08 December 2008

Giving Public Service, Gaining a Career

AmeriCorps members serve with numerous nonprofit organizations to address social needs, such as building homes.

By Siobhan Dugan

For more than 40 years, the U.S. government has sponsored programs that engage young people in public service. These programs are widely supported for the contributions that participants make. The young volunteers also leave the programs with a new view of their talents, their capabilities, and their futures.

Siobhan Dugan is a public affairs specialist at the Corporation for National and Community Service, the parent organization of AmeriCorps, which offers 75,000 opportunities each year for adults to help meet critical community needs across the country.

AmeriCorps members are known for helping others. They run after-school programs, build trails in national parks, face down forest fires, and respond to national disasters ranging from the September 11 terrorist attacks to Hurricane Katrina. The people they serve are overwhelmingly grateful for these efforts. But when an AmeriCorps member ends a year-long term of service, what then?

Many AmeriCorps members agree that their service helps them develop skills that ready them for future careers. They also report that AmeriCorps helps them figure out which careers they want to pursue. Those beliefs are backed up by Still Serving: Measuring the Eight-Year Impact of AmeriCorps on Alumni, a 2008 report that analyzed the impacts of AmeriCorps service on a group of 2,000 members eight years after their service, compared with a control group of similar individuals who did not serve.

The study, the most rigorous ever conducted about AmeriCorps’s impacts on members, conclusively demonstrates that AmeriCorps exposes members to new career opportunities and is beneficial to them in the job market. About 80 percent of members reported that their service exposed them to new career options, and more than two-thirds of the former members reported that their service was an advantage when job hunting after they completed their AmeriCorps service.

Serving Youth

Take Brian McClendon, 29, who grew up in New York City’s Harlem and has been associated with what is now called the Harlem Children’s Zone since high school. These days he oversees AmeriCorps members and works closely with the children served by the community service program, never forgetting that he was once in their situation.

Serving as an AmeriCorps member provided McClendon with the framework for his current management duties. “Without that basis,” he said, “I don’t think I would be successful.” AmeriCorps also gave him “the opportunity to work with families, with children in the community, and polish my social skills. Dealing with so many different personalities, addressing their needs, it’s been a wonderful experience.”

AmeriCorps service introduced him to a host of new skills, including conflict resolution, mediation, and classroom management. “Most of all, it gave me the ability to serve as a leader in my classroom, my schools, and in my community,” he said.

Serving also gave him new career plans. As a child and teenager, he had set his eye on a future in law enforcement; his undergraduate degree is in criminal justice. AmeriCorps changed his goal, he says, but there is a connection to his new goals in community service. He sees his role as “preventing problems and heading them off.” By the time police get involved in a situation, “it’s too late, the law’s been broken.” Instead, McClendon said, working with young people early in their lives, especially during early childhood, “gives kids a fighting chance. It’s a much more powerful influence.”

Although he still feels a strong respect for the criminal justice side of the equation, he views his career choice as having a “more profound impact” on those served by Harlem Children’s Zone. The organization has been providing education, social-service, and community-building programs to children and families living in Harlem since the 1970s.

These days, he’s also working on a master’s degree in public administration, which will “give me extra teeth [credentials] in the area of managing the public-service system. I wouldn’t have decided to do that if I hadn’t had the AmeriCorps experience.”

Protecting Water

Torie Bowman worked on watershed projects in U.S. western states and now wants to study environmental law.

Halfway across the country in Colorado, Torie Bowman, a current AmeriCorps member, is planning to take her life in a new direction when her service ends. Like McClendon, AmeriCorps has provided Bowman an introduction to a different career, one that will continue the work she is doing now.

Bowman, 25, is an AmeriCorps VISTA team leader with the Western Hardrock Water Team, working on water quality issues, particularly those impacted by mines. The program focuses on getting groups concerned about preservation of the watershed to start working with each other across political boundaries, such as state lines. By focusing on the watershed level, Bowman is striving to unite groups on common issues.

As a team leader, Bowman recruits more VISTA members to help reach other watershed groups. She started her VISTA service last year with the Appalachian Coal Country Watershed Team in West Virginia. Her work has focused on watersheds in small historic mining communities, where the mining industry has negative effects on the watersheds. “I do a lot of site visits and networking, partnership building around the state,” she said. She also plans events for training sessions and VISTA gatherings, and she does plenty of grant writing.

The experience has prompted Bowman to take the Law School Aptitude Test, with the ultimate goal of working in environmental law. She worked as a white-water rafting guide for two years before signing on with AmeriCorps. “My career and service terms have been a huge transition for me, to use my brain and not just my body,” she said.

Bowman received a bachelor’s degree in religion and art history from Wake Forest University in 2005. “The degree is definitely part of why I looked at VISTA,” she said. “The degree didn’t give me an idea of what my practical skills were. I wanted to do some intense work that would allow me to develop those skills.”

She has definitely achieved that goal. “For me, pretty much everything I know about myself personally is from my service experience. I’ve learned that I enjoy working with people. I can handle the paperwork, but more than that, I love matching people up, and networking and partnership building. It’s forced me to understand issues and be a well-informed person, especially about water quality issues.”

Bowman finds, though, that working in a nonprofit organization can be limiting. “Law school stuck out as a way I can be more effective, especially in water quality work.” Colorado has been a good place to become involved in water quality issues, according to Bowman. Water quality is important everywhere, but water quality and quantity are tightly managed in this Rocky Mountain state because of resource scarcity.

Bowman is currently applying to law schools, targeting the top environmental law schools as her first choices. She also wants to study Native American law issues, an interest that was sparked by studying Native American politics and spirituality in college.

Communicating in Communities

Angelina Moya, 23, is now job hunting in her native Aurora, Illinois, and nearby Chicago, after finishing a term of service with AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC) in July. She holds a bachelor’s degree in communication studies and wants to use the combination of her education and community service experience to find a position in the nonprofit sector.

“I’ve found that [job hunting] is a big challenge,” she said. “The Chicago market is competitive and organizations are having money issues.”

That aside, she said that her NCCC service provided her with a wealth of experience in critical areas. NCCC members are assigned to teams of 10 to 12 people that serve together for a year and live together in dormitory-like settings.

“One of the greatest things I learned from NCCC was interpersonal skills,” Moya said. “My team was very diverse, with a lot of different personalities. We had strong personalities. That’s one of the challenging things but one of the best things about my experience.” Because working with diverse people is a given in most workplaces, Moya recognizes the need for flexibility. “I think I’m a little more open minded now,” she said.

Moya worked in a variety of locations on vastly different projects while with NCCC. In Lake Charles, Louisiana, where residents are still grappling with damage from Hurricane Rita of 2005, her team served on a Habitat for Humanity project, building a house on 4.2-meter (14-foot) stilts to protect it from future hurricanes. In Ketchikan, Alaska, her team renovated a 100-year-old building to turn it into a youth community center. On another posting to Louisiana, the team worked at a Habitat for Humanity warehouse, delivering materials to homes under construction.

In addition to her role as a team member, Moya served as a media liaison for her team. “Before NCCC, the communication studies [experience] was so broad, I needed to narrow it down. Now I have this background in community service, and developed an interest and love for it, so I want to continue. That helped me solidify my future plans and career path.”

Although AmeriCorps service provided these three members with experience that will help them achieve success in their careers, none of them see that as the most important aspect of the program. AmeriCorps members have a huge impact on those they serve. As Brian McClendon put it, “I think we saved a lot of lives; a lot of lives needed to be saved. I’m on the front line.”

AmeriCorps is a program of the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency that improves lives, strengthens communities, and fosters civic engagement through service and volunteering. Each year the corporation engages more than 4 million Americans of all ages and backgrounds in service to meet local needs through its Senior Corps, AmeriCorps, VISTA, NCCC, and Learn and Serve America programs. For more information, visit www.nationalservice.gov.