The Segal Fellowship: How My Wending Path in National Service Led to DC

Today's blog post comes from Will, a three time AmeriCorps Alum with the Breakthrough Collaborative, Teach for America, and Hands On Mississippi as a VISTA. Most recently, he served as the Eli Segal Fellow at the Corporation for National and Community Service. After his fellowship concluded, he was hired by CNCS and currently serves as the Partnerships and Field Operations Officer for the CNCS Disaster Services Unit.


The CNCS Eli Segal Fellowship is recruiting now! Click Here to Apply If you are an AmeriCorps Alum who has served in the past three years, you should absolutely consider applying for this tremendous opportunity. The deadline is February 27, 2012. Will will be hosting a Q&A call for all those interested in applying on February 17, at 1pm EST, Toll-Free Number: 888-324-3916, Participant Passcode: 8802097.  For more information about the Eli Segal Program, click here.




AmeriCorps has never failed to present me with abundant opportunities and transformational change.
I was an eighteen year old, fresh out of my high school graduation gown, with the vague notion that I enjoyed working with children, when I was buried in an avalanche of good fortune faster than I could hold my breath. I was accepted to become an AmeriCorps member with the Breakthrough Collaborative in Cambridge, Massachusetts and was assigned a classroom of middle school students to teach Anatomy and Forensics. Days into training, I had forgotten I had even attended high school and was fretting about whether my lesson plans would cater to the multiple intelligences of my students, and whether I’d have enough fetal pigs for my class to run a proper dissection laboratory. I began to refer to myself as a teacher with pride that summer, and nothing since has ever been the same.



Will as a Breakthrough Collaborative teacher



The gifted poet Marge Piercy once openly admired in her work “To be of use”,

The people I love the best

jump into work head first

without dallying in the shallows

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.


Years after my first foray into service, I yearned once again to seek new challenge and opportunity and to be among people who jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows. AmeriCorps offered me that chance through Teach for America, where I trained to teach science in Watts, California, and then went on to teach special education in St. Louis, Missouri. Within hours, the thought that I had ever called myself a teacher at eighteen years old literally made me sick. THIS was teaching, and for two years I became so deeply engrossed in the phonetic abilities of my 10 students that I began getting confused myself and pronounced R-words with a St. Louis diction (tutorial: here = hur; there = thur; air = ur)

Ms. Piercy went on,

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience



Education, perhaps, wasn’t my calling, but along the way, AmeriCorps instilled in me a massive patience, a tool that I consider crucial, and a characteristic that has served me well ever since. Notably so in my subsequent job as a bartender in Seattle, Washington. Often referred to as the “other national service”, restaurant work was child’s play compared to the classroom, and petulant patrons were laughably harmless compared to the mock tragedies and high drama that string together a middle school student’s life.

Will the cook

Ms. Piercy continued,

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who stand in the line and haul in their places,


AmeriCorps has a knack for putting people in over their heads. Not in a bad way, but in a healthy and instructive forum that allows the daring citizen-volunteer to test the boundaries of their own abilities and forge new ones along the way.


Will wiith AmeriCorps VISTA members

 I had never endured a disaster a before, neither had I sifted debris, or framed a house. But witnessing the aftermath of hurricane Katrina unfold in the news, I knew that I could be of use. I quit my job in Seattle and drove to Biloxi, Mississippi where I sought people who submerge in the task.  I joined AmeriCorps again, alongside an army of other volunteers hell bent on rebuilding the Gulf. Four years passed, and with our noses constantly sniffing out the next home to rebuild, my fellow Katrina volunteers and I stuck around, transferred our licenses, and made the regrowth of the Gulf Coast our lives.


Katrina Recovery

Ms. Piercy concluded,

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museum

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.



There is honor in all work, but nothing has been more satisfying than the service that AmeriCorps had enabled me to embark upon. I knew that I wanted to continue on this path by helping to grow AmeriCorps at a national level, and when I heard about the Eli Segal Fellowship at the Corporation for National Service (CNCS) headquarters in DC, I knew it was my chance. The Fellowship is named after the late Eli Segal, the first CEO of CNCS, and its purpose is to all allow AmeriCorps Alums to help advance the mission and strategic goals of National Service in the United States.

Soon after I was accepted, I was sitting in a restaurant in DC across from John Gomperts, the Director of AmeriCorps, planning in which National Service initiatives I wanted participate. After so many years in the field, discussing high level programming with potential impact to the whole National Service movement was a dream come true. My service as a Segal fellow was broad in scope and allowed me to work across many departments at CNCS on projects as varies as overhauling the AmeriCorps member experience to disaster deployment in Joplin, Missouri coordinating response operations following a May 2011 tornado.

Just as Marge Piercy, I crave work that is real. I had assumed that once I left the field to begin more policy-centric work in DC that I would need to sacrifice that to continue serving a program that I love. Thankfully, I was completely mistaken, and if anything, my service to our country has made the work I do now with CNCS feel even more connected, real, and sweet, by enabling others to serve as I once did.

~Will

The Eli Segal Fellowship at CNCS is recruiting now! Click Here to Apply If you are an AmeriCorps Alum who has served in the past three years, you should absolutely consider applying for this tremendous opportunity. The deadline is February 27, 2012. I will be hosting a Q&A call for all those interested in applying on February 17, at 1pm EST, Toll-Free Number: 888-324-3916, Participant Passcode: 8802097. I hope that you will be able to join me!

Serving in Joplin, MO

Meg B. is a current AmeriCorps NCCC member serving with team Earth 4 at the Southwest Region Campus. 

When I found out that for Round 2 my team would be serving in Joplin, Missouri, which was hit by a devastating tornado at the end of May 2011, my immediate reaction was excitement coupled with nervousness. The main reason I decided to apply for AmeriCorps NCCC was to help the communities in our nation that needed it most, and being assigned to Joplin, I knew this was the case. After being in Joplin for just over a week, I have already been able to witness the strong sense of commitment and resilience this city contains, as well as a truly amazing spirit that runs throughout the entire community.

Earth 4 explores what the community named the "Volunteer House". This house was donated to the city by the family who once lived there and serves as a reminder of the miracle of the human spirit displayed after the storm.

For the next two months, my team, “Earth 4”, will be assisting the newly established non-profit organization Rebuild Joplin. Rebuild Joplin exists to ensure that resources of all kinds are effectively leveraged to holistically address the post-tornado needs in the Joplin community and create a brighter, more vibrant future for its residents and families.

We are working directly with the staff of Rebuild Joplin and will complete the following tasks in order to assess and fulfill the needs of the community. The team will be responsible for volunteer and logistical coordination, construction, and resource management and will strategize to recruit volunteers on both the local and national level. In addition, we will assess information about identified homeowners’ ongoing needs and subsequently lead volunteers in the rebuilding of these homes.

Amanda, Rebuild Joplin’s volunteer coordinator and our supervisor, expressed her enthusiasm about working directly with us for the next two months. "We are very excited to have the Earth 4 AmeriCorps NCCC team with us assisting our office as we begin to manage the volunteers and construction efforts to rebuild Joplin. The team will initially help us hit the ground running by completing various tasks to get our office organized. I am looking forward to getting to know them better as we begin construction for the many individuals in our community who need help getting back into their homes.”

My team and I are incredibly grateful to be a part of rebuilding Joplin into the bigger, better and stronger community we know it will be.

~Meg

In a related story, AmeriCorps members, like Meg, were recently honored by the Missouri House of Representatives, who passed a resolution honoring AmeriCorps members from across the country who have played an indispensable role in helping the city of Joplin recover from the devastating tornado that struck the city on May 22, 2011.
To read more, go here.