What I'm Doing as a VISTA

My name is Serg Ruiz and I’m the AmeriCorps VISTA for the Power of We Consortium. As the Communications Coordinator I will be serving to increase the capacity of the consortium’s, and its member coalitions’ and organizations’, communication and social media tools. I’ll mostly be working with websites and things like Facebook pages and Twitter accounts and so on to increase the communication and linkages across the current membership and to expand our outreach to underserved populations and groups.

The Power of We Consortium is defined as community collaborative or a network of networks; by involving the community organizations in the process of cooperation and collaboration, the Power of We Consortium strives to improve the quality of life and self-sufficiency of all residents of Ingham County through a healthy community. Basing its efforts off of its 33 indicators of community well-being, the Power of We Consortium focuses resources through engaging the community as a whole to solve problems that cannot be solved by any single entity. Hopefully that was coherent because part of my assignment description is to increase recognition of the Consortium and its coaltions, programs, and initiatives.

A couple of the things that I’ve done so far were to redesign the Consortium’s newsletters, implement initial changes to the website and open dialogue with a few of our 12 coalitions about their communication and social media tools. I’ve met with Angela Austin, who is one of our new co-chairs and the coordinator of the Community Coalition for Youth, in regard to her website and the creation of a newsletter. I’ve also met with the Ingham Substance Abuse Prevention Coalition, the Greater Lansing Homeless Resolution Network, the Ingham Great Start, Birth to Five Collaborative, and the Immigrant and Refugee Resource Collaborative about increasing their capacity. The IRRC is on route to move their website as a Power of We Consortium subsite, which is pretty exciting. The only hitch I’ve encountered is that coordinators tend to enact most of the changes themselves – which is great but it kind of leaves me out of the loop.

To widen my involvement, my supervisor sent out emails to a couple of our member organizations and our current VISTA sites and a few have responded to me for help. I’ll be working with our fellow VISTA sites at the Garden Project, with Willow Cherven, and the Old Town Association, with Chad Badgero, as well as a couple of other organizations such as the Fenner Nature Center, NAMI, and the Allen Neighborhood Center’s Youth Service Corps.

AmeriCorps VISTA serves to reduce and alleviate poverty in communities across the United States. My involvement in this effort is more behind-the-scenes than your normal VISTA, as I’m not directly managing volunteers or raising physical monies. It’s taken me some time to come to the understanding that I’m indirectly addressing the issue of poverty and its accompaniments by increasing the capacity of the organizations I help to be able to address their problems and reach their goals. By helping to create and enhance websites, social media tools, efficient communication, or resource sharing, the organizations I serve will be all-the-more able to attack the issues at hand that affect our populations in poverty.