Catherine in the Corps: Getting All Caught Up: First Month of Round 4

It has been ages since I have written and I deeply apologize to both my few loyal readers and to myself for this neglect. A huge amount has happened since I last checked in and I am not going to attempt to update on absolutely everything, but in this and the next few posts I will do my best to fill in the gaps.

For starters, I am now back East, two weeks removed from the “Ameri-Bubble.” It is somewhat weird being home, but also certainly nice to see family and friends, and in part it is weird how not weird it is being here. But I miss my team and have spent the past fews weeks reflecting (somewhat in awe) on my experiences from the last ten months.

Our final project brought us back to Sacramento. As I briefly mentioned in my previous post, the project was a program called AmeriCorps NCCC Summer of Service (SOS). For the first four weeks of the Round, while school was still in session for our program participants, we were training to be leaders, learning all about the inner workings of the program, working with the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Sacramento, and working with non-profits in Sacramento that would be hosting SOS crews during the program. Mondays were our training days. The schedule was constantly changing each day and we did not spend our days all together as a team, but were constantly split up by crew leader teams. My co-crew leader was Allison and it was absolutely wonderful being paired with her. Allison and I certainly spent some quality time together, but I missed working with the rest of the team. Though the schedule was varied and not always full, complete with downtime to plan for the actual program weeks, we were pretty constantly occupied in some way.

We set up shop in one of the rooms in the NCCC office building. Our white boards covered in notes and schedules.

One of our first weeks of the round was "AmeriCorps" week. We worked a special service day for a Sacramento event called "Homeless Connect," which provided services to Sacramento's large homeless population. We were also offered free tickets to a Sacramento Rivercats baseball game (pictured above).

For a service learning trip, we went and toured the California State Capital building in downtown Sacramento. Our tour guide was great and a fun time was had by all. Above is our group picture in front of the door to the governor's office.

Part of our work at the Boys and Girl's Club including revamping the Tiechert branch's teen room. The project was a bit frustrating and not entirely successful due to a lack of support and supplies, but we did have a fun time painting a few murals for the room and, as Maya is demonstrating in the above picture, reminiscing about childhood by finger painting.

Two fridays in a row, we ended our formal work a little early and headed to elementary schools in Sacramento to help run their end of the year carnivals. What a fun way to get service hours! At the first carnival I worked at the food both, selling hotdogs and hamburgers. The second carnival I got to attempt to be artistic at the face painting table. One of the popular designs which I feel I had mastered by the end of the day was a spider design. One child who came up to my station wanted his entire face to be a spider. That one was interesting. I did my best.

Another independent service project during the first weeks of Round 4 was at the Sacramento Public Library's summer reading kick off event. The library has a wonderful summer reading program in place, available not only to children, but to the whole family. Each of the childhood age groups, then teens, and adults have different bingo cards. The squares of the cards are filled in with different library and reading related activities. Once a participant completes a row of activities they bring their card to their local branch, receive a small prize, and are then entered to win a bigger prize at the end of the summer. It was great to learn about this program and to see families coming together to read and explore the library. An added bonus to working at the event was that two of our corps member participants got to wear costumes of children's book characters. Above, I am posing with Allison as she wears a costume from "Where the Wild Things Are."

One of the SOS sponsors we worked with during the training weeks was the Sacramento Zoo. Though, my crew never worked with the zoo during SOS, I was very happy to have the opportunity to work there prior to the arrival of crew participants. The day I went, we worked in the Kangaroo and Imu pen! It was a very unique and amazing experience to be so close to the animals. The kangaroos lounged while we worked around them and the Imu was very curious and walked around us, checking out what we were up to.

Towards the end of our training month, it was time to really get ready for the beginning of the program. At the beginning of the Round we were lucky enough to be able to read applications and interview applicants for the program. It was wonderful to be able to select the participants we would later be working with and interesting to later see how different some of them were than their interviews and applications had suggested. The interview process and training were also a great way to get to know all the NCCC staff at the Sacramento campus. They were all so fun to work with. Once the participants had been selected, we held three different orientation sessions to bring them in with their parents, process paperwork, size them for uniforms, and let them know a little more in detail about the program they were to be a part of.