Guest blog: Training session for VISTAs offers new perspective on service

By Joyce Jian, Food Programs VISTA in New York City.

It’s important to teach children to eat healthy at a young age, but it’s not a subject many children get to learn during the school day. That’s why I enrolled as the Afterschool and Summer Meals project at the New York State Network for Youth Success, where my role plays a part by bringing awareness to afterschool providers about opportunities like the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP).

CACFP is a federal nutrition program that allows afterschool providers to claim reimbursement for serving healthy snacks and/or meals during afterschool hours. When I started my service, I performed outreach about CACFP by sending e-mails and making phone calls to all afterschool program providers in the entire state of New York. In addition, each month I created monthly newsletters and social media posts for people to know about CACFP requirements and providing CACFP credible recipes.

My professional background has been performing direct service with youth from elementary to middle school students, but one day, I realized I needed a change. I wanted an opportunity to learn how to perform indirect service and make a bigger impact than I could by serving one school community—and that  led me to apply as a AmeriCorps VISTA member.

While my experience with direct service was very helpful for me as I started to find my way as a VISTA, I still needed more help… and more training. As I look ahead to the end of my VISTA tenure, I find that I want to continue to grow in an indirect service capacity.

Recently, I had the pleasure of attending an afterschool VISTA training in Chicago led by the Afterschool Alliance. During the training, we discussed topics relating to professional development, such as best practices for selecting content for a one-pager on any subject and the best design practices for one-pagers. We learned strategies to strengthen communication both inside our work groups and to others using an elevator pitch, and also explored options for jobs after VISTA year ends, types of resumes, and interview tips. In addition, VISTAs had the opportunity to visit afterschool sites where we learn about the program such as mission, overview, and what the programming offers to the students.

One of the things I found most helpful and useful from the training was the workshop in that all VISTAs wrote down on Post-It notes what responsibilities, accomplishments, skills, and competencies were obtained from our VISTA service. I looked over my list of experiences with surprise, and heard my fellow VISTA member, Kassy, remark, “We learned new skills that wouldn’t have been available for us to learn from an entry level position.”

With her words, I felt enlightened: until now, I hadn’t put in words how I had obtained so many new skills and experience to add to my professional portfolio: outreach, attending meetings to discuss the progress of my  work, writing monthly newsletters and social media posts, doing a grant report, and public speaking for a workshop at a state-wide conference.  

Overall, the experience has given me a much clearer picture about how I can move forward in my career—not only with the skills I’ve learned as a VISTA, but the strategies to showcase my experience to catch an organization’s eye.