Food Day @ Kate Mitchell Elementary School

                  
                                               Foodday from Caroline on Vimeo.

Thank you again to Caroline for sharing this great story!!!

On the Road to Lasting Impact

by Veronica Scheidler

GerationOn, NYC

The thing about community work is no matter how carefully it is articulated in all of the initial planning documents, it takes on a life of its own. And rightly so. Needs, skills, and programs evolve beyond the confines of the words inked onto paper and become far more vibrant and adapted to the community served. Such it has been with my work as an AmeriCorps VISTA at generationOn with a public elementary and middle school in the New York City neighborhood East Harlem. 

I would be lying if I said I was not mildly frustrated that I could not follow my VISTA Activity Description like a roadmap for my year of service. While the objectives it outlines are still driving my efforts, I have found that detours are useful and necessary. Taking the scenic route is allowing for more meaningful collaborations with educators and community partners and fosters a better sense of what is most beneficial to the children and families who are at the heart of what I am doing. 

The VISTA team at generationOn has been able to connect many rich community assets to the school in a variety of ways. Our primary focus is to empower the youth and families at the school to make their mark in the world and improve their lives and neighborhood through service and education. This mandate has already taken us in interesting directions. Early on, it became apparent that healthy eating was a concern among the parent population.  Thus, the team went out and found organizations that could provide nutrition education. In October, over 20 parents attended a presentation that was given in English and Spanish about understanding what we are eating and its impact on our health.

The VISTA team has also found a variety of other ways to assist at the school. We worked with the Middle School principal to help orchestrate a Career Fair for students in 6^th-8^th grade. We found ourselves targeting professionals with interesting careers (particularly veterinarians) and inviting them to the school. The event was well-received by the students, and I may have found myself also venturing to inquire about the professions : ). We taught four Kindergarten classrooms a lesson on animals, made catnip toys to donate to a local shelter, and organized a field trip to deliver the donations.

 The holiday season promises to keep us perpetually busy, as we coordinate a winter coat share (where families at the school are invited to both donated gently used coats, and take a coat, depending on their need), a canned food drive, and various caroling and other seasonal outings as spirits are moved by the pervasive goodwill of the holidays.

The tricky part of a VISTA year is assessing whether your work will have a lasting impact on the community you are serving. The influence of what we do is difficult to quantify. However, what I think we do is provide opportunity and access to new experiences, and resources. And that does make a difference.

After-School Program: Community Schools Collaboration, WA

VISTA Member

 Amanda Gadian 

This year, I am serving with a non-profit based in Burien, WA called Community Schools Collaboration (CSC). CSC seeks to “partner with schools, families, and communities so that all children can thrive” (cscwa.org). For my year of service, I have been assigned to work with CSC Site Managers and staff at two elementary schools – Bow Lake and Madrona. Together, we hope to provide services and resources for the students and their families that they might not otherwise have access to.

            For the past month and a half that I have been with CSC at Bow Lake and Madrona, one of the services we have been working on is the extended day program. At each school, the extended day program begins after the school day ends at 3pm and runs until 5pm. Students check in, then receive and eat a hot meal provided by nutrition services. Following meal time, students participate in our Academic Learning Center – a period for students to receive homework help or time to work on other academic skills. The last portion of our program consists of enrichment activities, such as arts and crafts, fitness club, or “no bake bakers” club. Some students sign up for additional program activities and leave for their respective activities after meal time; such activities include soccer, Boeing Science Club, and Girls on the Run – all organized and facilitated by external organizations who have partnered with CSC.

            To support the extended day programming through CSC, I have been helping to plan and facilitate programs at both Bow Lake and Madrona. Much of the beginning has been trial and error with small, day-to-day successes. However, CSC teams at each school have been able to piece together successful program schedules and I believe that the students enrolled so far have been enjoying their time after school with CSC. Moving forward with the extended day programs, I am now looking to create a handbook of easy to follow lesson plans of our more successful activities/clubs so that the current and future CSC Site Managers, staff, and volunteers will have them as resources for ideas or even to modify and use as their own lesson plans. It is my hope that this will support Site Managers and future CSC teams by allowing them to focus their energy on more pressing matters.

            My long-term goals include researching and hopefully recruiting more partners for CSC. It would be ideal to introduce CSC and its partner schools to external partners that will be able to provide resources for students and their families this year and in the years to come. I also hope to partner with those who work in or with the schools and focus on student attendance and/or students’ academic, social, and personal success. My search has started with meeting and talking with the counselors at each school and I hope to continue collaborating from there. Although the first month and a half with Bow Lake and Madrona has felt chaotic, I am enjoying getting to know the students and to help them in any ways that I can. I am hopeful that I will be able to find and create more opportunities to give the students the support that they need to be successful.

Out-of-School Time Program: Boys & Girls Club Santa Monica, CA

 

VISTA Members

Jose Armendariz & Clare Fogerty 

Boys & Girls Club Santa Monica

(narrative by Jose and video by Clare)

The Boys and Girls Club of Mar Vista is an awe-inspiring place, and a perfect representation of the expression ‘do not judge a book by its cover’. The first impression you get from the club is deceitful because the disorganized environment that can be perceived as chaotic, is not the overall reality. Yes, children could be running loose, constantly chasing each other, or engaging in illicit behavior and discourse such as fighting and cursing. However, once you become part of this club, one is able to see its greatness. All of the members who attend the Boys and Girls Club of Mar Vista feel appreciated due to the varieties of activities and special events that they have been part of. Also, most of the staff are native to the community of Mar Vista Gardens, so they are able to empathize with member’s life experience and their necessities, emotional or financial. Therefore, the lack of structure this unique Boys and Girls Club experience is only a tiny glitch in comparison of all the achievements accomplished with its members and the community as a whole. We as VISTA’s have taken the responsibility to solve some of the structural problems the club face in order to improve children’s behavior towards education and responsibility. Our main achievements have been an incentive point program that is intertwine with our nascent tutoring program, in addition we have been able to get involved with community partnerships, and parent engagement into the club.

One of our main goals is to create a tutoring program, we have adhered to the task by combining it with a point incentive program to motivate children to do their homework. In order to start the tutoring program we had to find volunteers, which has been a difficult task due to the scarce resources we have been given. Nevertheless, we were able to create a partnership with the non-profit, West LA Family Source, whom will be providing us with tutors. Also, they gave us a valuable testing tool. Most of the club members have been tested with the STAR (California standardized test) exam, which depicted what areas each member needed to improve in Math or English. But, we did not want to wait until the tutoring program started for our members to be improving their grades at school. So, we created an incentive point programs. This program had a positive result since children are actually doing their homework, engaging in educational activities, and browsing through academic websites. If the club members earn points, they can exchange them for prices each Friday. Children pile up in line eagerly every Friday to obtain a prize, of which there is a broad range of selection. So, we have been able to improve their educational habits.

We have also engaged the parents into the club by creating an open house for the parents to attend, along with a parent meeting. The Boys and Girls Club we are located has not been able to create a sustainable relationship with member’s parents. But, we have been able to expand communication through the events we created for them. The open house demonstrated the daily activities their children engage in. The parent meeting we organized, it was necessary to introduce a new program Be Great Graduate. To organize this parent meeting, we created flyers, went to families houses, and called the parents. All of this events have been a great opportunity to introduce ourselves, what we want to do, and listen to their ideas and expectations.

 

Parent Engagement: Jewish Coalition for Literacy, CA

VISTA Member: Josh Ing 
Program: Jewish Coalition for Literacy, San Francisco, CA

I attended 4 parent programs in November at various elementary in the East Bay. There were 2 different parent programs being offered in November: 1) Let’s Read At Home and 2) Let’s Read In English. The first program encourages parents to read at home to their kids. The program goes over things like how to choose books that are not too easy or challenging. Parents are also encouraged to read to their children in any language, whether it be in English, Spanish, Chinese, etc. While children benefit from learning new words when they read in English, reading books in a different language can build up reasoning and comprehension. These skills translate across languages, so a child who is read to benefits regardless of the language used. The second parent program is called “Let’s Read in English” and is done in Spanish. California has a large population of English language learners who speak primarily Spanish at home. This program helps teach parents who speak primarily Spanish to read English books with their young children. The goal is not to teach the parents to read English fluently, but to reinforce the idea that they are capable of reading with their children.

Service-Learning: GenerationOn, NYC

VISTA Member

Jonathan Renard

"My program at generationOn is focused on getting youth involved in service. What I do in partner with the other VISTAs at generationOn is to work specifically with PS/MS 57, a PreK-8 school in East Harlem, to incorporate service-learning into the classroom by utilizing the parents/families and community. I aim to work with the teachers to fuse together service-learning into the curriculum so that each year teachers are equipped with the tools to use service-learning as a teaching strategy. My organization believes that students have the power to change their community, the world, and themselves as learners.

                I sit in on grade meetings, as well as meet one-on-one with all of the teachers (40+) to get a grasp on how they want to incorporate service-learning into the classroom. To say this is an easy task would be lying. With the amount of grading, testing, and planning for the teachers, I sometimes barely get a word in. The teachers have new curriculum, are being evaluated differently, and have higher standards to live up to. Why would they add on something “extra” to their workload? This is the hardest part about what I do. Working with the teachers is difficult and sometimes doesn’t work, or they aren’t interested, but when it all comes together and lessons begin to flow, it is rewarding.

                It is hard to explain how I believe my work is impacting the community. I believe I am a good communicator and can effectively respond to e-mails, telephone calls, showing up on time to meetings, etc., but my school that I work at lacks all of the above. It is hard to create sustainability when the other VISTAs and I are reaching out and bringing the parents and community in, when the school faculty and teachers don’t respond to e-mails (yes, they have stated “I don’t respond to e-mails,” and “we don’t respond to voicemails in the main office”), skip out on meetings, and don’t have to tools to continue to reach out to the partners we are creating. I believe that this has taken away from our mission to incorporate service-learning, and morphed it into how do we help this school gain communication and leadership skills.

                As a team, we definitely have much more work to do. Creating sustainability through service-learning is our main goal and what we strive for."

Kate Mitchell Elementary Community Garden

by Rebekka Brown, Volunteer Center of Story County, Iowa

The school gardens project is an awesome collaborative effort between the Volunteer Center of Story County and Prairie Rivers of Iowa RC&D in Ames, IA [the town where Iowa State University is at]. The idea to start a school garden came from a parent at Kate Mitchell who saw the school garden as a way of combating childhood obesity and providing a hands-on lab for the classroom. The laid out objectives of the garden are: to increase healthy food knowledge among students, provide a hands-on laboratory to achieve grade-level expectations, establish school gardens as a volunteer-driven community asset, build a sustainable food system, and replicate the program for the state of Iowa. The impact that a simple school garden is able to make is pretty obvious, especially when you look into the research of what all such a project does; combating childhood obesity, changing the attitudes of students in the classroom, promote healthy eating habits, and providing an alternative way of learning that is proven to be better. This is what is impacting our community right now, and it’s pretty darn awesome.

As for what we’re doing, so far Carol and I have lead the after-school garden clubs at both schools, planned the Farmers Market for both schools, we did Food Day on Oct. 24^th, helped students in the classrooms, and are currently building relationships with teachers and parents in an attempt to keep this project sustainable. It’s been pretty fun, especially with the kids saying obnoxious things, watering each other, eating new things, but there are definitely some challenges that go along with it. The biggest issue right now is sustainability amidst new principals, new teachers, and, for one school, an entirely new location for the garden. According to the assignment, this is about all I’m required to do, but I’m going to keep going, because I remember quite a few other VISTAs thinking of starting their own school or community garden.

As previously said, school garden are awesome and the benefits to society are endless, but the to-do list of starting and maintaining one is quite the task. Having the classes get outside to water and plant in the garden is great, but who’s doing that in the summer, you? A lot of older teachers love the garden and may be a part of your initial garden committee, but what happens when they retire? Are you just going to bank on someone stepping up to the plate? because I can promise you that is not going to happen. Sure it’s great to have an after-school program for the kids who sign up, but what happens when teachers start to see it as a babysitting gig?

I don’t know what exactly everyone else’s projects are, but, to put it in perspective, implementing and managing the school garden programs is our VAD. If you’re project is already too much to add a school or community garden project, get someone else to do it. Don’t just say “oh well, I’m gonna plant the seed for the next VISTA!” because what that really means is “Oh well, I’m gonna buy the seed packets and let the next VISTA plant the seed!” In order to plant a seed, you have to make sure your soil is fertile enough, and if it’s not, then you need to lay down some compost. Are you planting this seed in the dead of a Midwest winter? Don’t forget to sow in the seed; to make the beds, make sure it’s the right distance away from all the other seeds, that it isn’t a weed for another plant. Once you’ve answered all those questions, then you plant the seed.

Community Engagement: Enka Community School Initiative, NC

Community schools are hubs that bring people together--teachers, students, parents, and neighbors--to support students' academic success, support strong families, and engage communities. The Enka Community School Initiative is a collaborative effort of Enka Middle School (EMS), Hands On Asheville-Buncombe, United Way’s Middle School Success Initiative & the YMCA of Western North Carolina. The goal of this effort is to strengthen community support for EMS students and families through a variety of skill-building classes and family-friendly activities, afterschool clubs, and volunteer opportunities that support student success. 

Anna Gettles &  Kristen Muscaro

(narrative from Anna Gettles)

"As Parent and Community Engagement Coordinator, I develop and implement free evening classes and programs for Enka families as well as recruit volunteers for the school day, after-school clubs, and evening programs.  One of the more successful projects this year has been our October Make a Difference Day volunteer event. School administration voiced that this year they want to focus on building school pride through school beatification. My co-VISTA and I planned a service activity involving weeding, mulching, and beautifying the area around the school mascot, an Air Force jet that sits in front of the school. The week of the service day there were only 3 volunteers signed up, but on the day of the event 7 people showed up! It turned out great and the volunteers had incredible ideas about future projects to continue beautifying the school.  Currently, I am working to plan series of evening family classes entitled “Healthy Cooking on a Budget”. In these classes families learn how to cook healthy nutritious meals without breaking the bank. The cooking classes are a great way to engage parents and their children at EMS in a safe, educational, and fun atmosphere.  About 60 % of EMS students qualify for free and reduced lunch. The cooking classes deal with the issues of hunger and food insecurity in the Enka-Candler community by providing a free meal and education regarding food budgeting.  The classes are free not only to EMS families but also to Enka community members as well.  I continue to look toward the future planning upcoming classes, service days, and events while trying to stay in the present—cultivating awareness and consciousness of what is happening now. So far, it is my experience as a VISTA that I feel like I can always, always do more.  I do not want to spend this year constantly worrying about how much more I could or should be doing rather than what I can do now. I took a pledge promising to “get things done,” and that is my goal here at Enka Community School. Get things done. Mary Oliver, the popular American poet said, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” Well said Ms. Oliver, well said."

Anna Gettles  Parent and Community Engagement Coordinator

Kristen Muscaro Student Success Coordinator