VISTA Fellowship grants experience with AmeriCorps

IU graduate student Carl Urness has been in New York City for only a week and a half, but he is already getting a taste of what life is like in the public policy realm — and loving every minute of it.

“I am still at work now, and it’s 6:30,” Urness said. “But it’s OK, because I am doing what I love.”

He is working at the Center for Economic Opportunity  in New York City representing the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs’ VISTA Fellows Program that launched last week.

The Fellows Program, a suborganization of AmeriCorps, provides SPEA graduate students with the opportunity to work full time with anti-poverty organizations and agencies in Indiana and throughout the United States while obtaining their master’s degree.

SPEA is working in partnership with the Indiana office of the U.S. Corporation for National and Community Service, the government agency that administers AmeriCorps VISTA, a national service program designed specifically to
fight poverty.

“It is a very innovative type of experience that combines education and community service,” said Tarah A. Maners, state program specialist with Indiana CNCS. “This fits directly into our strategic priorities — services to veterans and military families, increasing high school graduation rates and grade level achievement, increasing economic opportunity and improving the environment disaster preparedness
and response.”

Urness is one of seven SPEA graduate students participating in the program this year. Although they will be doing total volunteer work, as VISTA participants, the students will receive a modest living allowance, health care and other benefits.

At the end of their one-year commitment, the participants will also receive either a $5,550 education award or a $1,500 cash stipend. The education award can be used for tuition, book fees or loans.

They also earn credit toward their degrees, including the experiential requirement for the SPEA master’s programs, Maner said.

“This is an opportunity for our students to think about what they’re learning and see how it applies, or doesn’t apply, in the real world,” SPEA Assistant Dean Doug Goldstein said.

Goldstein said the school hopes the program will benefit not only the students that participate, but the entire SPEA community through the knowledge the fellows will bring back to Bloomington.

The seven fellows participating this year have been placed at sites with some of the most innovative organizations working to relieve poverty across the country, SPEA VISTA Fellows Program Coordinator Megan Siehl said.

Siehl joined SPEA last spring to recruit participants and organize placement sites for this year’s fellows, including New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Center for Economic Opportunity, where Urness is working.

Staci Orr, an environmental sciences graduate student and fellow working with the Health Foundation of Greater Indianapolis, said after her first week in the program, she already knows this experience will benefit her future.

“My co-workers are amazing and really supportive,” she said. “I hope to gain program-planning skills fundraising for the Indiana AIDS fund and to develop a greater responsibility for something bigger than myself.”