CAMP REACH MORE CHALLENGES YOUTH TO REACH HIGHER

(Guest blog by Gina Wiezel , MTCC AmeriCorps VISTA Summer Associate with Missoula Parks and Recreation)

The Montana CampusCompact Summer VISTA and AmeriCorps Program offers Montana students and residents the opportunity to serve in their local communities, or across the state, to help run summer learning loss prevention camps, summer feeding programs, and summer college prep camps. This summer 53 national service members participated in diverse activities to help Montana community organizations fight local poverty, including increasing tutoring and mentoring resources, managing various summer activities and support services for children and families, supporting feeding programs to help alleviate hunger within the community, mobilizing hundreds of volunteers to assist with events, developing programs to help literacy rates among disadvantaged youth, and planning for future VISTA members’ efforts. We’d like to highlight one particular story from a member serving with the MissoulaParks and Recreation REACH MORE program.

The overall goal of our program is to support youth with disabilities in recreation summer enrichment programs to increase the chances of succeeding in and outside the classroom. Our program is incredibly successful.  We serviced 130 youth in the REACH MORE program, our 10 week summer program, that might of otherwise struggled to find summer enrichment programming appropriate least restrictive learning environments and abilities. Research has found that people with disabilities often fall within poverty guidelines.  Providing community based inclusive summer services has proven to enrich and increase their school and social behaviors and lead to a stronger likelihood for job placement.

During my time serving with REACH MORE, a Missoula Parks and Recreation camp for children of all abilities,  I had the opportunity to work with a diverse group of children. One boy came to our camp for multiple weeks. Every week we have our campers do a ropes course. The first few weeks that this boy was in camp he didn’t want to climb at all, preferring to just watch. After two weeks of him not engaging and not participating in the ropes course the other counselors and I decided that we would push him a little to try climbing the rock wall. We told him that he only had to take 2 steps and after that if he chose not to climb for the rest of the day he didn’t have to. That day and he only climbed two steps, but last week we had him try again. We had a great group of kids and they all cheered for each other. With everyone cheering, he climbed about halfway on the wall.

      I think this kid got stuck in a pattern of believing himself incapable of doing certain things, but once he had people believing in him, encouraging him to try his best he discovered that he was capable of climbing more than just the two steps we were challenging him to. With everyone cheering he pushed himself to go higher.

This experience taught me that it is important to have people that support you to challenge yourself and that when you decide to challenge and believe in yourself you can accomplish a lot. Too often we focus on what we can’t do and forget how much we truly are able to accomplish.  We put limits upon ourselves and don’t appreciate our capabilities. We fall into patterns and routine and don’t push ourselves or try situations that test our abilities. I believe it is important to challenge ourselves to things that may be difficult or scary, because when we challenge ourselves we discover capabilities we might not have known that we possessed. 

The ropes course in general taught me that it is important to challenge myself, to not compare and weigh my successes against others, that it is okay to step back from a challenge, and that if I don’t succeed or go as far with my ambitions the first time around that I can come back and perhaps will go further or accomplish more. I also learned that it is okay to not get as far as I wanted or expected. What is important is not how far you come, but how much you tried and how much effort you put into getting to where you are.

MOUNTAINS AND MARATHONS - FINDING A PATH WITH NICO COMPOSTO

Montana Campus Compact AmeriCorps VISTA member Nico Composto reflects on the stages of life that brought him to serve as a VISTA in Montana and his revelations moving forward.

A talented runner; a valued service member; and a good friend

"It is wild to think of the moments that influence our lives. The small, seemingly insignificant happenings that change everything. For me, an odd web of unexpected coincidences led me to make several irrational choices landing me in the middle of Montana, a place I never thought I would be and certainly didn’t think I would spend the rest of my life. But now I am here and have never felt so at home.

A year and a half ago I watched the TV show, Twin Peaks, for the first time. It is a cult classic from the early 90s that most people haven’t heard of, and those who have often hate its quirky and surreal nature. For me, though, the show struck a chord. The series took place in a small town in the inland northwest, modeled after the creator, David Lynch’s home town: Missoula, Montana. Researching that show was the first time I had ever heard of Missoula, but since that moment, this town has been all I can think about. Prior to living here, I had only ever lived in Chicago or New York, yet I craved the mountain environment that exists throughout Western Montana, so I began looking into moving here. Since graduating college in the spring of 2014, I had been working small jobs, just trying to get by and figure things out, but I never quite felt satisfied. I enjoyed my job in retail sales, but it just didn’t feel like I was doing anything particularly meaningful. I don’t really value material possessions, so it was hard for me to sell things to people when I knew that deep down they didn’t need those items. That was when I looked at the Americorps website for the first time. I wanted to stop selling shoes and start working directly with a community, improving the lives of the people around me.

Now here is where things got weird, because I am not exaggerating when I say I applied for about 200 jobs after graduating college. At least 15 of those jobs I was impeccably qualified for. 5 of those jobs I had an in with the corporate office that was doing the hiring and I was offered 0 positions. No matter what I did, no matter who I talked to it didn’t matter, I could not get a job. What a miracle. If I had gotten one of those positions I would be living in some mid-sized city in the Midwest, pushing product for some shoe company. There wouldn’t be a mountain within 1000 miles of where I would have lived. I wouldn’t be helping anyone except ensuring that the stockholders had enough money to take 3 vacations that year. But I didn’t get that job. Instead, I ended up getting a service position with VISTA at the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula, developing youth education programs and working to increase the role of our museum in the community. This year has been eye opening. For the first time in my life I have come to understand the value of community and I intend to spend the rest of my life working to improve the lives of people around me (or at the very least make them laugh a little more).

I have done a ton in my year as a VISTA, working in many different roles to build the capacity at my museum. There is one job, though, that I have enjoyed more than any other at the museum: I love developing education programs and teaching. That is just who I am.  Perhaps the highlight of my year has been my task of developing a summer program for Missoula-area middle-schoolers called the “Jr. Docent Program.” The idea behind the program is to train students to become tour guides at our museum. It has been an incredibly rewarding experience seeing these students grow in knowledge and confidence. After just a few weeks, they have learned a tremendous amount about history as well as developed necessary interpersonal skills that they can use for the rest of their lives. I created the curriculum for the program with the goal of making it possible to run the program on a yearly basis after my service is complete, thus expanding educational opportunities for young Missoulians for years to come.

When I was younger I always wanted to become a teacher, but growing up in Chicago I saw so many teachers upset with the education system. Being a teacher began to seem like an undesirable position. This year as a VISTA, though, has reminded me how valuable teaching is and how much I love it. For the first time in a long time I don’t feel lost. It feels like I have a plan and direction, like I am moving towards something valuable. All I want is to be a teacher in Western Montana, it doesn’t even quite matter where, as long as there are mountains. I am hoping to teach at a high school, because I personally struggled with self-identity and self-confidence during my own high school years. For any student that is experiencing similar struggles, I hope to help them through the four years that I know can be challenging and inspire them to pursue their passions and do great things for our world.

What an incredibly unlikely set of events to lead me to this point. I guess that is the way things happen for everyone. For me, I saw a TV show in the Midwest and now I am going to be a teacher in Montana… All glued together by the inspirational experiences I received as a VISTA. I am going to be finishing my year in a few weeks and I can’t give enough thanks to the people who supported me this year: The staff at MTCC, my co-workers at the Historical Museum and, of course, my fellow VISTAs who never stopped and never will stop having deeply meaningful roles in the communities with which they work. What an awesome group of people to have spent my year with."

AMERICORPS VISTA SCARLETT DAY-ALEMAN REFLECTS ON CONISISTENCY

Scarlett Day-Aleman is a Campus Compact AmeriCorps VISTA Member serving in Lame Deer, Montana. She shared the following piece with us recently. Thanks, Scarlett!
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Ten of the past twelve months of my life have been spent in service to the Northern Cheyenne Tribe in Lame Deer, Montana. I have served with two different, equally amazing, organizations. I have learned so much and made some amazing connections with the community around me. I would not trade a minute of what I am doing, or what I did in the summer, for anything in the world. Just to make it clear: I do not hold any of my organizations responsible for the pit-falls that just naturally happen, nor am I discounting the good works they are doing. However, some things need to be addressed to make sure the good intentions people have are carried out in the most positive way.

The theory of “good-deed whiplash” came to me as I was evaluating the difference I was making as a VISTA and the difference I made when I was in Lame Deer during the summer. For some reason, being a VISTA makes a person extremely pensive about their purpose and contributions. This theory has been sloshing around my mind for about four and a half months and I haven’t been able to pin down an extremely formal definition, but I know the gist of what I think it means. “Good-Deed Whiplash” is the negative affects of temporary people on the lives of a community that may need semi-permanent to permanent people.

For example, the summer organization that I served with, Youth Works, arrives in Lame Deer for roughly two and a half months (80 days) and then, without much warning, picks up and leaves. The relationships formed are real and the seeds planted are great, but the feelings that kids have after are not always positive. I have talked with kids who feel almost abandoned after the summer because people that they grew to love and trust are suddenly gone. Kids are not the only people who feel the effect of “Good-Deed Whiplash”. Many community members are left to pick-up the pieces of the “good-deeds” after the people orchestrating the programs leave town.

“Good-Deed Whiplash” is most prevalent in low-income communities. Low-income communities are more likely to be grounds of broken homes where children often feel abandoned. Also, low-income communities are fertile fields for missionaries and social programs to take root. Where mission teams and social programs exist, so do temporary people eager to help.

The most prevalent example of “Good-Deed Whiplash” in my life were the conversations I had with the kids when I first moved back to Lame Deer after my summer service was over. After the initial excitement of me being back wore off one of my sixth-graders told me, “I’m so glad you came back. So many people say they’re coming back, but they never do.” Those two simple sentences really struck me. The fact that “so many” people had lied to her struck me even more. I reassured her that the friends she made over the summer still loved her and that even without them she could continue to do great things. That night I vowed to be up front with the kids and not try to pacify them by telling them shallow things. It has really made a difference in how I serve and how I talk with the kids and community I am working with.

While trying to figure out possible personal solutions for “Good-Deed Whiplash”, I have run into a few road blocks. Not everyone is afforded the opportunity to stay in the community they serve, so the solution of just telling people to stay somewhere is not a feasible one. The only feasible solution would be a two part project. The first part would be preparing the kids and the community for your departure. This could be done by making a calendar for the kids you work with so that they can see your departure date. Inform them that you have “x” amount of Friday’s left or “x” amount of days left. This would help ease them in to the transition of you leaving. Their trust would not be broken because it would not be a surprise to them. The second part would be to keep in contact with the people you work with even after you leave. Life is busy and it seems like certain things always get in the way of staying in touch, but with a little perseverance it will all fall into place. Many times, relationships formed are often forgotten when moving due to life just getting in the way. However, it is also important to realize that for some of these kids or community members their only positive influence is brought by the people coming to serve. Staying in contact does not have to be anything elaborate. All it has to be is a letter saying “Thinking of you”, a post card from your home state or where ever you end up after service. Those small gestures will go extremely far in creating sustainable changes in people that you inspire during your time in the community.

On an organizational level, “Good Deed Whiplash” could be combated with proper training. Some of the things that affect low-income communities do not affect other communities. People are not always aware of these distinctions. Optional training on abandonment issues, dealing with at-risk youth, and how poverty affects the psyche, would really alleviate issues that arise due to ignorance. Also having open discussions between former VISTAs or other service members in the community would help new VISTAs get a pulse for their community. Things like legacy binders are a great start, but should also include more things based on community relations.

While “Good Deed Whiplash” is a very real problem it is not a reason to stop serving. The things that YouthWorks does for the local community and students it brings have lasting effects on them both. The things that VISTA has done, and hopefully will continue to do, has changed the face of America for the better. Service is never a bad thing, but it can have negative effects if a proper awareness and connectivity to the intricacy of that community is not fostered. Addressing problems both on a personal level and an organizational level will help to strengthen the organization and community connection. With a few minor tweaks service organizations can continue to serve, but with a greater impact.

Goodbye to Two-Term MTCC VISTA - Kate Johnson

Last month, we said goodbye to a great VISTA and wonderful colleague in Kate Johnson. Kate served as a VISTA with Bitterroot College UM in Hamilton for 2 full years, helping build capacity for the college’s marketing and outreach to the low-income and first generation college Bitterrooters. Kate’s dedication to college access and passion for community education will continue to benefit her immediate community as she transitions into a new student outreach role at The University of Montana. Below she reflects on her 2 years of service.

What aspect of serving with Bitterroot College will you remember most?

Seeing how hard some of the people involved with Bitterroot College work in order to keep that college going. The College is relatively new in the community, and is always overcoming an obstacle. It keeps going on because so many staff, faculty, and community members are determined to provide access to education to people in the Bitterroot Valley. Pro tip: Support your local educational institution(s) through educating yourself on higher education systems, by taking classes, by getting to know the people who dedicate themselves to making education available, affordable, and relevant to their neighbors.

Through your experience, in what ways did you expand the capacity of Bitterroot College outreach?

In my first term of service I expanded the college's outreach capacity by building tools and systems for our marketing, doing outreach presentations for community organizations, tabling at the Hamilton Farmers Market (always getting a bagel breakfast sandwich from Bitterroot Bagels and More or a burrito from Maria's Burritos or both), and creating marketing procedures and strategies for the college to use in the 1-3 year span. 

In my second term of service I did more tabling (and ate many more bagel breakfast sandwiches and burritos), more outreach presentations, and helped develop a strategic outreach plan with a team of Bitterroot College staff and AmeriCorps members. I also wrote grants for the college to expand its academic offerings to the community. 

How has two years of service in VISTA changed you as a person?

For the past two years I've done my service on a largely self-directed basis with the expectation of still working within a team, so I've learned a lot about how I operate as a person, teammate, and office pal and have made some adjustments to my office personality. On the whole, I hope I've started to balance candor with capability. 

What can we expect from Future Kate?

I just started a job at UM's Global Engagement Office and am grant writing on the side for a couple nonprofit organizations in the Bitterroot Valley. So expect to see me drinking lots of coffee on campus, loping through Missoula on some good runs (ultimate short term goal is to run all of the switchbacks of the "M" without going into cardiac arrest), moseying through the Missoula Farmers Market, and volunteering.

Any words of wisdom for potential first year VISTAs?

Take ownership of your service. You're allowed - and supposed to - speak up for yourself at your service site. You're expected to get things done for your community, so make sure that you have what you need in order to do that successfully. And you're obligated to stand up for what is fair for yourself, the people you serve, and the people whose voices need to be heard. 

CREATIVE CAPACITY BUILDING SUPPORTING YOUNG MOTHERS

Carly Hosford-Israel began her MTCC VISTA service with Fort Peck Community College and Poplar Schools in July of 2016. Within the past three months, Carly's vision and determination to empower students and individuals for educational attainment has been outstanding and with no lack of regular ups and downs. Carly has demonstrated resilience and a wide range of capabilities to support her VISTA service term. The creative freedom and capacity building elements AmeriCorps VISTA provides can be daunting, however for Carly it has been an open invitation to tackle some long standing issues facing the Poplar community and to make big positive changes there. 

Below we highlight an initiative begun by Carly to improve the solidarity and community around young mothers through the use of an online open forum called Dear Young Mothers (DYM). Please take some time to read about her work this initiative and to show support for young mothers community by visiting the DYM Website and sharing with appropriate parties.

What led you to the development of this resource?

I work in a high school with a handful of soon-to-be student mothers. From my own life history I know what can go wrong in young motherhood, I also know young motherhood isn’t solely limited to missteps and mistakes. I know we all hold wisdom founded in and directly from our lived experience. 

Why is the mental and physical health of young mothers so important?

I know a lot of former young mothers are likely now older mothers and grandmothers. I've conceptualized a virtual community space to host inter-generational sharing of wisdom between current and former young mothers. It is called DYM (Dear Young Mother). It hopes to be an archive of letters in support and solidarity that all sustainable parenting requires. I personally know that in sharing with elders and others I have been able to better advocate for and orient myself. 

What cultural and economic roadblocks to empowering women have you experienced in your VISTA position thus far?

As a VISTA serving in a high school and tribal college setting it is unnerving to watch students drop out of education as a democratic responsibility and timeless personal pursuit. I think much of this disengagement is connected to students' life stresses outside of school as well as the disconnect between classroom lessons and lived experience. It is my hope that DYM becomes a platform to directly confront and combat those barriers to continued education and empowerment.  

What do you hope is accomplished through the DYM initiative?

Healthy, educated, and well supported motherhood is essential to the well being of our communities and country. It is the conduit through which we all become a part of, and learn ways in which to take part in, this world. I am writing to ask for your help in securing letters to young mothers at my high school and beyond, who themselves have excitedly reviewed the idea and are looking forward to a trove of: best practices, refuge, encouragement, courage, and teachable moments. I am asking you, and anyone you might think to forward this along to, to take a few moments to reflect on how you can contribute to a system of support for a group of cyclically undeserved women and their children. Thank you. 

MILESTONE: ONE MILLION AMERICORPS MEMBERS!

We're excited to have been a part of the now 1,000,000 Americans who have served with AmeriCorps over its 21 years. We started here, in Montana as AmeriCorps began with a student engagement program called Campus Corps, moved on to support literacy with Montana Reads, and worked with our Colorado partners with the UCAN Serve program, our Washington friends with Students In Service, and Mountain West with the Compact Service Corps. Now we run a program that's just called MTCC AmeriCorps, and we focus on high school graduation, postsecondary access and college completion. Over those past twenty or so years we've engaged several thousand members, tens of thousands of volunteers, and helped improve reading, math and college-going rates for our state. We have alums who served with Compact AmeriCorps programs who are in the governor's office, state legislature, private and nonprofit sectors and federal government and we hear from them regularly about what a difference their service made in who they are today. We're deeply proud to be the education part of a great broader community working with conservation, clean energy, access to nutritious food, quality legal support and antipoverty work. Every day we appreciate our friends with Montana Conservation Corps, Prevention Resource Center, Montana No Kid Hungry, Legal Services Association, National Center for Appropriate Technology, Montana State Parks and more. We also get great support from the Governor's Office of Community Service and Montana Commission for Community Service. What a milestone! Congratulations, Alums, partners and campuses!