Editor’s year in AmeriCorps was a powerful look at people’s needs around the country.
My senior year of high school, despite the advice of counselors, parents and peers, I could not force myself to fill out a college application.
I wanted to travel far from the small Eastern Washington town I grew up in, and I was desperate to do something that those advisors could point to and say I wasn’t a bum, that I was on track for something. What I found was AmeriCorps NCCC — short for National Civilian Community Corps — a yearlong, labor-intensive program where members moved state-to-state in vans and completed service projects.
AmeriCorps was first described to me as the domestic Peace Corps. I had heard of Peace Corps vets who hand-dug wells in Central America, planted native tree species in Madagascar, worked AIDs clinics in Eswatini. While I had dreamed of adventure, what I received was a rude awakening — such needs were not exclusive to rural Africa. They were shared by my neighbors.
By the end of the year, I had completed service projects in Colorado, Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas and New Mexico. I racked up 2,000 hours of community service, a $7,000 scholarship, a silver presidential volunteer service award and a fake autograph from President Obama.
My first assignment was in a rough neighborhood in Conway, Arkansas. Conway in general, with a 19.1% poverty rate, surpasses both the state and national poverty average, but East Conway, designated as an Opportunity Zone by the U.S. Treasury Department, sees a near-double poverty rate of 33%. Our street was called Ingram.
It seemed to me like one of those projects I might get if I signed up for the Peace Corps. Our task was to gut and remodel a Habitat for Humanity home in poor shape after a family had been evicted for cramming as many people as possible inside.
It was obvious that so many people had lived in this little home because they had nowhere else to go. At the end of the workday, we’d board the windows and doors of the construction site to find the next day the boards were torn down. I’d come in the morning with a shovel and scoop a heap of feces rising from the brim of the broken toilet until we removed the porcelain with a sledgehammer. Once, I took down a chunk of drywall, and a family of rats leaped from behind the beams and scattered throughout the house.
Keeping squatters out wasn’t the hardest part of the project. The family who had once lived in the home must have left behind everything but the clothing they wore. Family photos decorated the walls. We found dolls and diaries in the girls’ room. School reports showed a child excelling at spelling and lagging in math. Journals of dreams of becoming a cosmetologist. Court transcripts of gun violence and domestic disputes. A shrine for a dead child.
Of course I wanted to make a difference in this neighborhood, but the team couldn’t escape what we looked like. We were outsiders; we didn’t resemble the locals. Neighbors lined up with chairs and watched and heckled us all day. They knew the people who lived in that house, and we were the bad guys.
Over the course of a couple months, though, things began to shift. A man — likely one of the early squatters — approached me this time not scowling but smiling. The home was looking better. He gave me a hug, something my teammates would question me for; he didn’t smell good. I hugged him back. He said “God bless you” for what we had done.
East Conway, of course, does not rank among the country’s most impoverished neighborhoods. What I witnessed was a sliver of the harsh conditions in this country in places like Belmont, Detroit; O’Block, Chicago; Skid Row, Los Angeles; and many, many more — of the people who have gone decades without substantial help.
AmeriCorps provided my first professional experience with journalism. As the team’s media representative, I sent daily reports to the AmeriCorps headquarters, drafted a portfolio of what we accomplished at the end of each project and assembled video and imagery for our debriefs in Denver. I graduated grateful for all that the program did for me, professionally and personally.
But when the news came of 32,000 AmeriCorps members sent home in April — 2,000 of them NCCC — I thought of Conway.
In the coming weeks, the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland will likely decide on the motion for a preliminary injunction — filed by Washington and 23 other states — to stop this workforce reduction. To help some people I met — and others across the county in need — who, today, went without.
— By Sam Fletcher