Theda New Breast facilitates Tribal Community Relationship Building

Over the past 14 years, Building Engaged Citizens (BEC) has served as the Montana Campus Compact’s premiere civic engagement and service conference. Since 2000, through various iterations, BEC has provided hundreds of national service members and college students at-large the opportunity to explore the practical and philosophical implications of higher education’s role in civic engagement. This year,BEC continued the legacy through training in the areas of leadership/facilitation, marketing, grant-writing,  volunteerism, volunteer management and tribal community relationship building.  

This year, BEC was held in Great Falls on October 28th through October 30th.  Members and staff stayed at the beautiful Ursuline Center and sessions were held at Great Falls College.  Our guest speakers include:  Susan Wolf- Dean of Great Falls College, Theda New Breast, Roch Turner from Bitterroot College and one of our members, Kate Johnson serving at Bitterroot College.  

New AmeriCorps Program Leaders

Three new leaders are sworn in for our new AmeriCorps Program.  Sara Sadowski joins us from the Govenor’s Office of Community Service to help welcome them. These leaders will support and lead a team of college student AmeriCorps members.  Their teams will serve at least 50 high school youth in grades 9-12 to help them consider, plan for and prepare for postsecondary education.  

Eleven Members volunteer at Food Bank

One of our service projects was going to the Great Falls Food Bank to help prepare kid packs for the weekends.  In just two hours they prepared 600 kid packs.  The second group went to Great Falls Improvement District to clean and paint trash cans on Central Avenue.  In the two hour window they finished cleaning and painting thirty trash cans.  

We all had a great time in Great Falls for our annual Building Engaged Citizens conference.  We all learned a lot and made some awesome connections around the state.  We wish our VISTA members continued success and our new AmeriCorps Program Leaders the best of luck starting their terms of service!