Center of Southeastern Massachusetts).

To end out the work week, on Friday, students from UMass Dartmouth and community members went to the Boys and Girls Club of New Bedford where they prepared and planted flower and vegetable gardens! Finally, on Saturday, community members and students from the university participated in Operation Clean Sweep in New Bedford where they cleaned up the streets of Ward 3 in New Bedford. In the afternoon, community members and students then went to ArtWorks! in New Bedford where children and families of the local community made earth art in honor of Earth Day that will be displayed around the City of New Bedford.

This whole week of events was a great way to engage the community in a variety of volunteer projects that they can choose to continue independently. We have captured the whole week of service on video that we will be able to share with you soon!

Courtney Kurzweil

MACC AmeriCorps*VISTA

UMASS Dartmouth

Today marks 90 days until the end of my service to America as an AmeriCorps*VISTA; this is a bittersweet realization. As MACC AmeriCorps*VISTAs, we sometimes lose ourselves in the throes of tight schedules juggling time with community partners, students, faculty, and staff. After 276 days of managing expectations, collecting and synthesizing data, and fostering the personal and academic growth of students, I am becoming very aware of sustainability. Put another way, how do I ensure that the work I performed and goals I accomplished during the year of service continue in my absence?

Maintaining institutional knowledge is important, but also difficult. One must keep in mind that learning curves exist. I am fortunate that Wentworth’s Center for Community and Learning Partnerships has a very strong history of creating sustainability materials for future program leaders. In order for the work that I’ve done this year to continue, the documentation I leave behind needs to be useful, understandable, thorough, and helpful. Of particular importance to me, as the evaluation and assessment coordinator, is ensuring that the data collection systems I created continue to be updated and used. The next three months of my time as a VISTA will be spent documenting the work I have done, and creating training manuals to ensure that the evaluation and assessment work from this year will continue.

Sustainability is not just about integrating the work I did into the daily tasks of full-time staff and faculty at Wentworth. Sustainability requires instilling a culture open and accepting to continuous improvement. I feel that I have helped to create this environment at Wentworth by simply providing information about our programs to various staff and faculty around campus. Wentworth Institute of Technology recently received a one millions dollar donation to continue our work with Boston Public Schools students attending Wentworth and their families. The evaluation systems created as a Massachusetts Campus Compact AmeriCorps*VISTA will help our college access and success programs determine our successes and seek funding in the future.

Before moving to Boston from Los Angeles in July of last year, I had never been to Beantown. I grew up in Southern California, went to college in Northern California, and after graduation spent some time in Western and Eastern Europe. I knew very little about “back East” (that’s what West Coasters say) and only recently realized New England was more than just a geographic location. So, naturally, I accepted an AmeriCorps position I was offered and began preparing to relocate to Massachusetts.

Thinking back, I cringe at how naïve and uninformed I was when my aunt, who had once lived in Boston and worked for one of the City’s many universities, warned me that “As long as you steer clear of Roxbury, you’ll be fine.” I remember thinking: Of course, I’ll be in Boston- not Roxbury. I knew nothing about the geography of the Boston metro area, and even less about the different neighborhoods and the people who lived in them. Come to think of it, most of what I thought I knew about Boston stemmed from a story I vaguely remembered of an infamous tea party and a select few Hollywood depictions.

The housing search from California was more than challenging. Finally, four days before leaving, I was able to secure a room in an apartment as a sublet in the ‘South End’ (also known as Roxbury Crossing). If I walked one way, I was in the South End: SoWa, Northeastern University, the Museum of Fine Arts, and Symphony Hall. If I turned around and walked the other direction, I was in Roxbury: Roxbury Community College, Dudley Station, and Malcolm X Boulevard.

At first, I was confused. This was not the image of Boston, of brownstones with cobblestone streets, of cafes and bars “where everybody knows your name.” This was the real Boston, a city that ranks in the top 20 for the national poverty rate.

I started my year of service this past August as Community Programs Coordinator at Boston University’s Metropolitan College. I tried to learn the ropes quickly. First, learning the location and name of the 21 different neighborhoods in Boston (however, I’m still working on the roughly 105 unofficial neighborhoods and sub-neighborhoods). Second, riding the T at rush hour is not an art easily perfected. Finally, the higher educational institution that is “Comm Ave” (Commonwealth Avenue), Boston University and its sixteen colleges, was a whole new culture to learn. While all of these were important things to learn to navigate, they were only vehicles to getting me where I belonged: in the community.

My role at BU is not that of the traditional Massachusetts Campus Compact AmeriCorps*VISTA. I spend most of my time out there, in the city, doing community outreach for the Scholarship for Parents. A scholarship that provides a 50% discount on tuition for parents with children in Boston and Chelsea public schools. I connect with community leaders and coordinate opportunities to set up a table or give presentations about the scholarship. Most of the time, though, I end up having in-depth conversations with parents about their educational past, present, and future. What has become increasingly apparent to me these last eight months is that a person’s education is incredibly personal. For a lot of the parents I speak to, sharing the story of their education is done by telling me the story of their life.

I’ll never forget one particular mother I met on a Saturday morning in November. She and her family had recently moved to Boston from out-of-state, due to a bank foreclosure on their home. I visited her son’s school that morning since they were having a parent/teacher conference. I gave my talk about the scholarship, passed out brochures and my business cards, and announced that I would be available after the meeting to speak with any parents who had questions. When she came up to me later, she thanked me for visiting because she said it encouraged her to pursue her dream to finish college. I asked her what she was interested in studying; she said she wanted to be a nurse. She had already completed about two years of college here and there, at different community colleges back where she was from. She started twelve years earlier, but then she got married and started having kids. Then, her husband lost his job. She got two jobs to make ends meet. College was put on the backburner.

She filled out an inquiry card, but shared with me that she didn’t get to check her email very regularly because she didn’t have a computer, and access to her cell phone varied (depending on whether she could add credit to it). I told her not to worry and that she was welcome to contact me whenever she could. She thanked me, again, and said that she and her family were living in a local shelter at the moment, but she knew that finishing her degree was their way out. I went home that afternoon feeling humbled and thankful for all of the things I take for granted everyday: a room, a computer, a cell phone, my college degree. Although AmeriCorps is about dedicating a year to service, and designed to give its members the opportunity to experience life living below the poverty line, I brought most of these things with me when entering the program.

A few weeks later, just before Christmas, that same mother called me at work. She wanted to thank me, yet again, and let me know that she would not be taking advantage of my scholarship, but that she was planning to enroll the following semester at another Boston-area university. Very rarely have I been able to follow up with a parent I met in the community and hear they are planning to return to school so soon. Something my supervisor, and my AmeriCorps*VISTA predecessors, have learned over four years of scholarship recruitment is that the process for parents to return to college, after a number of years, can be long and arduous. Not only did this parent take the time to follow up with me, but she also shared some news that we don’t always get the pleasure of hearing: that just by being present and listening helped inspire something in someone else. That, to me, is a huge chunk of what volunteering, and being in AmeriCorps, is all about.

Chimamanda Adichie once wrote about The Danger of a Single Story, stating if you “…show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, [then] that is what they become.” Boston’s story has changed for me. True, Boston has not technically changed since I got here, but I have. I saw this city as one thing, now I see it as another. Now I choose to see it through the stories I hear from the people I meet, not what I see in the movies, read in books, or hear from others (even if they are a beloved relative). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that those outlets are necessarily false. I’m just saying that they’re only one side of the story. So to that parent and to all of the people I have met so far during my outreach efforts: thank you for sharing your stories with me. Keep them coming!

Thanks for reading and you’ll be hearing from me again soon.

-Alex

Alexandra Motter

Massachusetts Campus Compact

AmeriCorps*VISTA

Community Programs Coordinator

Boston University Metropolitan College