Submitted Photo Shown on the grounds of the Roosevelt Park Zoo in Minot are, left to right: front, Katelyn Nguyen and Briselda Hernandez; middle, Chandell Lattin, Kelli Schmidt, Shelby Hazel, Erin Charley; back, Nick Brown. Hernandez and Charley are Souris Basin Planning Council staff. The others have served as AmeriCorps members through SBPC’s Community Builder Program.

The New Town Chamber of Commerce had waited for some time to find an AmeriCorps member to help build its organization. When its recruitment efforts finally were successful this year, the chamber saw firsthand how much good the AmeriCorps program can accomplish.

Seeking to grow organization membership and broaden its base of volunteers, the New Town Chamber has begun to see that happen since Charlene DeCicco came on board with AmeriCorps.

“She’s done a very good job of it,” said chamber member Bill Wilber. “She’s just the right person to do this. What she’ll be doing this year will help us greatly.”

A shortage of AmeriCorps applicants in North Dakota is an issue Souris Basin Planning Council of Minot is attempting to tackle.

A seven-county regional organization supporting local economic development, SBPC serves as the umbrella agency for AmeriCorps in the state. SBPC was awarded $440,000 in federal AmeriCorps State and AmeriCorps VISTA grants to coordinate placements through its Community Builder Program for the 2024-2025 program year.

SBPC has tasked its own AmeriCorps member, Kylie Anderson, with member recruitment efforts and the professional development of existing members.

“I’ve been doing everything from going to career fairs to talking and presenting at high schools. It’s really incredible the change that it has brought out in me,” said Anderson, whose work has taken her around the state. “It’s definitely pushed me outside of my comfort zone, especially giving presentations to high schools and colleges and speaking in front of 100 kids all at once.”

Since she has begun sharing information, Anderson said, there has been an uptick in applications and calls from people inquiring about the program.

“We strongly feel AmeriCorps is such a great experience, especially for students who are either starting their journey, or are in the middle of it, or ending their journey in school,” said SBPC Executive Director Briselda Hernandez, who once had been an AmeriCorp volunteer in California. “So that’s been a big focus of ours, and we’ve made a lot of great strides. We’ve recruited from those efforts, and then also, we see a lot of success recruiting within even just your own community, because a lot of the times those individuals already know your work, or know of you, or maybe have at some point volunteered for you.”

Anderson said her first experience with AmeriCorps came just out of high school last year. Unsure of her next step in life, she jumped at the chance to serve as a paid AmeriCorps member for the Minot Area Council of the Arts for a summer. She had been volunteering with MACA, but her new role allowed her to have much more impact, she said.

“It’s really helped me figure out what I’m interested in. I always knew I really liked working with nonprofits. It’s just work that’s very good for the heart, and I knew I liked that, but I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with that,” she said. “But through my service with AmeriCorps, I was really able to find a love of community outreach, arts accessibility, especially working with MACA.”

Following her term with MACA, SBPC invited her to her current, year-long position to let people know about the opportunities with AmeriCorps. She also encourages community engagement, including promoting volunteer opportunities to youth, directing people in need to community resources and connecting nonprofits for collaborations.

Anderson said her time in AmeriCorps has been a wonderful way to fill a gap year between high school and university while earning college funds as she considers that next step in her education. She wraps up her AmeriCorps term at the end of September and is enrolled this fall at Minot State University in its Arts Administration/Museum Studies program. She also has been offered another service term with SBPC.

Anderson encourages people interested in AmeriCorps to check out the position listings at SBPC, but if they don’t see one that fits their interests, don’t give up. The right organization might be out there and willing to participate if an applicant exists, she said. Interested individuals can schedule a visit with SBPC to learn more, she said.

DeCicco said she was attracted to AmeriCorps and the position with her local community’s chamber of commerce after determining both were a great fit for her.

“Getting back to some core values and principles of helping one another, being of service, is what attracted me,” she said. “The New Town Chamber is the hub of where I live. I live in New Town, so I get to be a representative, but then also create a voice that is in alignment with what AmeriCorps stands for.”

DeCicco, who assists the chamber part time while also employed in managing the tribal radio station, said she has visited chamber members to get input and encourage them to attend meetings. She organized a business after hours event, helped with the chamber’s car show and the annual spring cleanup and expanded the chamber’s social media presence, among other projects.

She also is tasked with creating video stories around business and community activities to be posted online. Separately, DeCicco obtained a grant through the Mountrail County Job Development Authority for a video-based Community Spotlight project. She will work on the project after completing her AmeriCorps service this September, but Wilber said the chamber would consider hiring her back as an employee once that project is completed. In the meantime, the chamber would like to hire another AmeriCorp member if it can find the right person, he said.

SBPC’s Community Builder Program supports organizations within and outside its seven counties of Ward, Mountrail, Burke, Renville, Bottineau, Pierce and McHenry, particularly those with a statewide focus. For instance, Great Plains Food Bank, based in Fargo, and FAARMS, with active members around the state, have benefitted from Community Builder.

FARRMS offers educational and other support to empower farmers to build sustainable, profitable enterprises. The organization has used the services of multiple AmeriCorps members, a few of whom later became full-time staff.

Stephanie Blumhagen, FARRMS executive director and a former AmeriCorps VISTA member in Washington state, knew the value of the federal program when as board chair for the North Dakota Local Food Development Alliance, she approached SBPC about obtaining an AmeriCorps member.

The AmeriCorps member who came to the alliance in October 2020 later was hired as staff by FARRMS. Since taking on its first AmeriCorps member in the spring of 2021, FARRMS has hosted two others and later hired both of those as staff.

“About half of my staff started out as AmeriCorps members,” Blumhagen said. “That’s probably the greatest success story.

“It’s built the capacity of the small nonprofit that I run in a way that’s accessible,” she said. “It makes it possible to grow as a small nonprofit. Your margins are very tight and, personally, I rely a lot on grants, and it can be hard to create a new position using grants because, one, they’re not secure. Just because I have the grant this year, I might not have it next year. They’re also often very restrictive. But AmeriCorps, its purpose is really building capacity, and so that’s the way I use it.”

She said AmeriCorps allows her to initiate a project to test whether it will be effective before taking on permanent staff. Investments in new positions and initiatives come with costs that often take a while to begin paying off, so having the support of AmeriCorps during that initial stage until a program gets on its feet can be key to its feasibility, she said.

Blumhagen said FARRMS was able to create a marketing department that has increased its public awareness and has grown attendance at its workshops from 15-20 people initially to 54 registrants at a recent event.

“The numbers I’m reporting to our federal grantors have doubled. We served about 100 people a year before and now we’re serving well over 200,” she said. Having more programs does add to those numbers, she said, but she attributes the growth to the public’s familiarity with the organization.

FARRMS now is in the process of creating a position description for another AmeriCorps member it hopes to bring on board this fall.

“We’re so grateful to Souris Basin Planning Council because they’re just a godsend with the AmeriCorps program,” Blumhagen said.

AmeriCorps’ local impact grows

AmeriCorps is a federal agency that works to strengthen communities and foster civic engagement through service and volunteering.

Souris Basin Planning Council launched its Community Builder Program in 2019 to create local opportunities for AmeriCorps members.

“At the time it was specifically to meet our own capacity needs. We had identified the AmeriCorps program and determined that would be a really good way to build our capacity, specifically our outreach,” SBPC Executive Director Briselda Hernandez said.

However, SBPC’s project wasn’t large enough for an AmeriCorps grant, so SBPC partnered with other entities in similar situations.

Hernandez said AmeriCorps placements were made with SBPC and four other organizations in the first year. This past program year, there were 11 participating organizations offering 14 service opportunities. AmeriCorps volunteers served 4,728 annual hours in 2023, according to Community Builder statistics.

Since inception, Community Builders has facilitated 47 AmeriCorps members to serve 49 host sites, accumulating 36,248 hours of service and earning $125,900 in education awards in addition to being paid stipends.

“What we are attempting to do is not only increase the amount of organizations and communities we impact and the opportunities for individuals to serve, but we want to be very intentional about that, because again, there are priorities that fit under our program and we really want to ensure the placements fit within those priorities,” Hernandez said.

Those priorities include building rural capacity and creating economic opportunity, whether through career pathways or indirectly through supports such as housing. More recently, SBPC’s engagement in the North Central Regional Food Business Center has made building local food systems a priority.

Participating organizations that host AmeriCorps members contribute a local cost-share that varies each year. Through a Bush Foundation grant received last year, SBPC has been able to reduce the local costs and actually eliminate it for some eligible organizations, while also increasing the support to AmeriCorps workers through additional housing or grocery stipends, Hernandez said.

AmeriCorps consists of AmeriCorps State and AmeriCorps VISTA.

AmeriCorps VISTA is tied to alleviating poverty, and volunteers serve full-time for a year, with potential health care or child care benefits. AmeriCorps State follows priorities set at the local level. Its volunteers are part-time and serve three months to a year. State volunteers also are more likely to be from within the state and be recruited from within their communities.

Members range from recent high school graduates to retirees. The state side of the program requires applicants to be at least 17 years old, while the VISTA program is open to 18 and older.