The chance to make real change is drawing volunteers to Alaska

BETHEL — They sit beside sexual assault victims during exams and trooper interviews, providing comfort. They teach high school classes and help small businesses. Sometimes, they stay in the remote areas they are assigned to help temporarily.

Alaska is dotted with members of what some call the domestic Peace Corps: volunteer groups like AmeriCorps and SeniorCorps. Many of them are in rural Alaska. Some are fresh out of college and figuring out their place in the world.

This week, the nation's chief service officer made her first trip to Alaska to examine their work.

They affect their communities in ways big and small, sometimes more than they know, Wendy Spencer, who oversees AmeriCorps, SeniorCorps and associated programs, said Thursday in Bethel. Other stops on her Alaska field tour are Yakutat, Anchorage, Sitka and Hooper Bay.

"Yesterday what I saw in Hooper Bay was transformative for me," said Spencer, who has visited 47 states in her four years on the job since her appointment by President Barack Obama and confirmation by the U.S. Senate. She's been to poor areas and remote areas but nothing, she said, as removed as the Southwest Alaska village.

"The simple things we take for granted. Plumbing. Internet. Communications. Having access to water," Spencer said. "These issues are so distant from what I've seen."

Hooper Bay is getting piped water and sewer services, and residents have access to the internet, usually. But some families still use honey buckets and pack water from the community wells to their homes.

There, she saw AmeriCorps member Wilma Bell-Joe – a home-grown activist from Hooper Bay — working with kids in a variety of ways, from teaching Yup'ik dance to talking about the harm of tobacco.

"I saw real change yesterday," Spencer said. "Wilma is teaching them to write grants! It is so amazing."

More than 600 people in Alaska serve through AmeriCorps and SeniorCorps, tutoring children and responding to natural disasters, recruiting volunteers and helping the elderly. They get small stipends of varying amounts and often also can qualify for grants to help pay for college.

Like the Peace Corps, national service is designed to help communities in need and develop the potential of members themselves. It comes under the Corporation of National and Community Service, which also funds management of companion faith-based programs, including Jesuit Volunteer Corps Northwest. JVs, as they are called, have long been a major presence in Bethel.

At a meeting at Brother's Pizza, upstairs from the Yute Air terminal in Bethel, Spencer asked Bethel's VISTA volunteer and several of the current JVs how the experiences will impact their next phase of life.

Some of the answers were profound.

Sarah Pawlaczyk, 22, of Ohio, was an education major in college. Over the past year as a Jesuit AmeriCorps volunteer with the Tundra Women's Coalition, the shelter and advocacy agency in Bethel, she not only worked with the teen group, she also served as an advocate for sexual assault victims.

She didn't know that would be part of her work when she committed to Bethel, but took two special courses to become qualified as an advocate. She sits in on Alaska State Trooper interviews and hospital exams and she talks women through scary legal and medical proceedings.

"It's also probably, surprisingly, my favorite thing about my job," Pawlaczyk said.

"You can be there for someone at their hardest, most traumatic time," Spencer said.

Pawlaczyk, who called her year in Bethel the best in her life, said she now hopes to do rape crisis work in Ohio. One of the other Jesuit AmeriCorps volunteers, Nicole Cass, is staying on in Bethel at the Tundra Women's Coalition.

Caley Terry of Michigan, 23, served as the JV with the public defender agency in Bethel, helping families who had lost custody of their children. She had been interested in a law career, but the job was more social work than legal work. She loved it. She's now shifting from a plan to go to law school to a career in social work.

"This happens a lot," Spencer said. "We have a lot of AmeriCorps members who come into service with one idea. They often times get exposed to issues and social problems that they just get so immersed in it. … It's a calling."

Overall, 60 percent of AmeriCorps alumni pursue careers in public service.

"Which I love," she said.

In Anchorage, Mayor Ethan Berkowitz and Spencer announced the city had committed to be an "Employer of National Service" and hire AmeriCorps and Peace Corps alumni.

Bethel Mayor Rick Robb said his town benefits greatly from the JVs and AmeriCorps members cycling through.

"They are very energetic people who want to contribute," Robb said. "They come here just to help."

Robb, who works as director of residential services for Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corp., said in years past JVs were assigned to his department. They never complained about hours or pay. "They just want to do good."

Bean Peloquin of Massachusetts, 23, wanted to spend a post-college year volunteering to come to terms with herself and her own good life.

"Why am I able to go to college?" she had wondered. She wanted to get closer to Native American culture, which she sees as hidden from history textbooks. So she picked Bethel.

After a year at Kuskokwim Learning Academy, a boarding school in Bethel, Peloquin no longer wants to be a French teacher, which is what she studied for in college. Instead she wants to concentrate on students who need help the most, the ones who didn't grow up with privilege.

Roxanne Girdlestone, the AmeriCorps VISTA member in Bethel, has spent her year in economic development, working on the Best in the West competition that provides grants to small businesses as well as the Saturday Market craft and food festival.

Unlike the JVs, who live together in a house, 24-year-old Girdlestone of New York lived in the college dorm. She found the connection to students who came into Bethel from villages one of the best parts of her job.

For her, a year wasn't enough to accomplish what she hoped to do and some of the goals were elusive, such as establishing Saturday Markets in villages. She didn't have travel money for that.

"I think they have more impact than they are giving themselves credit for," Spencer said.

The stories she is collecting in Alaska will help her advocate for AmeriCorps to Congress, Spencer said.

Girdlestone, who hopes to stay in Bethel, said the year was transformative.

"AmeriCorps changed my life," she said.