AmeriCorps Week: The VISTA experience at MENTOR

By: MENTOR

News

The week of March 11-17 is AmeriCorps week! This is a week to celebrate the organizations, programs and members of the AmeriCorps community who dedicate their time and energy to service nationwide. In honor of this week, MENTOR is featuring blogs from AmeriCorps members who are spending their service year working with mentoring related organizations.

This past September, we became AmeriCorps VISTA members at MENTOR. Deciding to spend a year of service with MENTOR has given the both of us the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the importance of youth voices and the power that caring adult relationships can hold for young people. Becoming a VISTA was also a great way to get started in the non-profit field and learn more about how a national non-profit organization runs. It has helped us discover a variety of experiences and career paths from industry leaders, who have helped us cultivate a passion for youth development.

It was great to learn that a large number of staff members at MENTOR have also participated in AmeriCorps programs, which has allowed them to understand our experience and encourage us to make the most of our time here. Hearing about their years of service revealed the wide range of opportunities that AmeriCorps can provide to its volunteers. We’ve been able to work on a number of projects with these colleagues and others that have grown our professional skills and enabled us to build connections with a much larger network of mentoring programs across the country.

In addition to building connections with MENTOR staff and past AmeriCorps members, a large benefit of being a VISTA is the peer connection that this service experience provides. We are able to navigate the ups and downs of service, collaborate on how to close out the year as successfully as possible, and plan for exciting next steps together!

MENTOR has been a unique organization to spend an AmeriCorps service year at for many reasons, but a reason that it stands out is the professional development opportunities that have been offered. There have been endless opportunities to learn and grow, both within specific roles at MENTOR and in the mentoring field as a whole. We have had the opportunity to learn more about the important role our work plays for mentoring programs through attending trainings at our Affiliate, the Mass Mentoring Partnership, and through conferences such as the National Mentoring Summit. Over 1,000 people attended the Summit and there were over 100 workshop sessions that people could attend. This event brought together researchers, CEOs, program directors, and mentors to facilitate a conversation about the mentoring field and what different programs and researchers are doing to support youth. We were able to work behind the scenes at this event, as well as attend workshops and collaborate with peers. Our work at this event helped many professionals learn from and collaborate with other people in the field, and helping to support that knowledge sharing was truly a wonderful experience.

Overall, this year so far has provided many great opportunities to learn from people in the youth development field. We can have connected with mentoring programs across the country to help support them and allow them to grow and flourish. This experience has shown the benefit a national organization can have to smaller mentoring programs across the country, and what can be possible by sharing resources and skills to create a better support system for our youth. We as VISTAs can now move confidently into our next steps after being able to develop our communication and project management skills and expand our network in a meaningful way.

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  • MENTOR National and Affiliates will use the information you provide to better inform future publications and keep you up to date with advancements in the mentoring field. For more information, check out our privacy policy.