Americorps Reflection

AmeriCorps has been a great learning experience for me. In AmeriCorps we work to make the community safe and better. We do board up, clean up, leafleting, surveys, home safety assessment e.c.t. We get to meet new people every day. We also plan big board-up events occasionally. We had an AmeriCorps Member Celebration day on November 17th for getting 1 million members. We had to go to Lansing to participate in this celebration. There was almost 700 members there and they were only from Michigan. I didn’t know how big AmeriCorps was until that day. This celebration gave me opportunity to connect with new people. There were also several informative workshops, which gave me new perspective to look at few things differently. The workshops were the best part of
I remember when we hosted the Make a difference day event for Thurgood Marshall. It was a busy day for all of us. It was also a big event. There were a lot of vacant houses in that area. Our job was to make a list of the vacant houses and to measure it for board-ups. Measuring it took about a week. Lighting observation was a challenge for some of us because we had to wait till dark to find out which light works so that we can write down the address. Some people didn’t like how we were going around the same area multiple times because they didn’t know what we were trying to do. After that some of us had to drive around morning and afternoon to find out the most common routes that everyone takes to go and from school. I couldn’t participate in that because I had school the same time. On the big event day, we secured 10 vacant properties, cleared three blocks of trash, removed a block of graffiti from a vacant property, and created visible safe routes signs. We hit some rough patches on the way but we all worked together to overcome it. It was a very long and exhausting day but we all were happy because we all felt the joy of making a difference in the