New VISTA for college

Alumna returns to work on community/college connections.

November 7, 2006

Samantha Gallo '04 with a scout troop at Hope Station during a "Raingutter Regatta." The scouts built and raced boats made out of Styrofoam cylinders, popsicle sticks and fabric.

Knitting together strands of community service into a seamless whole will be the happy task of Samantha Gallo '04, who is occupying Dickinson's VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) position.

"We've never inventoried what we do with the community in a given year," says Shalom Staub, academic affairs fellow. This includes the range of community-service and service-learning opportunities as well as internships.

Gallo's work will better align the resources of the college with the needs of the community. "Community organizations may not know the full range of resources available to them from the college," says Staub.

The award

Pennsylvania Campus Compact (PACC), through AmeriCorps, a program of the Corporation for National & Community Service, awarded Dickinson a one-year (renewable up to three years) AmeriCorps*VISTA position to coordinate the project, Educational, Health and Environmental Impacts on Child and Family Welfare in Carlisle, Pa.

Staub, along with Director of Religious Life and Community Service John Miyahara, are overseeing Gallo's work on campus and in the community.

Back to serve

Miyahara contacted Gallo about the VISTA position last spring. The English major, who had been Miyahara's chief of staff her senior year, saw this as an opportunity to get out into the community, to work with social-service agencies and "to help students find ways to connect classroom learning with their extracurricular pursuits," she says. It is something that she did not take full advantage of as a student.

After graduation, she spent a year of service in Washington, D.C., with Sasha Bruce Youthwork, an organization that assists at-risk youth and their families.

Her work at Dickinson through VISTA will look at the range of campus-service efforts and community projects that assist local nonprofit agencies serving low-income families and children, reflecting priorities identified by the Carlisle community.

In the first phase, she will work to make better connections between the campus and the community. Then in the second year, this groundwork will create a network that can aid in coordinating campus-community interaction in an intentional partnership based on identified needs.

Shifting gears

"In the past, we'd just send bodies; we're initiating a shift," explains Staub.

While area organizations certainly do need "boots-on-the-ground" volunteers, "Students are developing higher levels of skills that could be brought to area organizations," Staub says.

Two community projects in which students are providing their intellectual resources are a needs assessment for Cumberland County of the homeless population and development of a storm-water management plan for the Borough of Carlisle, which is in response to a federal requirement.

Partners in community

As part of the VISTA project, "We're building two-way partnerships, starting with the Carlisle community and working in concentric circles outward from there," says Staub.

But coordinating student efforts has been difficult because "our campus is blessed with so many extracurricular, cocurricular and academic opportunities for community engagement that no one person or office has ever looked at the big picture."

One goal is to create a clearinghouse for information but "not a bottleneck," he adds.

The clearinghouse was begun with Gallo's inventory and will continue as she explores Web-based infrastructures to support these campus/community partnerships.

Service with intent

At the same time, Pathways for Citizen Leadership: The Dickinson Student Experience task force is developing plans to interweave existing civic engagement into a comprehensive and progressive student experience.

"This pathway project is aligned with the VISTA project," says Staub, and the results of this focus are already being played out.

In addition, there are the High I initiatives that include plans for moving students to live in downtown Carlisle with a community-engagement focus. High I refers to the two blocks of West High Street that serve as a mutual gateway between the college and the town.

The whole experience

The VISTA project and the Pathway initiative are two tools for creating a whole student experience that seamlessly integrates the academic with cocurricular, extracurricular and community-service activities, explains Staub.

"We're creating a learning-by-helping environment ... and we're intentionally and effectively engaging the world through the range of student involvement from the classroom to the community."