You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one, I hope someday you will join us, and the world will live as one. ~John Lennon

People want to know exactly what I do and wonder what AmeriCorps is. I will tell you.

AmeriCorps (sometimes referred to as the domestic Peace Corps) is an organization that helps meet needs in communities all over the country. There are a lot of things one can do in AmeriCorps: work with kids, help the environment, aid in disaster relief, fight poverty. I am in AmeriCorps VISTA and we focus on the last one, fighting poverty, but before I get into the different branches of AmeriCorps I will tell you in general the benefits everyone gets. I know this is going to sound like an ad or a recruitment tactic, but I just want people to know what I do; I get a lot of questions and it's not the easiest thing to explain.

In AmeriCorps (VISTA, State & National) we sign up for one year of service to the country. We don't get paid a salary, but a living allowance, which sustains us at about poverty level (it's on purpose). At the end of your service you can take a $1,200 stipend or a $4,000 education grant (for paying off student loans or going back to school). I chose the stipend because I don't have student loans and I am not planning on going back to school. If you do have student loans you get loan forbearance during your service and they pay the interest in the interim. You can do AmeriCorps up to 3 years, but you can only take the education grant twice and the last time you have to take the stipend. You can see that they drill all of this into us, because I know about a lot of programs and things that I didn't even use.

Now the branches...

I will start with AmeriCorps VISTA because it's the best (I know that's debatable, but it's the one I know the most about because I am a VISTA)! Vista stands for: Volunteer In Service To America (We take the same oath the president does!). AmeriCorps VISTA is specifically devoted to fighting poverty. We aren't allowed to have any outside jobs or take any classes and must be available if our sponsoring organization calls us, 24 hours a day, 7 day a week. Luckily Harvesters usually on needs me Monday through Friday during regular business hours. We have a PSO (Pre Service Orientation), which is based by region, and ours was in Albuquerque, New Mexico this year. We learn there about poverty, misconceptions, our general and specific roles, networking and how to capacity build. Capacity building is a key term, it's like giving a seed roots so it can grow into a tree. VISTA's specifically have jobs that there shouldn't be a use for when they are done with their service. If you do your job right you should complete your task/s, grow your project, and work your way out of a job. I think we have more rules than the other branches, but VISTA has been around longer that AmeriCorps (which came about during the Clinton administration). Vista came from and is still associated with the Corporation for National and Community Service. I still don't quite know how all that works but VISTA was created in 1964 and is the oldest of the national service programs (include AmeriCorps, Learn and Serve AmeriCorps, and Senior Corps). We do secondary service, we don't work directly with clients. We leverage human, financial, and material resources to increase the capacity of low-income communities across the country (that's directly from the manual). There have been roughly 177,000 VISTAs. Oh, and we can't be political or religious if it's in any way linked to our service. I also applied directly to Harvesters, not to AmeriCorps and then placed somewhere, like I think it can be in State and/or National, but maybe they're all like that. To learn more about VISTA: http://www.americorps.org/about/programs/vista.asp.

AmeriCorps State & National is similar to VISTA because we both serve a year an all of the stuff I said two paragraphs ago. There are some of them at Harvesters too. They can work primarily with clients, mentoring youth, assisting crime victims, restoring parks, and building affordable homes, etc.) Instead of having an end date one calendar year after their start date like VISTAs do, State and National programs count hours and it usually works out to be about a year. I may have gotten some of it wrong, because I am not in AmeriCorps State &/or National. You can learn more about it here: State - http://www.americorps.org/about/programs/state.asp; National - http://www.americorps.org/about/programs/national.asp.

AmeriCorps NCCC is a little different than the other two. I don't know much about it, so I will direct you to the AmeriCorps website for that one: http://www.americorps.org/about/programs/nccc.asp. They live on a special AmeriCorps NCCC is what it says.

Okay, now have I really confused me. Feel free to ask me questions, I would be happy to at least try to answer them.

Here is the link to the AmeriCorps website: http://www.americorps.org/