By SHEILA BEACHUM BILBY
This summer, Jasmine Schoemann is spending her days helping teach letters and numbers to a rambunctious group of at-risk youngsters in Genesee County, Michigan, as part of the recently launched
Flint National Service Accelerator Initiative.
She is one of 53 national service participants, or VISTA Summer Associates, trained through the initiative to work for the summer with local nonprofit groups. Those agencies focus on such issues as poverty alleviation, public safety, education, health and the environment.
The 19-year-old Schoemann, who is majoring in elementary and special education at Saginaw Valley State University, wakes up looking forward to working with the 4- and 5-year-olds in the
Flint Community Schools’ Summer Tot Lot Program.
“They make you laugh,” she said. “It makes me want to go to work.”
The accelerator – one of some half dozen across the country – recruits, selects, trains and provides ongoing support to local national service participants.
The Flint model stands out among its peer programs because it is embedded in the nonprofit community instead of local government.
“By combining the agility of the local nonprofit sector with the momentum of the national service movement, the accelerator leverages community expertise to solve community problems,” said Mary ZumBrunnen, director of the Genesee County program.
Her work is part of an initiative funded by the Mott Foundation through a one-year, $127,516 general purposes grant to the
Boys & Girls Club of Greater Flint. The club, which has employed national service participants since 1997, houses the initiative’s headquarters.
The associates placed this summer under the initiative are primarily college students. Each receives a monthly stipend of $858 for working 40-hour weeks with one of four local, youth-oriented nonprofits: the Boys & Girls Club; the Flint schools’ Tot Lot program;
YouthQuest; and local sites of the 21st Century Community Learning Centers, a federally funded before- and afterschool program that also operates during the summer months.
ZumBrunnen says the associates are working directly with children, doing everything from mentoring or helping with schoolwork to playing games or teaching them to plant seeds.
The impacts are clear. For instance, at the Tot Lot site, Schoemann and another associate work with one instructor. The resulting staff-to-child ratio of one to seven dramatically improved the amount of staff time available to work with individual kids.
The initiative enabled the Boys & Girls Club to create service positions for 23 associates for the summer. This is in addition to the four national service positions that typically help staff the organization year-round.
James Gaskin, the club’s executive director, says the summer associates have successfully built positive one-on-one relationships with the participating children.
“Flint is a community of great need,” Gaskin said. “We couldn’t achieve the quality of the work being done without this larger number of folks doing it.”
Another unique aspect of the Genesee County initiative is that it leverages additional resources – both local and federal dollars – to help the local nonprofits build their capacity to help meet the community’s many pressing needs.
For example, helping to fuel the accelerator is the recently launched
National Service Fund of the Community Foundation of Greater Flint. The fund, created through a $139,484 Mott grant, provides matching grants to area public charities and governmental units, allowing them to draw on the skills, energy and resources of national service participants.
Even as ZumBrunnen oversees the summer associates, whose 8- to 10-week stints end in August, she is preparing a fall recruitment drive for full-year service volunteers and hopes to expand the pool of participating nonprofits.
Full-time volunteers provide indirect service, helping with tasks such as programming, fundraising and volunteer recruitment.
Schoemann, who grew up in nearby Grand Blanc, has found her national service experience to be fulfilling.
“For me,” she said, “it’s all about trying to make a difference.”