Why did I join AmeriCorps*VISTA?
I finished my M.A. in Educational Administration and Policy at the University of Michigan in April 2010. My husband, Noel, still had another year before finishing his M.A. in Entomology at Michigan State. (Yeah, I know, we’re a “house divided,” but in our defense neither of us is originally from Michigan so we actually didn’t know the extent of the rivalry between U of M and MSU until after we got accepted to graduate schools.) The summer after I graduated, I did some contract work for the Michigan Department of Education; these were mostly short-term projects, like grant-writing, editing, and research. After a few months of this, I decided I wanted a longer-term project that would positively affect underrepresented students, ideally in the realm of K-12 education. Since Noel and I had already agreed to look at Ph.D. programs outside Michigan, I knew I could only commit to a year.
AmeriCorps*VISTA fit well with my goals – a year-long commitment, a focus on service and poverty-ending activities, and (bonus!) an education award to help pay off my graduate loans. I began my service in November 2010, but transferred from my initial placement to the MCSC in February 2011. Joining Mentor Michigan felt right because supporting mentoring programs meant promoting a relationship-based practice that can provide the academic and social supports youth need to succeed in school and life.
What do I do at Mentor Michigan?
As the Special Initiatives AmeriCorps*VISTA, I focus on providing support to mentoring programs serving specific youth populations Mentor Michigan has identified as needing special attention. For my term of service, that youth population is youth in and aging out of foster care. My responsibilities are to identify and make available the tools, resources, and training mentoring programs serving youth in foster care need to support high quality match relationships.
Youth are put in foster care when the state determines their parents are unable to care for them or it is unsafe for them to remain at home; although a good number of youth are reunified with their families or, if their parents’ rights are terminated, adopted, but many remain in the foster care system until emancipation (between the ages of 18-21). I didn’t understand how much foster youth need caring adults, like mentors, in their lives until I began doing research and talking to the staff at different mentoring programs.
Hearing about the difficulties these youth have to face and overcome on a daily basis, and learning that May is National Foster Care Month, motivated me to put together the Foster Care Month Mentoring Toolkit. This Toolkit provides mentoring programs with materials and ideas for promoting the need for and recognizing and supporting the service of mentors in the lives of foster youth. Along with the Toolkit, I’ve begun summarizing research and compiling resources on the Mentor Michigan website and helping to organize foster care mentoring workshop sessions at Mentor Michigan’s annual conference in November.
One of the difficult things about being a VISTA is that you don’t see the immediate effects of your service. I don’t directly serve youth in foster care and I rarely get to see how programs implement the tools and resources I’ve made available on our website. But since I’ve begun, I’ve received feedback through phone calls, emails, and even Facebook that indicate I’ve helped Mentor Michigan get a good start on supporting programs serving youth in foster care. Those, and the terrific people in the MCSC, are what keep me going and remind me that what I’m doing this year is worthwhile.
Shameless plug: Won’t you consider becoming a mentor to a youth in foster care today? Check out mentoring programs near you on the Mentor Michigan Directory of Programs (www.mentormichigan.org).
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