The Washington Post: How national service changed my life, and could change yours

This op-ed was originally published in The Washington Post on Sunday, September 1, 2024.

By Letters to the Editor

Regarding the Aug. 25 editorial, “How about national service for young people?”

Having been a VISTA volunteer in 1968, I can speak with firsthand experience about the impact of participating in a national service initiative. VISTA, which stands for Volunteers in Service to America, has long been referred to as the “domestic Peace Corps” program. The Peace Corps requires a two-year commitment, while VISTA is a one-year program.

As volunteers, we were trained by staff from the University of Maryland School of Social Work. It was clear to trainees that we were to serve as community organizers, and we were assigned to impoverished communities. Our monthly stipends were low enough that volunteers had to live at the same level as the low-income residents we served.

In the beginning, VISTA recruited mostly young White volunteers fresh from college. After some experience, VISTA changed its policy and recruited “indigenous” volunteers. I wondered what happened to the volunteers who worked in Pittsburgh and the surrounding communities to which I had been assigned, so I organized a couple of reunions decades after our years of service.

Here is what I found: A few volunteers had used their training to implement changes in public institutions. Racially biased policies in one public housing authority were eliminated. Allegheney County, Pa., examined and changed problematic policies and practices in the magistrate courts system. Funding for an early childhood development program was saved.

But the volunteers almost universally agreed that the biggest impact of their year of service was on themselves. Without exception, they agreed that they became more aware of and sensitive to the real problems of people living in poverty. And in most cases, their year of service caused them to reevaluate what type of career they desired.

Many of the volunteers had returned to their homes and sought employment in public service or nonprofit agencies. One became a respected city council member. Another became a judge; a third founded a nonprofit bakery. Still another became a counselor at a youth agency and then a forensic psychologist, counseling women in the state prison system.

I had intended to become a journalist. I majored in journalism and worked in the newsroom of my local paper for three years. But when I returned to my hometown, I worked for a community center, then headed up a Model City program. I came back to Pittsburgh and earned a master’s degree in social work, then founded a community technical assistance center.

My work as a VISTA volunteer and my postgraduate degree helped me to direct a community development program in Pittsburgh, and then downtown revitalization programs in Kalamazoo, Mich., Detroit and Des Moines. In 2001, I was named president of the International Downtown Association.

VISTA changed the direction of my life, as it did for so many others. The measure of a national service program is not only the impact of volunteers on the communities they serve, but also the impact on the volunteers themselves, as they continue to contribute to the communities in which they choose to reside.