A Sweaty Sunday by Jonny Dugger
Jonny is a VISTA serving with Snqweylmistn in Ronan, MT. As the heat begins to push into me, my only thought is escape. It is too hot in here, I don’t know if can take it, I think I want to leave, I want to leave, I can leave if I want, there is nothing keeping me in this place, i can leave, take a deep breath, slowly through the nostrils, it’s so damn hot. It’s dark, I can only see the rocks glowing red, I can only hear the voices in prayer, the sizzle of the water as it…
Schedule Struggles by Kathryn Barton
Kathryn Barton is an AmeriCorps College Coach serving at Salish Kootenai College Upward Bound. “You’re up for anything!” I’ve heard this from many people, many times. It’s a compliment, but it’s also a nice way to say that I’m the person who asks when and where to show up and what I should wear. I’m the person who follows along. I’m the person who agrees to the plans after they’re made. I am NOT a planner. When a teacher at the high school I’m serving asked for help introducing her students to nearby community colleges, I was excited to show…
Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service by Jessie Zuiderveld
Jessie Zuiderveld is an AmeriCorps College Coach serving with Experiential Learning and Career Services at University of Montana. This past week we celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday meant to honor the life and accomplishments of MLK. As a prominent civil rights figure, Dr. King’s tireless efforts towards equality through peaceful protest led to groundbreaking changes in the United States. The holiday in his name was first observed on Jan 20, 1986, making this the 38th year that it was celebrated. Martin Luther King Jr. Day is unique in that it is not just a public holiday…
Heartfelt Histories- Serving with Purpose in a Museum by Grace Lowery
Grace is a VISTA serving with the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula Last month, I attended a national AmeriCorps VISTA training conference in Dallas, Texas. It was very special to be at such a large gathering of people in a similar position as me. A lot of the time, when talking to people about AmeriCorps, they don’t really know what the program is or how it works. There were many opportunities for collaboration, networking, and discussion of VISTA-related topics. It was nice to be able to talk about the ups and downs of service within the diverse melting pot of…
Stuck by Parag Desai
Parag Desai is an AmeriCorps College Coach serving at Flathead Valley Community College. “Your wheels are spinning in place.” This is what a friend and colleague said to me as we chatted in his office in-between classes this past Spring semester. Three years had passed since I graduated college in May 2020, at the heights of the COVID pandemic, and I had only a negligible cluster of professional experiences to show for the time spent. Attempts at carving out some sort of career path within this time—as education goes virtual, rent soars, with layoffs and budget cuts abound—did not provide…
Purpose and Placement by Joanna Massier
Joanna is a VISTA serving with Park County Environmental Council in Livingston It’s always mattered to me where I live. From an early age was enamored with the idea of moving away from Iowa, leaving forever, and going to live in a utopian city somewhere. For a long time, this perfect escape was Canada, a mythical place where some aunts and uncles lived and where my dad was from. In my imagination, Canada was a place I could go to start fresh, a magic bullet for my personality flaws. This dream lasted well into my adolescence, even representing a possible…
Mindsight – Finding Myself Through Service by Raymond Knight
Knightian Uncertainty: Rolling the Hard Six “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance. It is the illusion of knowledge.” ― Stephen Hawking. As we reached the midway point in the COVID19 hysteria that gripped the nation, (and the world at large), mandatory quarantines left all of us with lots of extra time on our hands. Like many around me, my idle mind led me to take a long hard look at where my life was going. I began asking myself such questions as: Will this pandemic ever end? What will life be like in the aftermath? What will the…
The Key to Student Engagement by Laurie Koepplin
Laurie Koepplin is an AmeriCorps College Coach serving at University of Montana Western. Lately, I’ve been reading at least an article a day from the online publication: Inside Higher Ed. Every article in the student success section relates to being a College Coach. Today’s article highlights something that I experienced firsthand yesterday. Shawn VanDerziel, President and CEO of National Association of Colleges and Employers, stated that, “We have to catch students where they are and not just rely on them seeking out the services.” (Flaherty, 2023) The article focuses on students’ use of career centers on college campuses. This is…
Just Show Up by Chris Boswell
Chris Boswell is an AmeriCorps College Coach serving at TRIO Upward Bound at the University of Montana. Traveling out here has been one heck of a shift for me. I’m far from home here and, as someone who has never lived outside of their home state before, moving out to Montana has been a big, massive shift for me. Still, my service here has been a major factor in helping me to adjust and acclimate to this new situation I find myself in. My service site is TRIO Upward Bound at the University of Montana. Our mission is to provide…
On Second-Year Service by Amelia Huba
Amelia is an AmeriCorps VISTA member serving with the Bozeman School District 7 If you told me in August 2022 that I would willingly sign up for a second year of service, it would have seemed unrealistic – I was already homesick on the 30-hour drive here! If you’d told me the same thing in January 2023 I would have laughed out loud. Why would I sign up to stay in a place where winters mean below zero degrees and where there are chances of snow through June? I came to Montana expecting to have one year of incredible experiences…
Nice Ghosts By Liv Sorenson
Liv is serving as a VISTA at the Clark Chateau in Butte, MT One dreary afternoon in Butte, I was working at the front desk on the ground floor of my service site, the Clark Chateau. It was sprinkling outside and something about the dampness had kept the usual trickle of tourists away. Still, working in a historical building is rather enchanting. On quiet days like that day, it often feels as though I’m a resident of some ancient castle. In fact, the Clark Chateau is likely modeled after the Château de Vizille, in Southwestern France. This Chateau, though, is…
Overcoming Barriers by Lindsey Hundemer
Lindsey Hundemer is an AmeriCorps College Coach serving at International Rescue Committee. I quickly realized as I started college that life will not take you in the direction that you always think it will. That is the only way that I can explain moving to Missoula, Montana directly after graduating from Clemson University in South Carolina. However, I know now that this is exactly what I need to be doing, working with refugee youth to help their educational and career goals become a reality. But this rewarding work does not come without its challenges. Luckily, I have found a community…
Fake It ‘Til You Make It? More Like Fake It ‘Til You Become It! by Emma Burck
Emma is a VISTA serving with DEQ Energy Office in Helena “How did I get here?” It was a random Tuesday afternoon when I had a moment of self awareness and thought to myself: “Am I really here right now?” I had been in service for about two weeks by then. I was sitting in a conference room listening in at one of the DEQ staff meetings. As a Rural Energy Outreach coordinator, meetings and conferences are weekly obligations. I looked around the colleagues sitting in the room, seemingly engaged in what was being discussed at the time, which clearly…
Trying to Make a Difference with Alex Lee
Alex Lee is an AmeriCorps College Coach serving with Poplar High School and Fort Peck Community College. For me, service is all about the relentless pursuit to help those who are in need. Service is about making a difference that lasts in a community, and actively making everyone’s lives better in the process. That’s why we all joined AmeriCorps, and that’s why we are all here in the middle of Montana, to help the impoverished and the disadvantaged. Well, at least that’s what I hope to do. It has been a little hard to find jobs, tasks, and projects to…
Progress with Griffin Seyfried
Griffin Seyfried is a VISTA serving with MSU Bozeman’s Student Engagement Office, Bozeman, MT My journey began during my final term in college. I was finishing off my degree in Environmental and Urban Studies in the little city of Chicago. I knew I wanted to pursue a career that would help me establish deep community ties while also planting myself as a resource and pillar to support those around me, but I couldn’t fight the itch to escape to America’s wilder west. The AmeriCorps emails seemed to fall in my inbox more heavily than Chicago’s snowiest Winters covering all the…
You Will Find Home Eventually by Almeida Paroubek
Almeida is a VISTA serving with the Native American Achievement Center at MSU Billings If you’ve never been to Billings, Montana, you might not know about the Rimrocks. I had no idea about them before the day I drove into town. I had a vague idea of what the geography was like closer to the Rockies, and when I looked at a few google images of Billings as I was preparing for the move, it didn’t seem like anything special. The rocky cliffs around the city matched my expectations of what mountains are like, real mountains. My experience with mountains…
Going West. by Jonny Dugger
Jonny is an AmeriCorps VISTA member serving with Snqweyłmistn. The beginning was easy. Exciting. The start of a new adventure. Heading out west to do good. Making the choice to be in the service of the American government. Latching on to the hope of eliminating poverty, just as Lyndon B. Johnson hoped to do. Sixty years ago. The possibilities seemed full of promise. I felt like I had great potential. I would be able to help Snqweyłmistn, a non-profit on the Flathead Reservation, build a Salish immersion community for foster children that can address the intergenerational trauma caused by colonialism. …
Third Year of Service, Going Strong by Ethan Krenzer
Ethan is an AmeriCorps VISTA member serving with the Moving Mountains Foundation in Missoula. Now in my third year of service as an AmeriCorps VISTA in Montana, the 2023/2024 period has me very excited. Moving from California to Butte during Summer 2021, the opportunity to serve with two different nonprofit organizations in that region of the state made me a better team member through learning how to grow capacity, promoting and advertising community events, and establishing community partnerships. While difficult to understand at first, being taught these skills was incredibly useful not only for my service work but also with…
Stepping Out of My Comfort Zone: Relocating from Introvert to Ambivert through Service by Raymond Knight
“One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.” -Abraham Maslow The year 2019 saw me preparing myself to live in a Kenyan village for two years, teaching sign language and life skills to deaf Kenyan youth. That was the plan anyway, but COVID-19 saw to it that, that particular reality would not take place. Fortunately, I recalled bookmarking several favorite opportunity listings in the My AmeriCorps Portal. I began looking through them for assignments that interested, inspired, or challenged me—offering opportunities for personal…
I’m Not the Assistant by Laurie Koepplin
Laurie is an AmeriCorps College Coach serving with the University of Montana Western. When I began my first term of AmeriCorps service on April 4th, I was given a desk and space outside of the Director of Student Success’s office. People would walk into the Multicultural Center (where his office is located) and assume I was his personal assistant. He or she would ask, “When will the director be back?” “Will you take a message?” (Of course I did, I’m a helpful person.) We even had conversations about not needing to tell each other where we were going or when…