Category Archives: Corps & Coalitions

05.12.09
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AmeriCorps Week: Service Leads to Teaching Career

In honor of AmeriCorps Week, I’m interviewing people who are current or former AmeriCorps members, to talk with Doug and our sonthem about their service, and its impact on their communities and their careers. This interview is with my husband Doug. We met in 2000, during his second AmeriCorps year with Notre Dame AmeriCorps.

Where did you serve?

From 1999-2000 I served at Heberle Elementary School in Cincinnati, Ohio, and from 2000-01, I served at Fair Oaks Elementary School in Redwood City, California.

What do you do now?

I teach fourth grade at an elementary school where most kids are from low-income, limited-English families. This is my fifth year at my school.

You studied fine arts and painting as an undergrad, but you started AmeriCorps several years after Continue reading →

05.08.09
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Summer of Service Creates Positive Alternatives for Middle School Students

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Today’s guest contributor is the ICP Summer of Service Fellow Joshua Truitt.

On Tuesday, April 21, 2009, President Obama took a tremendous stride toward supporting youth civic engagement in the United States by signing the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act into law. Included in the legislation is funding for a new innovative program called Summer of Service (SOS).

A national SOS program — to help communities create positive alternatives for middle school students during summer vacations — was first proposed by Innovations in Civic Participation (ICP), an organization committed to increasing youth service opportunities in the United States and abroad. In the summer months, the lack of constructive activities and opportunities for young people often results in academic decline, risky behavior and an increased likelihood of failing to make the transition to high school. Yet, when young people participate in service activities they are better able to control their own lives in a positive way, avoid risky behaviors, strengthen their community connections and become more engaged in their own education.

A national SOS will enable a large number of young teens to participate in service as a “rite of passage” from middle to Continue reading →

05.01.09
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Boston Teacher Residency

picture-41The Boston Teacher Residency, an AmeriCorps program, offers education and support for new teachers willing to commit to three years of teaching in Boston Public Schools.

Modeled after the medical residency, the Boston Teacher Residency (BTR) aims to meet Boston Public Schools’s goals of recruiting, educating, and retaining teachers of color and teachers of math, science, and special education. Though the residency is less than a decade old, already ten percent of math and science teachers in Boston Public Schools are graduates of BTR.

Placement and education

Aspiring teachers in BTR co-teach with a mentor teacher four days a week for one year in Boston Public Schools, and take part in intensive, tailored pre-service and post-service training.

Wednesday evenings and Fridays during the residency year, the 75 participants take cohort-based education courses taught by professors from University of Massachusetts Boston. The coursework leads to a Master’s degree by the end of Continue reading →

04.29.09
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HealthCorps Holds Annual Gala, April 30 in NYC

Green Garden GalaHealthCorps — the national service corps founded by Dr. Mehmet Oz that brings health mentoring and education into public schools across the United States — is holding its Green Garden Gala, an annual black (and green) tie fundraiser, tomorrow night at the World Financial Center in Manhattan.

The Gala aims to raise funds to establish HealthCorps’s curriculum in more schools and to honor actor and dancer Ben Vereen — an advocate of diabetes awareness, New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and New York Philanthropist and CEO of the Red Apple Group John Catsimatidis for their  considerable contributions to the health and well-being of American youth. Check out this video about the event.

HealthCorps will also grant its first Music for a Better Life award to music legend Quincy Jones. The night will also feature performances from Wyclef Jean, Stepp Stewart, and Eturnity Band. Hip-hop mogul and vegan Russell Simmons will attend, among 500 other supporters.

In addition to the entertainment, the Gala will also incorporate elements of HealthCorps’s Mental Resilience curriculum into the evening’s activities, with booths set up to offer tastings of healthy foods, and to teach guests about reading food labels, for example.

The fundraiser (individual tickets to attend cost $1000) goes to support the activities of HealthCorps which currently places health coordinators in 44 public schools across the country to educate teens about healthy diet and lifestyle through tailored peer-mentoring and activism. The two-year term of service offers a stipend and benefits to coordinators, who are often recent college grads heading for a career in medicine or public health. (Note that HealthCorps isn’t currently affiliated with AmeriCorps, so the benefits structure is different from AmeriCorps service.)

HealthCorps is currently recruiting — check out the elegibility requirements and consider applying.

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04.23.09
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The Peace Corps Lottery

This year, Obama’s words and actions have inspired many people to serve their country.  Every day a new article appears in the press about the surge in Peace Corps applications. But given budget constraints and the nomination system, who gets in and who doesn’t is a bit of a lottery. And not just because the applicant rolls are swelling.

J. Scholes, Peace Corps Haiti

J. Scholes and a little friend, Peace Corps Haiti

Peace Corps’s funding has been challenged in recent years due to the falling value of the dollar and rising expenses — so fewer Volunteers are invited. And the qualifications for Peace Corps assignments are narrowly drawn. The net effect is that “generalists” — well-educated people who could learn to do many things effectively — compete against each other for fewer and fewer Volunteer positions while demand for Volunteers is growing around the world.

Peace Corps assignments each have their own very specific qualifications attached. For any given assignment it’s all spelled out — the degree you need, level of language proficiency in specific foreign languages, amount of time in relevant volunteer or professional experience. The requirements are there because host countries invite Peace Corps, determine the mission of the program there, and request specific skill sets among incoming Volunteers.

In the past, if you were an accomplished college grad with varied volunteer experience and few medical complications, your chances of getting into the Peace Corps were solid and fair. You could vie for one of a few generalist assignments — Community Development, Health Extension, or English Teaching, for example. Once in-country you’d be trained with all the specific skills you’d need to complete your service effectively.

Problem is, Peace Corps wants to place all of its talented generalists in these same assignments. That’s because the Continue reading →