Raising the Bar: Not only to serve but to lead

The NCCC Blog continues its month of guest bloggers. Today's guest blogger is Taft, 25, from Atlanta, GA, who is a new team leader at the Atlantic Region campus.

Imagine that a NCCC team has helped your community during a natural disaster. You then join NCCC and, within the first two weeks of NCCC training, you meet and serve alongside the President of the United States.

I have eagerly anticipated the day I could serve as a Member in the AmeriCorps NCCC. I feel a deep debt of gratitude to NCCC for helping my fire department find the strength and capability to complete the daunting task of creating a fire buffer around Crown King, Arizona in 2007.

On Monday January 16, the national Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service, I found myself standing behind President Obama wearing an NCCC uniform. Only a week and a half into NCCC training, and I’ve already raised the bar for the proudest day of my life!

Monday morning was a whirlwind of waiting, being moved around, being shuffled in and out of crowds and going through security checkpoints. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but I found myself standing in front of a crowd of volunteers with fellow NCCC Members Casey and Toby.

We stood along a wall while speakers took turns addressing the crowd. I had been told that the President was going to speak, and I knew that a photo opportunity was planned, but nothing could have prepared me for the moment he stepped into the room with his family and shook our hands one by one. He then stood ten feet directly in front of me and delivered a speech that I will never forget.

“There isn’t anyone who can’t serve … nobody who can’t help somebody else,” said President Obama.

Those words will follow me for as long as I live.

There is a phrase that I have heard repeatedly from several facilitators during the NCCC training. The facilitators keep saying, “I can’t do what you (NCCC Members) do.”

Nonsense.

It is my new ambition to spend my life helping people find that strength just like NCCC helped me find it in the Bradshaw Mountains of Arizona. I will carry this commitment with me this year and beyond. Each of us is engaged in a struggle for life. All of us are strong. Everyone has the capacity not only to serve, but to lead.

~Taft

NCCC Atlantic Region Class 18 Team Leaders (L to R: Patrick, Casey, Brooke, Tiffancy, Taft, Toby)

You too can serve and lead. NCCC is currently accepting Team Leader applications until March 1, 2012 for the fall 2012. Consider applying as a Team Leader. For more information about applying for a Team Leader position go here

Top Ten Things I Miss From AmeriCorps NCCC

The NCCC Blog will be hosting guest bloggers during the month of January, 2012. We will be back with a brand new team blog in February.



Today’s guest blogger is Heather, who was a corps member of AmeriCorps Class XVI at the Southwest Region Campus in Denver, CO. She currently resides in Maine where she spends most of her time skiing and baking.



Top Ten Things I Miss From AmeriCorps NCCC

1. Buying food in bulk from Sam’s Club and Costco

2. Transition week antics

3. Living in Denver


4. Hearing ‘Who Dat’ everywhere in New Orleans











5. Operating heavy machinery like a pro

6. Hiking giant mountains

7. Unusual and interesting daily projects

8. Being able to say, “oh yeah, I’ve been there!”

9. ISP at the New Orlean’s Zoo

10. My family

~Heather

Heather serves as a member of the AmeriCorps NCCC Alumni Leadership Council. The AmeriCorps NCCC Alumni Leadership Council was recently established to increase NCCC's alumni engagement. The council currently consists of 11 members including 2 alums representing each region and 1 Chair. Alums are currently spear-heading committees related to new member recruitment, building relationships with project sponsors, fundraising, national days of service days, and 20th Anniversary planning. For more information or to become involved as a regional rep, please contact ncccalums@gmail.com.

The NCCC Blog will be hosting guest bloggers during the month of January, 2012. We will be back with a brand new team blog in February.

Today’s guest blogger is Joe, an AmeriCorps NCCC Alum. He served as a Corps Members in Class XVI and a Team Leader in Class XVII, both at the Southwest Region campus in Denver, Colorado. Joe currently serves as the Development Officer-Annual Giving for the Edmundite Missions, headquartered in Selma, Alabama and serving rural Alabama and New Orleans, LA (http://www.edmunditemissions.org/).

Selma Water tower

Working at a non-profit in rural Alabama creates a Christmas season that even Santa himself would find stressful. Our direct mail campaign is going at full force, our non-stop food kitchen is serving upwards of 500 meals every single day, parties are being thrown for our senior adults and kids, and, all the while, our meals on wheels program is still going and growing and, as the head of the Donor Relations Department, plans must be made for the New Year and meetings must be kept with my boss.

Mass delivery of groceries to rural poor families

It’s easy to begin fearing for the hair that’s left on my head when this stress combines with the stress we all find when preparing for the holidays. However, I never wonder if I CAN accomplish all the tasks in front of me every day. I know I can get all these things done because of the skills I learned during two years of service with AmeriCorps*NCCC.

More important than the skills I learned that I use every day to help the Edmundite Missions, AmeriCorps*NCCC taught me to become part of a community in order to learn how to help.

People usually don't believe that this kind of poverty is in the U.S. I work with it everyday

The fact that 56% of the children in Selma, Alabama live in poverty is startling enough for anyone to want to help, but NCCC prepared me to learn names and faces and search for answers in the community.

The fact that more than 65% of all residents in Dallas County are food insecure (not sure where their next meal is coming from) could easily overwhelm anyone looking to help a community from the outside.

This is a picture of me with an elderly lady that receives our assistance in every way we offer it, including our Bosco meals on wheels. We also provide her with utility assistance and clothing. I got out of the office one day to help with the delivery and her gratitude nearly brought me to tears. She wouldn't stop hugging me and telling me that without us, she wouldn't make it. This picture means a lot to me.

But when you view a community the way the NCCC experience allows, it becomes in a big way your community. It’s not about feeding these poor people; it’s about feeding my neighbors. I love my job and I love helping the people of rural Alabama through fundraising and the dozen other tasks I do every day. And when I’m seeing the results of all that “paper pushing”, I feel like that "A" should still be proudly displayed on my sleeve.

I owe AmeriCorps NCCC so much. I am proud to have been selected to serve as a Southern Region representative to the AmeriCorps NCCC Alumni Leadership Council. Through the next few months, I look forward to working hard with the rest of the LC to connect the fantastic alumni across the nation to the program we all love and the communities that program serves. As a proud alumnus, I must say it is truly a great time to be a member of the NCCC family!

~Joe

Joe serves as a member of the AmeriCorps NCCC Alumni Leadership Council. The AmeriCorps NCCC Alumni Leadership Council was recently established to increase NCCC's alumni engagement. The council currently consists of 11 members including 2 alums representing each region and 1 Chair. Alums are currently spear-heading committees related to new member recruitment, building relationships with project sponsors, fundraising, national days of service days, and 20th Anniversary planning. For more information or to become involved as a regional rep, please contact ncccalums@gmail.com.

An Open Letter to our Readers

The time has come. Maple 4 is graduating November 17, 2011. This means no more projects, no more briefings, no more van rides and especially no more PT.

The team has completed over 16,000 hours of community service work in Infrastructure Improvement, Environmental Stewardship and Conservation, Urban and Rural Development, Energy Conservation, and Natural and Other Disaster Relief. The team created a quarter mile and maintained three miles of trail in Cincinnati, OH. They provided park maintenance to four parks in Vinton, IA. When the team went to Marquette, MI they worked with over 100 children under 17 and improved a day care in order to be state accredited. In Minot, ND they helped 31 homeowners recover some part of their homes that were flooded in June 2011.

This is just from one team. There are 18 other teams in the North Central Region that served at the same time in Class 17 and many more across the country.

We really enjoyed working on the blog. We hope that you enjoyed reading it. We hope that it gave an intimate insight into an AmeriCorps NCCC team.


With Love,

Maple 4

This is it

So we have served our time in Minot. It was a long two-day journey, but we made it. Since driving from Minot to Vinton is more than 10 hours, NCCC rules say that we must stop somewhere for the night. For this project, we were given a single budget for a hotel on the way to Minot and for one on the way back. Since we stayed in a less than spectacular hotel in Fargo on the way there, we had a little more to spend on the way back, allowing us to stay in Bloomingdale, MN, just minutes from Mall of America and Minneapolis (they even had a shuttle!).

Now we are back on campus doing closure activities. Many of these are similar to what we do during project transitions, like community meetings, project debriefs, team check-ins with unit leaders, rep role meetings and tool/equipment check-ins.

At the end of our round 4 debrief, Greg does a rap closure.


This is closure, though; it’s the end of the year of service! That means that we have to make it special. At the beginning of the year, we did physical fitness baselines, so of course we have to do baselines again to see how we’ve improved (hopefully!). We’re having a few meetings to learn about our opportunities after AmeriCorps. Some college credit test practice and testing is going on. We’re having another Cultural Coffeehouse session (talent show) and an AmeriProm.

One thing I am majorly excited about is the Unit-Palooza. Previously, it’s been referred to the AmeriLympics. No one has released very many details about it yet, but it’s supposed to be the ultimate team vs. team competition. At the beginning of the year, every team received “Legacy words of wisdom” from their respective teams from Class 16. Old Maple 4 said they “never lost anything, ever,” so we’re going to work hard to live up to that expectation.

Speaking of “Legacy,” we get to make a team flag and get to paint a team wall mural.

Our “wall” mural is actually on a pillar in middle of the room. We are very happy about this as it allows us to work a little more creatively. I’m not going to give anything away, so if you want to see our mural, you’ll just have to stop by the Vinton NCCC campus. :) But if you want a sneak peek.

The two nights before graduation is an awards banquet to recognize certain accomplishments in the Corps, specifically how Gaby and I broke the campus record for most media hits this year (50!).

Every day is coming up faster than the one before it. It’s fun and scary at the same time. Just as fast as we were all put in the same team, we’ll be thrust apart. I’m really going to miss my team, but I’m happy to have all of my memories.

~Phil

Blockin the Mold

Personal Protective Equipment, or PPE, as it's called, is the stuff campus issues NCCC members to protect us on the worksite. That includes gloves, a helmet, and safety glasses, earplugs, coveralls, steel toed boots, and rain gear. During our last few projects, we've used some of these items off and on, but Minot's been the first time that I've seen all of this Personal Protective Equipment used in concert. Wearing nearly all of that stuff at once, on top of your normal uniform looks something like this:

Diana and Hillary ready to go in the basement

Why is Diana (on the left) wearing so much gear, you ask? Because this is what it looks like in a basement, power washer on blast behind you, contaminated water splashing off walls that were once covered in sewage, pieces of drywall shooting out of hidden cracks in the wall. It's foggy, dark, and difficult to see, even with a string of lights plugged into our generator.

Power washing a basement ceiling

Our sanitizing process involves carefully spraying every piece of wood in the house from about 6 inches away, then hitting it again with a soapy Simple Green solution and finally rinsing. Lastly we mix bleach and water together in a sprayer and go over all of the wood again to kill any remaining mold. Rain gear is a must when bleaching or your clothes underneath can get ruined. I learned this the hard way. (sad face) Then you've got the muck & gut houses where we shovel out basements full of debris that have not been touched since the flood.

Those jobs require us to wear P100 masks that filter out junk in the air and keep us from getting sick due to mold and possible asbestos.

Mucking out a house

Some jobs are demo houses, where we demolish flooring, rip out drywall and nails; remove hot water heaters, duct work, and that sort of thing, to prep them for future power washing. When working in those types of houses, we'll wear an N95 dust mask.

Removing floorboards to expose wet interior floor to dry

Sometimes it can be a pain to put on all the gear. With enough PPE for 9 people thrown into the back of our van, it's confusing to sort through in the morning. And because of contaminants, we have to wash our 2 sets of coveralls every other night so that we have a clean one each morning. It's worth it though, to keep the team safe. I certainly don't want a nail in the foot or mold in my lungs. And I usually try to keep the amount of poo water I'm covered in to a minimum, so the rain gear is my friend.

~Darcy

My First Root Canal

During project round three, I chipped my tooth while swinging a hammer. It really didn’t hurt that bad when it happened, but I knew later the pain would come. At the end of the round, my tooth was in crazy pain, but I was too afraid to go to the dentist.

When fourth round came, the pain was so bad I had to start using Ora-gel. The Ora-gel helped a little bit, but the pain was unbelievable. It was so bad I almost took some sick days off of work, but I kept working like always. Everyone on our team kept telling me to go to the dentist but I was seriously scared. So one day I got tired of the pain and made an appointment at Greer and Greer Dentist Office.

Greg and Dr. Tom

When I went to the dentist, Dr. Tom told me I needed a root canal and he wanted to fix it for me. He set up another appointment and told me to get ready.

I went back a couple days later and was scared for my life. Everyone kept telling me that it “wouldn’t be so bad” and “don’t worry.” When I was waiting in the lobby, there were kids in there making fun of me. They were trying to make me even more scared, but they were actually kind of funny and made me laugh a little bit.

Greg getting drilled

Dr. Tom called me to the back and started on my root canal. Darcy was in there with me to provide me a little bit of company. I also watched a little bit of The Price is Right on TV.

Long story short, I had fun with Dr. Tom and Darcy, my tooth doesn’t hurt anymore, and the dentist isn’t bad after all.

~Greg