AmeriCorps & The Value of Community Involvement

Someone once said that children “may forget what you said but they will never forget how you made them feel.” Here at MARESA’s AmeriCorps, we strive to improve the lives of the children we work with each and every day.

Hi! I’m Kathryn Johnson, writing to you from Marquette on majestic Lake Superior. I’m a second-year member serving with the Marquette-Alger Regional Educational Service Agency, which is the ISD for two Upper Peninsula counties. There are 10 members in our AmeriCorps program, eight of which are based in local K-12 schools. The other two are based at the MARESA office and support education programs throughout our two counties.

We all work with at-risk students in one way or another. Our members serving at the high schools and middle schools develop relationships with students who struggle with attendance and often have numerous problems outside of school. By developing caring and trusting relationships, our members help these students improve their school attendance, tutor them with homework to complete assignments, and in the process also increase self-confidence in the students by encouraging them every step of the way. These members also operate before- and after-school homework labs where any student can come in and receive tutoring on homework assignments. These homework labs also provide a safe and relatively quiet atmosphere in which to do their school work – this is so important to the success of students who do not have that option in their home environments.

At the elementary level, our members are more focused on enrichment activities, recruiting parent volunteers, and programming. Two AmeriCorps volunteers are placed at one specific school that has a history of the most local at-risk students for both academic failure and behavior problems. While the members sometimes provide behavior intervention and in-school suspension support, they focus on ways to keep the students and surrounding community involved in the success of the youth at the school. Whether volunteering to coordinate Community Resource Center activities or making pasties (U.P. favorite food – pastry shell filled with meat and veggies), they try their best to help boost the self confidence of the students and involve the parents to make the school a better place for the kids.

Here at the MARESA office, there are two of us that are all over Marquette and Alger counties, depending on the project. One member helps to coordinate pre-K play groups to help children develop positive social interaction skills and support parents in assisting their children to develop those skills.

And then there’s my position, which is harder to describe….

I support Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs throughout our two counties. CTE is a broad category of anything from an elementary counselor conducting career exploration activities to high school welding, health occupations, and business classes. I have been involved with coordinating several skills competitions, such as the Upper Peninsula region Health Occupations Students of America (HOSA) where professionals in the healthcare field judged student events. I recently set up job shadowing activities for 90 eighth graders. I could not have accomplished this without the generous cooperation of our local professionals who were willing to take a few hours out of their work day to spend time explaining their jobs to these youngsters. Examples of the job shadow placements included the DNR fish hatchery, a circuit court judge, motorcycle mechanic, the U.S. Olympic Education Center, and a logging company. Each site happily agreed to demonstrate their processes and even let the kids try some hands-on, in-action activities in one way or another.

My next event is just around the corner next week and will be my biggest project of the year. It is the annual “Pathways to Your Future Career Day” where we bring all 800+ high school juniors on to the campus of Northern Michigan University for a day of career exploration with professionals who are set up on panels. For example, our “Government” panel consists of a Foreign Service diplomat, a Veterans’ Affairs officer, and the Upper Peninsula representative for Senator Carl Levin. All together there are 127 presenters who were kind enough to give up their time to participate in Career Day. The students sign up for specific panels by career pathway according to what they find most interesting and relevant to their own future careers. They will have the chance to listen to brief presentations from each professional and then ask them all sorts of questions about their experiences, salaries, etc. Will this make or break a career for each and every student? Of course not, but it might for a few and it certainly gets all 800 of them thinking about making solid plans for after high school.

Of course, we conduct service projects as well. Our favorite so far this year was cleaning up our newly-adopted stretch of Highway M-94. We truly got a kick out of some of the crazy items we found discarded on the side of the road covered up in the tall weeds, such as an alarm clock and a brass candle stick holder. But more importantly, we got to know some of the residents who have small farms along that road. One lady even happily showed off her mini-goats and pigs, telling us all about how she takes care of them. All of the residents we met thanked us for our efforts and offered to help out whenever we conduct our future clean-ups!

My experience with MARESA’s AmeriCorps has taught me about the value of community involvement. Recruiting volunteers that care about our local kids and communities has been instrumental in the success of our programs. As Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”