North Carolina LiteracyCorps

Becoming More Independent: A Year in Review with NCLC

As this service year draws to a close for me and I prepare myself to depart for service in Peace Corps Madagascar in just a few weeks, I thought it would be best for me to sit down and reflect about what I learned over the course of my time with NCLC and The Raleigh Boys Club.

My thoughts on North Carolina LiteracyCorps

Having served previously with another AmeriCorps program, I have found that not all AmeriCorps programs are the same and they all have their different benefits. Here are some of the benefits of serving with NCLC:

• Agents of change – I am proud to be a part of a group of people that were chosen to serve with NCLC. This group of people each brings a diverse set of skills and knowledge to the program which has made for a very enriching year of service. Many have provided their knowledge and expertise in areas on how to help diverse learners, how to set goals, and provided better ways to help with volunteer management and recruitment to name a few.
• Different methods of providing literacy instruction – NCLC has provided me with awesome training on a variety of methods for providing literacy instruction to meet the individual needs of the students that participate in my program.
• Conference opportunities – I have had the great honor of being chosen to participate in the IMPACT Conference where hundreds of volunteers and organizations convened to share best practices in the areas of service, action, and advocacy at UMASS Amherst. This conference positively influenced me to continue in the area of public service where I can build the capacity of the people and communities that I serve.

A cold day but that didn't stop the smiles on our faces! #IMPACTCONFERENCE2016

• Service Days – All of our service days have been purposeful in engaging volunteers, our service sites, and the community. Whether it be collecting book donations to be given to youth in need or having the community come together and participate in fun literacy related programming, you can always know that NCLC is making a positive impact.
• Awesome Program Director – NCLC’s program director is very personable and I’m thankful for the working relationship I have formed with her as she is readily available to provide feedback and resources to ensure that everything goes well for our training days, service days, and at our service sites.
• No micromanagement – For those that value #gettingworkdone on their own (such as myself), I have found many chances to test out different techniques and ideas at my service site as freely as I wanted.

My thoughts on The Raleigh Boys Club (Boys and Girls Clubs of Wake County)

I personally think that I got the best service site in NCLC!

While my work with the previous AmeriCorps program only focused on teaching literacy to 6th graders, I am now doing that with the addition of math, history, and science and whatever my students need help with while covering grades k-8. This is great because I am currently anticipating working with elementary or middle school students with the Peace Corps.

I piloted a program called Brain Gain Read which helps with learning loss in the area of literacy for grades K-3rd. My site director gave me the go ahead to flow as freely as I wanted with the program. I was then tasked with writing the curriculum for The Boys and Girls Clubs of Wake County that would work best for the different clubs. Again, great experience for Peace Corps. I have also learned how to set up a classroom to provide structure for my younger students as they need it the most.

In addition to providing literacy instruction, I am also in charge of volunteer management and recruitment.  This has been my most challenging area as our volunteers come through the administration for the entire Boys and Girls Clubs of Wake County and someone is already tasked to handle that. What I did do with this was that I created a list within Constant Contact for 200+ volunteers and tagged them by their interests so that they can be contacted when we need volunteers in a particular area. I then focused my attention on managing the volunteers at the Raleigh Boy’s Club by keeping up with their volunteer schedule.

I got to work with the most amazing staff at the Raleigh Boys Club. They are very knowledgeable in the area of youth development and was readily available to answer any of my questions and to give advice. They are very passionate about what they do.

My site director provided me with many professional development opportunities such as attending different workshops and working with staff in administration to learn more about how the organization functions.

In addition to that, I got to sit in on weekly organization wide staff meetings where I learned a lot about how the seven Clubs in the organization comes to together to function as one unit while still maintaining their individuality of their Club. Along with this, I got to attend some pretty high profile events such as the Holiday Board Program where my Brain Gain READ! program was highlighted, the 50th Anniversary Luncheon where board members and community leaders gathered to show their appreciation for the Boys and Girls of Wake County, and the Youth of the Year luncheon where top performing Club Members were celebrated along with sharing the positive impact of the Boys and Girls Clubs on their lives.

The greatest and most important thing I will take away from the Raleigh Boys Club is the relationships that I have built with my students. I have gotten the chance to learn about some of their personal backgrounds and their triumphs, share laughs and jokes with them, give relevant advice for life, talk to them about their plans for the future, and to be a mentor and role model for them. I am going to miss them terribly but I know that they are in good hands.

How I Changed Over the Course of My Service 

I would describe myself as a no-nonsense type of person. I typically like structure and a plan. Serving at the Raleigh Boys Club, I found that I have become less rigid and have learned to go with the flow as a lot of things tend to happen that aren’t routine. My patience has also grown by leaps and bounds and I have learned how to handle disappointment in a more constructive manner.

I am immensely grateful for my time with North Carolina LiteracyCorps as I can definitely say that I have grown as a person in my thinking and the way I view the world, the way I provide instruction, and the way I communicate and build relationships with others around me.

Thank you NCLC and the Raleigh Boys Club for everything.

City Year

How City Year Changed my Life

I originally found out about City Year through a friend who had applied and was accepted into the cohort of Little Rock, AK. At the time, I was working on my MBA and had just quit my job as an Assistant Store Manager for a retail store. I was feeling a bit down-trodden and ill at ease about the prospect of my future and what I really wanted to do in life.

I found out that I really regretted my degrees (both of them) as I should have pursued my passion in life which would have been becoming an English/International Studies/Foreign Language studies major. I tell you this with the utmost conviction: Do what you are passionate about! Do not let others dictate your path in life. Life is too short to live with regrets. And even if you have made the same fumble as I did, it isn’t too late. Life is full of second chances.

The only information that I grasped from what my friend told me about City Year was 1) move to a new city and 2) help with education. That was all I needed to convince me to apply which would give me another year to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and put me on the trajectory to a fulfilling career. I did my initial research to learn all I could about City Year. I found out 2 weeks before I was to begin in Miami my year of service that I had been accepted. That meant 2 weeks of losing my mind trying to get paperwork filled out and securing housing from North Carolina.

I am immensely thankful unto God that I found housing in such a short timespan through the help of Craigslist. If you ever have to take this route, please be sure to insist upon a background check, and skyping to make sure that your contact is legit. I got to live with a Panamanian family for the duration of my stay in Florida. It was one of the best things ever that have ever happened to me in life. They were the most kindest and generous people I have ever met.

Concerning City Year Miami and my first impressions during BTA my thought was: what have I gotten myself into? Everywhere you saw these smiling people cheering and jumping, doing crazy dances, and playing games (team building as they call it). This was definitely not what I signed up for and this just didn’t match with my no-nonsense attitude. Where were the kids that needed help with their school work? After I got over my initial shock of CityYear culture which I later reluctantly acquiesced to and in some parts ignored when I could, I focused my time on trying to make an impact on my students in the area of literacy.

City year gave me the awesome opportunity to function as an ELA (English and Language Arts) corps member. I also had additional coordinator roles which were ELA coordinator and Leadership and Development coordinator. During our service, some of my fellow corps member and I felt blindsided by the additional roles we had to play that we knew nothing about while applying. In hindsight, these roles are some of the best things that can happen to young college graduates or those who just lack experience as they are definitely great resume builders.

"CY Baes" - Best team ever!

When it came to my students and trying to make an impact, I had my good and bad days. There were days in which I felt like packing up and going home as my efforts in the classroom felt pointless when trying to get students to focus on their work. It’s hard to keep up morale when students use derogatory language towards you and hearing them constantly telling you to leave them alone (did I forget to mention that I served at a school that was rated number 1 concerning school fights in all of Florida?). Fortunately this was balanced by the awesome students I got to work with during morning and afternoon tutoring/programming and in the classroom and fully loaded cheesesteaks with fries, a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and Sprite on really bad days, and sharing my woes with my one of my best friends who I consider to be one my sisters.

After School Heroes - I miss these students

It was with this great and awesome lady that I found out what I wanted to do with my life. During one of our normal pow-wows (an informal meeting where we vented, watched Netflix, vibed to Spotify and discussed life in general) we started talking about LACY (Life after City Year) which is one of the pros to City Year as it does help  you come up with a comprehensive plan for your career. We discussed the fact that we always wanted to travel and see the world as neither of us had been outside of the U.S. and the farthest I had ever gone was Florida. Strangely enough, we both shared an actual dream that we had in which we saw ourselves in a foreign land helping students in education. We came to the same conclusion: Peace Corps. We both talked about our long-term goal being that of becoming Foreign Service Officers but that is yet to be seen as who knows how life will affect us.

Fortunately for us, the Chief of Staff at the time of our service was an RPCV who helped us with our application process (resume and motivational statement). As of now, my friend has started her service in Uganda and I am awaiting departure in June 2016.

All in all, I recommend City Year as it is a life changing experience for the good as you get to enter into the fight for social justice and positively impact impoverished communities. You will come out as a better person.

I have no regrets.

Check out City Year to learn more.