By Talia Schmidt

My AmeriCorps VISTA Leader, Abby Zent.

When I moved to the boonies, which some people call Montana, I worried that I wouldn’t find a group of friends like I’d had in college. I didn’t need best friends; I just wanted a group of young women I could share my ups and downs with, exchange stories with, and help me grow in my year of finding myself.

I never wanted to join AmeriCorps. My mother basically pushed me into it as I was finishing up an internship at Seattle Business Magazine. Jobs in journalism were scarce back in 2009 (ha, they are even scarcer now), and I decided to look into giving back through a year of service.

AmeriCorps VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) sounded like an adventure in learning, team building, and creating sustainable communities.

It was all of those things and more. It was refreshing to surround myself with millennials who cared deeply about grassroots activism. It was inspiring to work hard on advocacy campaigns around substance abuse/overdose and teen pregnancy prevention. It was humbling to watch one community talk about the hard stuff and then enact the changes needed to help.

By far, though, the highlight of my year was the friendships I made. Friendships that extend beyond the spending time together realm or camping together under the stars in Butte for the summer folk festival, though those are lovely memories as well. The friendships I’m talking about are the surrogate mothers who took me under their wing, checked in regularly, and shared my successes and challenges during that year.

Friendships like my roommate during my AmeriCorps VISTA year, a local girl my age, who embraced me into her family and town and never let me feel lonely.

Friendships like my AmeriCorps VISTA supervisor, who was always there with advice, a friendly smile, a hug, and a funny story. Though she worked out of Helena and I was in Great Falls, we emailed regularly enough that I felt like I was in the loop in her life, and she in mine.