VISTA Profile: Saarah Abdul-Rauf

During her two years as an NC Campus Compact VISTA, Saarah Abdul-Rauf has coordinated service opportunities for hundreds of college students. Her efforts have helped many develop a passion for service, just as she herself was inspired by an NC Campus Compact VISTA while a student at Peace.

"The first VISTA I worked with and probably the reason I chose VISTA over other things was Jessica Baxter (Peace College VISTA, 2008-09). I feel like she really helped our campus grow as far as recognizing there are things in the community that students can do and getting us pumped about it. It was really an eye-opener for me in realizing what I was passionate about."

Saarah has since shared her passion for service with students at two campuses, Lenoir-Rhyne University and UNC-Chapel Hill. At LR, Saarah instituted the school's first Hunger Banquet, and she started a student group to focus on homelessness and food security. For much of the past year at UNC-Chapel Hill, she has worked to strengthen the SMART mentoring program in collaboration with community partner Volunteers For Youth. The program pairs 20 college students with local 8 to 13-year olds in a year-long relationship. Saarah believes her experience building partnerships with community organizations at LR prepared her for the work she's done with the mentoring program,  making her "comfortable" in her role as liaison and capacity-builder.

 "I spent a lot of time working with student leaders to solidify a structure that wasn't there before," Saarah explains. "Creating documentation, creating a way to log mentor hours, forms to ease the matching process.... We completely changed the orientation for incoming mentors." She has helped developed skill workshops for mentors and mentees. Now, she is  focused on transitioning the project to new staff and even holds Skype meetings with student leaders over the summer to be sure the project is ready to go this fall.

Saarah has also worked with fall, winter, and spring alternative break projects that address Latino issues or rural poverty in eastern North Carolina. To refine those experiences, she visited the partners in Robeson County and in Dunn, clarified needed service activities, and prepared training materials to orient students to the history of the communities. Working with these groups gave Saarah some of her toughest moments as a VISTA, but also one of her proudest.

Saarah and former VISTA Carolyn Byrne

At the end of the semester, the students wrote letters to Saarah and Carolyn Byrne (former Carolina Center for Public Service staff member and VISTA) about how much the break experience meant. "It really solidified that my work here wasn't just work, that they really were getting something out of what we were doing."

Saarah grew up in both Chapel Hill and in Washington, D.C. - "both are home" - and she will head north to Silver Springs, MD when her VISTA term ends. She plans to continue work with non-profits and is especially interested in mentoring programs or organizations that support high-schoolers transitioning to college.

After two years of helping campuses engage with communities, Saarah's advice to future Campus Compact VISTAs working with student leaders is simple: "understanding and listening to student voice is really important." As she learned from her first encounter with an NC Campus Compact VISTA, students have the power and ability to make things happen.

MLK project updates and recent site visits

The blog has been quiet for a couple of weeks, but our VISTAs have been busy. We have news to share from MLK Day service events and recent visits to four VISTA host sites.

Though some MLK project sites had plans disrupted by winter weather, our VISTAs supported much successful service on MLK weekend. In Raleigh, VISTA Jennifer Evans served at Wake Tech Community College's meal packaging event with Stop Hunger Now and later as part of the United Way's service day. Check out the local news report on Wake Tech's event, which features Jennifer's supervisor, Melody Wiggins, director of WTCC's Office of Volunteerism and Leadership. In Wilmington, Erin O'Donnell (Feast Down East) served with a Cape Fear Crop Mob project at LINC farm, working with local AmeriCorps members from Food Corps and other VISTAs from the QENO project. In Winston-Salem, Takira Dale (Wake Forest) helped organize the annual MLK Day Read-In, which collected new and donated books for kids and enlisted the help of community members and students from Wake Forest, Winston-Salem State, and Salem College. In Elizabeth City, VISTAs Marion Hudson and Tiara Pugh coordinated the service component of a day-long celebration, also partnering with other local higher education institutions. These are just a few of the great projects our VISTAs supported for this national day of service.

We have also made several site visits to meet with NC Campus Compact VISTAs, supervisors, and community partners to learn more about the things our members get done.

Sally (L) and VISTA Leader Rachel Rogers

First, we braved the ice to visit second-year VISTA Sally Parlier at Durham Tech Community College. Focusing on food security issues on her campus and in the community, Sally has worked with community partner Briggs Avenue Community Garden to develop plots for DTCC students and staff, coordinate volunteers for garden workdays and win over $1700 in grant funding to expand the garden. She has also started an on-campus food pantry to serve some of the low-income students on campus. Check out this great story in the Durham Herald. For the rest of her term, Sally will continue to connect DTCC with the Briggs Avenue garden, refine systems she's created for managing the on-campus food distribution, and build structures so the college can continue this work beyond the VISTA term.

Our visit to Chapel Hill offered the chance for a double-dip: we met with our community-based VISTA Monica Palmeira at the Jackson Center and with second-year VISTA Saarah Abdul-Rauf (UNC Chapel Hill). At the Jackson Center (located in the Northside neighborhood in the historic St. Joseph C.M.E. church), Monica has created key systems to manage the Heavenly Groceries food pantry, including a comprehensive volunteer handbook and internship positions that will be filled by UNC Chapel Hill's new Bonner Scholars. Monica also helped plan a community-wide civil rights celebration in November. Check out this local news video of the Jackson Center's civil rights photo exhibit, a center piece of that event.

Monica has an open-door policy at the Jackson Center.

Monica is now working to develop other partnerships with university units, including an upcoming wills clinic with the Black Law Student Association, and she is designing more internships and systems to coordinate volunteers for other Jackson Center programs. Also check out this recent UNC Chapel Hill spotlight article on Monica's supervisor and Center co-founder Della Pollock.

VISTA Saarah Abdul-Rauf spends time each week at her community partner, Volunteers for Youth. Saarah works to support UNC's student-led SMART mentoring program, which provides nearly 30 mentors to young people in VFY's mentoring program. Saarah has coordinated events; created an evaluation to assess satisfaction of mentors, mentees, and family members; and helped to review and refine the mentor training curriculum. Saarah is also the primary liason to the Community Action Center in Pembroke, NC, which is a key partner for the four UNC alternative break trips that visit the area each year. She is exploring other ways UNC can support this community and has created an alternative break partner evaluation that will be used with all break community partners.

Takira with a Demon Deacon.

Finally, this week we visited Takira Dale at Wake Forest University. Takira has created volunteer coordination and operations manuals for the Campus Kitchen project, and she visits kitchen partners regularly to review delivery schedules and offerings and to discuss how the project can better serve the food needs of partner clients. One new effort that has emerged from these visits is the kitchen's nutrition education program, which Takira is now developing. She is also creating a comprehensive training curriculum for students who volunteer as tutors or mentors with children and youth. This effort has led to NERD (Network of Educational Resources and Development), a new coalition of student organizations that undertake tutoring/mentoring activities.

We had the chance to visit a key kitchen and tutoring program partner, El Buen Pastor, a community agency serving Latino families in Winston-Salem's Old Town area. The agency's director was very excited about the ways WFU is connecting to her agency, and she sees the VISTA resource as a great support.

Thanks to all these VISTAs, supervisors, and partners for your hospitality, and keep up the great work!

Hands on Hickory puts Lenoir-Rhyne frosh to work!

When most young people head off to college, they don't expect to spend their first days on campus doing yard work, painting park benches, and playing Bingo with folks at a retirement home. But that is exactly what incoming first years and transfer students at Lenoir-Rhyne University do during "Hands on Hickory," the school's annual orientation service event.

LR students helping out at the YMCA at Hands On Hickory

On August 18th, 360 new LR students and 35 faculty and staff volunteered at 19 sites in the Hickory community. The students, organized in groups according to their First Year Experience class, worked at a local site during the Saturday morning event. Associate Dean of Engaged and Global Learning Charlotte Williams says, "Hands on Hickory is a great way to introduce new students to the concept of community engagement and to needs in our area. We hope this experience is a springboard for service during their time at LR."

During their three-hour tour, students completed projects at community organizations like the Flynn House, Centro Latino of Hickory, and Eastern Catawba Cooperative Christian Ministry (ECCCM). ECCCM Executive Director Rev. Robert C. Silber was very satisfied with the volunteers' work, stating it was "great working with the LR students - again." Other partners described the students as diligent and pro-active; together, students volunteered 987 hours of service. As the First Year Experience classes continue to meet throughout the year, many will return to their Hands on Hickory service sites for additional service projects.

Like the student volunteers whose efforts she organized, Ariel Mitchell had just arrived on campus in a new role, starting her service as LR's new AmeriCorps*VISTA a week before the event. Ariel's successful coordination of the day's community placements built on the planning of her VISTA predecessor, Saarah Abdul-Rauf, who currently serves as the NC Campus Compact VISTA at UNC Chapel Hill. So, along with being a great experience for student volunteers and community partners, the Hands on Hickory event is also an example of successfully transitioning VISTA work!

VISTAs & Supervisors Unite at Annual Orientation

At Elon University on August 15, thirty-five (35) VISTAs and supervisors convened to build relationships and share ideas at NC Campus Compact's annual VISTA orientation event. The day-long session was packed with team-building exercises, breakouts for VISTAs and supervisors, and directed conversations about regional and project area issues. Participants traveled from the farthest points of the program's reach: from Cullowhee in the west, Elizabeth City in the east, Stauton, VA in the north, and Charlotte in the south. Despite the long drives, everyone contributed energy and ideas throughout the day.

Our 2012-13 VISTAs and Supervisors. No one fell in the fountain.

Sessions were led by NC Campus Compact and Elon University staff and by returning VISTAs. Pam Brumbaugh, Elon's Director of Experiential Education, began the day with a session exploring workstyles and communication preferences that drew on the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) scores of VISTAs and their supervisors. Program officer Chad Fogleman led sessions for supervisors on supporting and sustaining a VISTA's work, and Associate Director Leslie Garvin delivered a training that prepared VISTAs to conduct a SWOT analysis of their projects with community partners. Special guest Mary Morrison, director of Elon's Kernodle Center for Service-Learning and Community Engagement, shared information about some of her office's strategies to sustain community engagement, including the LINCS program which places students as volunteer coordinators with key community partners.

Returning VISTAs Derald "Banjo" Dryman (WCU), Pamela Pate (UNCC), Saarah Abdul-Rauf (UNC Chapel Hill), and Sally Parlier (DTCC) all led mini-trainings for new and current VISTAs. Topics included including living cheap on a VISTA budget, the VISTA health plan, clarifying the VISTA role for your campus and community, and using social media for community engagement.