An Absolutely, Incredible, Memorable Day!

Greetings AmeriCorps community! My name is Ellen Hensel and I am currently serving as an AmeriCorps member with Camp Fire USA West Michigan Council in Grand Rapids. Camp Fire USA is a nonprofit that’s been around for more than 100 years. Since the beginning, Camp Fire has always been dedicated to youth development. We strive to create caring, confident, youth and leaders through after school and summer programs. At the West Michigan Council, we do that through several programs including ten after-school sites where Grand Rapids youth receive academic support, participate in activities, and have opportunities to be leaders.

I am currently serving at Burton Elementary in the Schools of Hope literacy class. We have 20 students who begin at least one grade level below their peers in reading and work tirelessly after school, reading independently and continuing to improve daily. Our students have already had a full day of academics, and their perseverance to continue after school always motivates me and keeps me trying my best.

Being able to work with kids everyday can be a tiring experience, but incredibly rewarding. One of the great activities that Camp Fire USA hosts is Absolutely Incredible Kid Day (AIKD). I think sometimes we forget that kids get stressed too, they have bad days and they forget how they make a difference in this world. AIKD is a day when every kid gets to feel special and every kid has a tangible reminder of what they mean to us. In the words of Dr. Seuss, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

To reinforce this positive message, the main goal of AIKD is to provide every student with a letter from a family member, friend, neighbor, educator, or even a volunteer, that reminds them of their positive qualities. At the West Michigan Council, every student in the after school program gets a letter from their activity leader, totaling over 1300 letters. In addition to that, two sites are picked for an assembly on the day and every student from the school gets a hand-written letter. This year it fell on Thursday, March 15. Palmer and Brookside Elementary Schools were chosen for the assembly.

My AmeriCorps program assisted in gathering volunteers to write letters, wrote personal letters for students themselves, and some even got a chance to attend the assembly. I was lucky enough to participate in every part of the process and it was the most rewarding and surprising activity I’ve been involved in thus far in my year of service. As the Volunteer Team Leader, I reached out to our volunteer groups for writing letters. The response was overwhelmingly positive. Although these volunteers had never met the students, they wrote beautiful, inspiring letters. At a library letter drive, one high school student wrote in his letter to a third grader, “Did you know that the world is a better place because you are in it?” I can’t imagine the impact his words had on a child.

The day of the event was a day filled with positivity. Camp Fire USA has built a partnership with our local news celebrity, WWOTV-4’s Maranda, who hosted the assemblies along with some local mascots. As she told each student how special they were, how hard they worked and how much they meant to the adults in their lives, you could see them puffing up with pride. At a certain point, she directed teachers to hand out the letters. Students ripped open the envelopes to find words of encouragement and truth. Five-hundred and sixty-seven students at two different schools opened letters that day and an additional 700 after-school students received them from a trusted adult.

I had the opportunity to go to Palmer Elementary, one of my former service sites. Ismail, one of my previous students, came up to me and showed me his letter. It was written to him from Ms. Jamie. She wrote that he should work hard, and always remember that he makes a difference to others. She wrote about his leadership. He looked at me and asked, “Is everything she said true? But she doesn’t even know me.” I told him, I know you and everything in there is true. He clutched the letter happily as he walked out.

When students get stressed or when their day doesn’t go how they wanted it to, we hope they can look at the letters they received on AIKD and know that someone out there believes in them. At the end of the assemblies, Maranda led the students in a chant, where they shout “I’m Incredible!” and the sound of that positive message resonates with them today.

For more information about Camp Fire USA West Michigan Council visit www.campfireusawmc.org.

Defining "Service"

My name is Alec Marsy, I’m a second-year AmeriCorps member serving at Goodwill of Greater Grand Rapids. I really love this organization! Goodwill has a workforce development program that helps people with barriers to employment, such as mental or physical disabilities, criminal history, or socio-economic factors, create a life of self-governance through gainful employment. It puts the power over one’s life back into the hands of the individual.

My service this year is very different from last year, which has gotten me thinking about service a lot lately. What does it really mean to “serve” your community, to “serve” your country? From my experiences over the past two years, I’ve come to the conclusion that service is more of a feeling than an action. It’s something that has to be experienced before it can be truly understood. I could never fully understand what service means to an individual in the military, and I think it would be difficult for them to understand what my service has meant to me.

What’s even more surprising is how different service can feel depending on those whom you serve. Last year, I served at a high school in the Upper Peninsula where I ran a credit recovery room. Students could come to retake classes online that they had failed in the classroom. Working with teenagers could be very frustrating at times, with some of the students exuding a sense of entitlement. It was as though my AmeriCorps service in their school – providing mentoring, tutoring and guidance – was just a given; that it didn’t depend on a large commitment, not only from myself, but from the school and program through which I served. I realize part of that can be attributed to immaturity and a lack of understanding of my role in the school, but it did make my AmeriCorps service challenging.

This year, serving at Goodwill as a GED tutor, has a different feel than my service last year. It might be because the participants I tutor are much more appreciative, much more open to suggestions than the high school students I worked with last year. Hearing the words “thank you,” or “I appreciate the help” makes serving that much more rewarding. But because my experience last year was a bigger struggle, does that make the service more meaningful? Or does it simply imply that, whether you’re on active duty in Afghanistan, a mechanic at Fort Leavenworth, or even a GED tutor in Grand Rapids, Michigan, service is about the people you affect, the lives you change, and the experiences you have while doing it all?

Service isn't qualified by the amount of adversity you experience, or by the risks you take. I feel as though service is qualified much more simply than that: service in the name of service. Not because we want glory, certainly not because we want to be rich, but because we saw a need in our community and chose to actively participate in its relief. And this is the task of all people, not just AmeriCorps members. There may not be a "thank you" at every turn, but take in every ounce of appreciation you receive as you pass through your year of service. It's rarer, and far more precious than you think.

Safe Routes to School

Greetings AmeriCorps friends and family! My name is Stephanie Mae Howells and I am a proud member of the AmeriCorps Urban Safety Project (AMUS) at Wayne State University’s Center for Urban Studies. Our program, which is just over a year old, aims to increase neighborhood guardianship, decrease victim attractiveness and susceptibility, and provide free basic computer/internet training, allowing residents to strengthen their community through technology. The AMUS project accomplishes these goals by supporting and empowering residents to create block clubs, assisting with neighborhood clean up initiatives, boarding up vacant homes, and teaching the Connect Your Community computer classes in partnership with Focus:HOPE.

Like many of our fellow AmeriCorps comrades, AMUS members were hard at work for Dr. King on a cold Monday in January. In collaboration with the national “Safe Routes to School” initiative, AmeriCorps members served along side United Way volunteers and community residents to board up four vacant homes on 14^th street in Detroit’s Historic Virginia Park neighborhood, near Thirkell Elementary School.

Open vacant houses pose an obvious threat to the safety of school children – these structures are a magnet for illegal dumping, arson, squatters, drugs and other criminal activity. Another potential hazard is the natural curiosity of children to explore their environment, which is extremely dangerous if abandoned properties are part of their everyday landscape. One vacant house, closest to the school, was particularly disturbing. Every inch of the interior walls were covered with sexually explicit vulgarities. It was clear what needed to be done.

Orchestrating a multiple house board- and clean-up, was no simple task. Each of the four houses were supervised by an AMUS member who lead the volunteers in an extensive clean up effort. The amount of waste collected filled an entire 30 cubic yard dumpster to the brim! Volunteers also picked up trash around the school premises. The remaining AMUS members formed a board-up team, rotating from house to house. It was a board-up round-robin of sorts. All together the volunteers put in an 8-hour day!

The boards were painted a sleek slate gray, adding contrast to the final transformation. Several of the boards were colorfully decorating by local youth. I was charged with facilitating the painting process, since I have a background working with both art and youth. It was extremely rewarding to see the look in the kids eyes when they realized their art would be on display for the entire neighborhood to see. I encouraged them to think about the messages they wanted to convey. “Peaceful Swag” was one - it is now my personal mantra!

The event was a testament to the power a group of determined individuals has to effect positive change within their community. Recently, I rode my bike through the area to check how the boards were holding up. Seeing the houses, a month later, still securely boarded and now the most colorful objects on the street, evoked an even stronger emotion in me than I had felt on that chilly January Monday. It’s hard to describe, but it felt serenely invigorating.

*Photo credit: First photo was taken by Mike Glinski, a student at the College for Creative Studies.