For Members
At Arizona Serve, we take pride in providing a meaningful, supportive experience for our National Service members to full valuable volunteer roles in Arizona. Our AmeriCorps team members receive many benefits, including one-on-one coaching, a collaborative and open team environment, exploration of regional issues, and professional development training with a service-learning twist that results in a Certificate in Civic Leadership through Prescott College. Creating community is at our core, so we collaborate with partners and other National Service agencies several times a year for our National Days of Service.
Learn more about National Days of Service and various training opportunities for AmeriCorps members with Arizona Serve by checking out our regional team calendars below.
Please email ahaseley@arizonaserve.org if the shifting administrative priorities have impacted your site. If you have seen an influx of new work, the removal of other tasks, or the creation of new organization priorities please let us know.
Organizational Positionality & Values
We are an institution that strives to promote equity. We encourage individual positionality and strive to define Our organizational positionality.
What is positionality?
Our identities are critical because they shape our perceptions. They determine our assumptions and our understanding of how others treat us (Bourke 2014). By recognizing our identities and paying attention to our biases, we can work with different groups and recognize their unique circumstances. (Bourke 2014).
What is organizational positionality?
Staff, members, partners, and organizational stakeholders each have a unique path. Organizational positionality begins to define the inevitable complexities that exist within interconnected entities like Arizona Serve. It is vital to recognize the collective perspective because by acknowledging our own relative power, privilege, and biases we are able to start to move towards equity literacy and increase our own agency accountability (Madison 2005; Gorski, 2020).
Arizona Serve’s Positionality
We began as a grassroots effort to support communities and AmeriCorps members. Now we are a small Prescott College staff with dominant and nondominant identities that recruit new members of varying social identities, educational backgrounds, and lived experiences. Thus, our positionality changes yearly.
On the positive side, our community continues to grow and foster new ideas. On the negative side, we commonly make assumptions about member needs because we have limited time to recognize individuality. Ultimately, we answer to the agencies that fund and support our mission; thus, we walk a fine line between our members and partners.
There are more drawbacks to our model; National Service is rooted in white saviorism, and we risk imposing outside perspectives without community input. We struggle to accommodate citizenship status, income barriers, and reliance on grant funding. We strive to remain aware of the impact of our position and actively work towards operating a member-driven program that intentionally cultivates equity.
Our values are interlinked and inform our organizational goals that direct our yearly action commitments. This is the mechanism that keeps us accountable to our diverse array of stakeholders.
We value being part of a nationwide cause that is greater than ourselves and empower members.
We engage with the community through deliberate outreach, partnerships with nonprofits and public agencies, and community-driven initiatives.
We amplify the voices of non-dominant identity groups by confronting inequities with a social justice perspective.
We strengthen our members for future endeavors through professional development, targeted coaching, and professional networking opportunities.
We recognize the imperfections in our work and will always work towards bettering our communities by constant self-reflection, internal evaluation metrics, and open-door policies to our communities.
Member Training & Events
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A four-credit class through Prescott College, the Certificate in Civic Leadership Training helps participants develop the knowledge and skills to be effective community leaders. Members complete ten service-learning trainings. Up to five of these may be Community Based which aligns with their current service.
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Guest Speaker Series is a series of panels where National Service and community members alike hear directly from local leaders about issues that influence poverty at a national and community level. Topics are timely and relevant and allow engagement in real conversations with field experts. The series promotes opportunities to network and get involved.
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Held monthly across regions and grants, these meetings serve as a way for our members to collaborate and connect on an ongoing basis. Each month a professional development focus area is highlighted, meant to strengthen skills National Service members often use at their sites.
Past examples include difficult conversations, self-advocacy, life after service, resume workshops, etc.
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Our scope widens to the broader community with National Days of Service. Spearheaded by the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), the following days seek to connect National Service members across the country to volunteer projects happening in their communities. At Arizona Serve, these events are an opportunity for members and the community at large to come together, make new connections, and work as one team. These volunteer opportunities in Arizona might be single Days of Service, but we also encourage service-learning based volunteerism throughout the year and are always willing to connect interested community members to our partner organizations.