- At this point in the year, what does being a VISTA mean to you?
So far, being a VISTA at UC Clermont means motivating people to become civically engaged in their communities to fight the issues highlighted in our PAFAs. This can be done either intrinsically (e.g. the belief that “no child should go hungry”) or extrinsically (e.g. a service learning program really benefits our college as an institution with good PR, better learning outcomes, etc). It is recruiting others for the fight against poverty while helping come up with new better ways to fight it through service learning courses and advising and serving with a student group that is dedicated to volunteer work to benefit the community.
- What are you aspirations for this year and for your projects? What do you hope to leave as your legacy?
I hope to leave a culture for service behind, or at the very least the beginnings of it. At this point, a tremendous amount of work has gone into creating this culture by the previous VISTA and our supervisor and I feel that it is reaching a “critical mass”. I want to encourage more students and faculty to become civically engaged and combine this with the recent administrative support to catalyze the change in culture. Ideally, this could lead to a formalized office for service learning and civic engagement at UC Clermont. If an office is established, this would enable many more faculty to engage in service learning courses that can both benefit the community and improve the education of their pupils as well as sustain and improve upon the culture that already exists.
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