ServiceWorks - A Year In Review
St. Louis ServiceWorks program year 3 (August 2016 – August 2017) has been full of achievements from hosting National Days of Service to attending conferences to working with partners, scholars, and volunteers. Here are a few of the accomplishments of the year.
NYC Conference and Day of Service
Less than a month after becoming AmeriCorps Volunteers In Service To America (VISTA) members, Lisa, Margaux, Valerie, and Year 2 VISTA Kate headed to the Big Apple with ServiceWorks VISTAs nationwide to attend the Opportunity Nation Conference and volunteer with US Hunger for 9/11 Day of Service and Remembrance. These two events set the stage for an inspirational and exciting service term.
ServiceWorks is a national professional development program providing 16-24 year olds, called scholars, with the resources to be positive change agents in their community. St. Louis ServiceWorks had primarily worked with scholars through either nonprofit or school partnerships. However that changed during the 2016-17 program year.
Thanks to the hard work of previous VISTAs, the Year 3 team began working with youth at the St. Louis City Juvenile Detention Center just days after returning from New York. This partnership was the first of its kind in ServiceWorks program history. With their compassion and innovation, the Detention Center’s scholars inspired a Youth Today article that led to a connection with the St. Louis County Juvenile Detention Center which allowed Year 3 VISTAs the opportunity to work with their young men as well.
Another St. Louis ServiceWorks first was geographical. After two years of serving Missouri residents, a relationship was forged with Illinois non-profit, Griffin Center – East St. Louis, thus making St. Louis ServiceWorks the first ServiceWorks site to serve a bi-state region.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2017
Our second national day of service was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day on January 16, 2017. That day our ServiceWorks team, along with other St. Louis-based VISTAs and AmeriCorps members, remembered and honored his legacy and critically evaluated how far St. Louis has come in making his dream a reality. We began the day at the Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis for the annual rally with people from all over the St. Louis area.
Afterwards all St. Louis AmeriCorps members traveled to the International Institute of St. Louis for our lunch discussion, “What would it take to make St. Louis a Beloved Community?” After hearing selections from Dr. King’s speeches and autobiography, members wrote their answers on sticky notes and placed them on a wall for all to see, before regrouping for table discussions. This first ever gathering of 80 people from the various branches of National Service (AmeriCorps, VISTA, SeniorCorps, and Teach for America) serving in St. Louis was deemed the “largest national service event” one leader had had the pleasure of attending in 9 years!
(You can view more details and pictures from #MLK2017 on an earlier blog post.)
This was a year of firsts for ServiceWorks, especially when it came to partners and projects. Program leaders and youth within St. Louis County Youth Programs: Leadership & Resiliency Program joined forces with ServiceWorks to make a Global Youth Service Day – April 22, 2017 – impact that scholars, leaders, and those served will not soon forget. The success of this project led to another large-scale service project about two months later during scholars’ summer vacation.
Another Large-Scale Service Project
For most students summer is a time to relax from school and projects; however, those within the Leadership & Resiliency Program of St. Louis County Youth Programs instead planned Foster Field Day – a day of fun for families working with Angels’ Arms, a St. Louis non-profit. Foster Field Day included games, food, prizes, a cooling station, a dance off, and some more outdoor fun at North County Recreation Complex’s water park. Scholars and families alike had a blast during their summer vacations!
(You can view more information about Foster Field Day through previous Tumblr posts, on our Instagram account - @serviceworksstl - and on St. Louis County Youth Programs Facebook - @STLCountyCYP)
The past year St. Louis ServiceWorks has had incredible success with National Days of Service and large-scale service projects; however, witnessing the scholars’ development on an individual level has been the most rewarding part of our service term. From attending workshops to assisting with mock interviews to participating in graduation ceremonies, we have seen how scholars grow throughout the ServiceWorks program. Upon completing the program, some scholars said they have decided to be “more active in participating” in group discussions and in class, others realized that “working with one another is fun and not that hard,” and still others said ServiceWorks gave them volunteer opportunities that helped them decide what careers to pursue. ServiceWorks also gives youth an opportunity to be creative, help others, and build their own self-confidence while building workforce skills.
In total we have had the privilege to work directly with 20 volunteers who helped us work indirectly with 360 scholars over the last 12 months. Those 380 individuals participated in 44 service projects and 22 scholar-led service projects that benefitted 1000 clients in the St. Louis community. These service projects ranged from cooking to collecting donations to writing stories and raps to assembling a wide variety of kits for homeless shelters and children’s hospitals.
None of this work or these results would have been possible without the help of our sponsors: United Way of Greater St. Louis, Points of Light, Citi, and Corporation for National and Community Service. Thank you all for supporting St. Louis ServiceWorks throughout the last 3 years. A big shout out and thank you to the Year 1 and 2 VISTAs for their hard work establishing partnerships that we could build on. Lastly, thank you to our amazing supervisor Mary who has guided and supported 3 years of VISTAs.
Check out our United Way-ServiceWorks blog, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with the handle @ServiceWorksSTL to see more highlights from the past 3 years.
Program Year 3 – that’s a wrap
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