I’m in my second year as a Montana AmeriCorps Leader, and my experience has been one of contrast. In the fall of 2018, I left Georgia and crossed a great swath of the country, prompted by a combination of necessity and a desire for meaningful education work.  I ended up in Sidney, a small sugar beet town about 15 miles west of North Dakota. Though hectic and stressful, the following year at the Boys & Girls Club there was indeed meaningful, and altogether an interesting and formative time.

While in Sidney, I heard tell about Western Montana. Spoken of with a dash of disdain and a sneak of suspicion, Western Montana was like a foreign region—wholly un-Montana. With Montana Campus Compact based in Missoula, I saw fragments of the populous, mountainous West; it’s vastly different than the brownish, rolling land of the east, both in culture and landscape.

Despite the warnings, I fell in love with a Missoula VISTA member and began to travel to the west regularly. Eventually, I crossed the Continental Divide and moved there. For many of the reasons I chose to do my first term, and with a desire to continue my exploration of the museum field, I decided to do second year of AmeriCorps at spectrUM Discovery Area.

spectrUM is a science museum in Missoula, and is part of the University of Montana. Exploration and curiosity are at the heart of spectrUM’s educational mission; it is home to a host of hands-on, interactive exhibits like water tables, moving topographic models, and a physics turntable. In addition, there’s a science station called the Discovery Bench where educators conduct small experiments with visitors. Outside of the museum, spectrUM is involved in a variety of science outreach programs throughout Western Montana.

  My service experience in Missoula has been markedly different than in Sidney, which makes sense—AmeriCorps varies greatly depending on host site and community. As such, my time in Sidney was reflective of the town itself. In that isolated but tight-knit community, I became involved in many realms of public service, knew and worked with a ton of people, and volunteered all over the place. But I existed on a kind of windswept, sugar beet-stenched island, disconnected from the wider world and wanting for art and music. In Missoula, a veritable metropolis on a Montana scale, my service is much more relegated to my site. Aside from a weekly trip to Empower Place, a kind of mini-spectrUM attached to the Missoula Food Bank, I haven’t been able to dig deeper into the community in terms of volunteering and interaction. Ironically, in a city ten times larger than my previous home, I feel less connected to the people and less of a community member. However, it’s nice to go to museums, to see live music, and to check out art shows.

In the face of a changed environment, I’ve tried to create where I can, to serve where I’m needed, and to educate to the fullest. AmeriCorps is weird—it’s mutable and unpredictable. I’m here to do what I can.