Answering the Call to Serve

My name is Breannah Alexander and I am beginning my service as a 2012-2013 Mentor Michigan College Coaching Corps AmeriCorps member at the Grand Rapids Community Foundation.  In addition to my service as an AmeriCorps member, I have also had the pleasure of serving as a commissioner on the Michigan Community Service Commission board for the last five years.  Since I am at the very start of my service year, I will not reflect on what this year with AmeriCorps has meant to me quite yet, but instead tell you why I answered the call to serve.

    

During my senior year at Arthur Hill High School, I had the pleasure of being appointed to the Michigan Community Service Commission board to represent young people 25 and under who were engaged in some form of service across the state of Michigan.  Coming into this appointment, my philanthropic experience was exclusively from the service I had done as a Youth Advisory Council member at the Saginaw Community Foundation.  I had no concept of how involved the nonprofit sector was in the day to day work being accomplished in communities until I began to serve on the Commission and was introduced to AmeriCorps.

Through my service on the Commission, I was given a firsthand look at the impact of amazing individuals who had given a year (some even two) of their lives to bettering communities in need.  From Commission meetings where AmeriCorps members would discuss the difference they were making in the communities they served, to serving alongside members during the Russ Mawby Signature Service Project, I was given a gift – seeing incredible people create phenomenal change.

I continued my service on the Commission during my attendance at Grand Valley State University where the final piece was put into place as I sought to discover my greater purpose.  It was Spring Break 2012 and a group of about 30 college students, including myself, were sent as a part of a service-learning course to assist with disaster clean-up in Joplin, Missouri. I had never in my life been involved with a service site with such devastation.  We were working in an area where two-thirds of the town had been wiped out by a tornado and population loss so immense, sites that had been flattened were pseudo memorials. In doing disaster clean-up, we had the opportunity to interact with survivors who shared their pain but most importantly, their hope.  This hope transcended their circumstances and shined a light on the impact AmeriCorps members were having through their coordination of volunteers and disaster relief in that community.

That hope was my call to serve. In the year ahead, my AmeriCorps service will give me the opportunity to help kids in Grand Rapids Public Schools achieve their full potential. This service will also forever change the way I interact with others, as I hope to inspire people to make a difference in their own community.