The Familiar Unknown and Beyond
22
by Brad Hunter
It’s like one of those super-cool, old-school video games where your map screen only shows the area directly around your character and not the rest of the map you are working with. AmeriCorps, I’m speaking about. When you decide to take on a VISTA position that you most likely know little about for a year you can be in the dark. Lucky for me, since I’ve already done one year of VISTA my character upgraded to a small candle that cast a bit more light. But then I faced the additional hurdle of jumping state lines as well as program lines for my second year of service. Candle snuffed.
I’m spending my second year of National Service as a VISTA Leader for the VolunteerMaine project. My first was served in Michigan working at the United Way of the EUP Volunteer Center, a small volunteer center that dealt with the core volunteer center functions of recruitment, referral, recognition, and retention (you probably picked up on the 4-r’s memory trick there, feel free to use and spread liberally). This was a learning experience for me as I had no prior practice in this kind of environment, or the non-profit world in general. I was given the opportunity to work with youth in a service capacity as well as learn about the functions of a United Way in the community. It was also a great experience because we were members of a statewide network, Volunteer Centers of Michigan. My ability to see volunteering and national service at a statewide level was critical in helping me to decide on a second year of VISTA, this time as a Leader where I could help in guiding and ensuring that other national service members were being supported and put into a position to succeed during their service year.
In the potentially unlit situation I’ve moved into it has been most reassuring to find familiar contours in the surrounding landscape. The people working and supporting one another in the volunteer sector here are just as wonderful and passionate as those I was privileged to know and work with in my previous service, and they have been exceedingly generous in welcoming me to a new community and work environment. The project here is “volunteer centers without walls” and I feel as though I’ve jumped into a network that is the twin in many ways of that I just left (not the evil twin or better twin, just twin, to clarify). The team of unbelievable VISTAs and the work they are engaged in for a year of their life is something that we all draw inspiration from as we work towards a better world.
A better world. That’s what I find myself thinking about as I’m learning about my new community and my new program. It’s part of the AmeriCorps thought process in a lot of ways, I suppose. Volunteer Maine fits into that picture. Building an infrastructure of volunteer related resources and connections is an idea worth fully embracing, and the technology based system that VolunteerMaine has chosen is forward thinking with the potential for great sustainability into the future, even if it does present its own unique challenges now. My role now is to help support this project, one of this states’s chosen methods of making its world better. It is a task that I can take on with optimism and pride because I know there is a supportive network of people working with the very same goal.
My character has a long list of missions ahead, and the game may have snuffed out my candle, but it never realized I had night vision goggles on.
Brad Hunter is a VISTA Leader with the VolunteerMaine VISTA project at the Maine Commission for Community Service. He is a guest blogger.