A Conscientious Blog

I came to Omaha, NE on August 1st, 2009, preparing myself for the endeavor of being an AmeriCorps member for 11 months with Rebuilding Together Omaha.

Rebuilding Together Omaha is an affiliate of the national non-profit Rebuilding Together. The mission for Rebuilding Together across the U.S.  is to repair and rehabilitate the homes of low-income elderly and disabled. (Rebuilding Together does have other repair standards beyond this for special things, but we mainly focus on low income elderly and disabled)

My reasons for being an AmeriCorps member is from my family. My parents have been a part of neighborhood volunteer service for years, with my mom running an AmeriCorps Literacy Council in Madison, SD for two years and continuing to volunteer with this group to this day with my father. My fiancee also has been a member with AmeriCorps last year, working with the American Lung Association of Utah. I’m surrounded by civil service.

The start to my experience began not in Omaha, but in New Orleans for the first week of training with 35 other new and returnings AmeriCorps members. We fall under a different group of AmeriCorps volunteers known as the CapacityCorps, a specialty member group for Rebuilding Together.

We are a fancy bunch due to this distinction.
(No sarcasm here, true fanciness.)

CapacityCorps members in a the New Orleans HandsOn volunteer home

We learned about the need for the service we provide to low-income communities around the country, and how we 36 members are supposed to help expand the abilities of Rebuilding Together at local affiliate levels. We all have a specific role to serve in the affiliates we serve.
My role is an Energy Efficiency Coordinator and I try to enhance the environmentally friendly capabilities of Rebuilding Together Omaha at an office and home repair level.

A daunting task. It hasn’t stopped being daunting either.

After training in New Orleans for a week, I came back to Omaha as prepared as I possibly could to work with Rebuilding Together Omaha in building up their abilities to serve the city of Omaha. I would like to save my thoughts for now on my service so far for a later post.

I just wanted to make known the task that has been laid out in front of me and my peers, and that is trying to improve the conditions of low-income elderly and disabled.

For a look into my peers perspective on their new(-ish) membership with AmeriCorps Rebuilding Together program, check out the embedded video to hear it in their own words.