Tag: 2021-2022

My time as a VISTA has been, overall, an extremely rewarding experience that has taught me a lot about both my local community and myself. I am serving with the Rural Institute of Inclusive Communities, which promotes equal opportunity for people with disabilities. As someone who has a disability, is dating someone with a disability,…

“What’s it going to be then, eh?” was a question I often asked myself after I graduated college-though I had a rather less poetic retort. This uncertainty, during the height of Covid lockdowns, soon reached a head, and pushed me into moving a thousand miles to a state I had hitherto never set foot to serve…

Excitement, learning, hesitation, perseverance, grief, burnout, growth, frustration, resolve. My AmeriCorps experience can and will be described in a multitude of ways. After two years, one might think the ability to talk about what you have experienced would be familiar, become habit, but honestly my description changes every time. I reviewed past blogs from my…

As I enter the penultimate month of my service year, I would like to take a moment to pause and reflect on my experience so far. I’ve found my community impact can be a bit more challenging to measure than that of my fellow cohort members. While their high school and college students are working…

“My parents kept me out of school today because of shooting and bomb threats,” a student explained to me. Their absence from school prevented them from attending their weekly meeting to receive the academic mentorship and college readiness services my service site offers. However, this student’s worries were well founded. The day prior, Helena police…

After having completed my first service year at a family shelter, I knew I wanted to continue serving parents and children. That left a lot of room for me to explore and search, but when I saw the opportunity to work with indigenous foster families in rural Montana, everything about it excited me. I was…

Every community is different. Oftentimes people are measured by a standard level used for all, that completely disregards the outliers and minoritized individuals. These standards are based on communities or groups of people who do not encompass everyone. Serving on the Fort Peck Reservation with high school students has made it more apparent that these…

Five months have passed since my previous blog. I couldn’t remember so I had to look through the archives to remind myself how much time passed since I wrote it. My feet feel so firmly planted in Browning, that I was certain it was much longer ago. In my first couple of months here, I…

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with labeling everything as either right or wrong, truth or lies, and had a hard time understanding what was between those two, that concept of a gray area. Looking back, I have a lot of respect for my parents. I realize I was probably a hard kid…

Some questions in life are better left unasked. “Where are you from?” makes me bristle with its (hopefully) unintended micro-aggressive questioning of my origins and American-ness. “What do you do for work?” forces me to do a sidelong glance for insinuating my worth goes only as far as my useful to others. Word to the…

There is so much to be said about my experience thus far I honestly do not really know where to begin. So I guess I will begin here, Montana as a whole is the 17th State with the largest homeless population. 9.2% of that population (the population I serve), are between the ages of 18-25.…

The Great Falls LGBTQ+ Center is a beautiful mess of color, filled with mismatched furniture, shelves of books and board games, and always an abundance of goldfish crackers and fruit snacks. We are located in a building with a lot of history; built in 1899, the space has seen thousands of faces and has heard…

As my second blog 4 months into my first term as an AmeriCorps Leader, I have happy adventures to share after climbing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs pyramid; Survival, Safety, Belonging, Esteem, and Self-Actualization. My first blog post revolved around adjusting and relocating from Chicago, Illinois to Butte, Montana. Here at Montana Technological University’s Institute for…

When President Biden decided to withdraw military forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, many Afghans chose to or were forced to flee their homeland. President Biden directed the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to lead the federal government’s initiative to resettle these vulnerable Afghans. First, Afghans were transported to different military bases across the…

Prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore believes that “where life is precious, life is precious.” When we treat each life with the full sanctity it deserves, when we provide people with everything they need to live healthy, happy lives, we engage in mutual care for our communities. We reduce the chance of harm and violence. We break down…

Has there ever been a time in your life when you felt stuck? Like maybe you knew what your big dreams were, but you didn’t know how to start chasing them? That is exactly how I felt after graduating college last year. Just like everyone else in the world, my path in life had taken…

I’ve only been at Missoula Food Bank for a little over a month, but I could tell on my very first day that the people who work here care deeply about their community. It doesn’t matter how much money you make, where you live, or how many kids you have, no one leaves here hungry.…

My name is Amber Christina Peretz. I type these thoughts while sitting on the carpeted floor of my cozy Montana home; music playing softly, a candle burning its gentle light. I’ve come a long way to arrive here at this particular moment. Physically (I moved here from Florida), emotionally (2020 was hard for everyone), and…

For much of my life, the societies I have lived in have conceptualized learning as an activity with two primary actors; the learner and the teacher, with the former understood to be somewhat dependent on the latter in this model. However, this season of my life has been marked by repeated realizations that the world…

When I lived in Beijing, people would always ask me how the pollution was. I told them two things: The Communist Party planted trees to stop sandstorms from entering the capital. They also moved factories away from the city, but didn’t shut them down. Despite all this, the Chinese Capitol still experiences terrible air quality…