By Vincent Feeley | June 3, 2025 As my service in Montana begins to wind down and draw to a close, I’ve been thinking about everything I’ve done so far during my time here. I’ve been thinking a lot about all of the projects I’ve helped my office complete, the students who I’ve advised, and even the things that I’ve failed to accomplish despite my best efforts. But most of all, I’ve been thinking about what my time serving here has taught me, and what service overall means to me. When I first got here, I had just graduated college, and really had no idea what to expect out of this experience. I had somewhat of an idea of my responsibilities in my role, and I understood generally what AmeriCorps service meant as far as what would be expected of me, but I hadn’t really considered what my role and my service meant to me. I knew that I wanted to serve to help people, and that my main goal was to assist as many people as I could, but I didn’t really know yet what that would look like for me, or what effect service would have on me. When I started, I took my relatively
surface level understanding of service and tried to focus on big projects, looking to take
on any large scale issue that my office was attempting to tackle.
While I was able to participate in a few projects like this, such as building the infrastructure for a future food insecurity program on campus, I always felt that the other parts of my service here, such as giving students advice on how to find housing in the area, were almost useless in comparison. I felt like every day that I didn’t spend helping to create a large scale
project or tackling a massive issue was a day wasted, and that these big actions were the only ones that mattered. However, as my service went on and I began to have more and more of these smaller scale interactions that focused on smaller issues, I realized that these problems and projects were just as important and impactful as the larger
ones. Helping a student understand how a lease works or what a cosigner is certainly
isn’t as impactful as setting up a safe ride program on a large scale, but it is incredibly impactful to a student who is trying to understand how living off campus works for the first time. I began to realize that, while finishing big projects that help a great number of people is obviously great, doing small things that only help one person means just as
much. I began to see service less as having an end goal to help the greatest number of people possible, but rather to have the greatest impact on those that I’m serving, however many people that may be. This shift in my mindset really made me consider those smaller moments more, and I began to treat them like they were just as potentially impactful as the large projects I was a part of.
I realized I had been selling the importance of these interactions short, and inadvertently not giving them the care and attentiveness they deserved. After all, what may be a small or simple interaction to me may make a world of difference to a student who is incredibly anxious about moving off campus, or trying to find a roommate. I was, at the end of the day, putting how I felt about the impact of these actions before how those I was serving felt about them, which in reality is the opposite of what I should have been doing. This whole experience has made me much more intentional when it comes to every part of my service, big and small, and I’ve been making a concerted effort to ensure that my mindset of serving to the best of my ability, no matter the issue at hand, is always present. All of this
eventually led me to really stop and consider what exactly service means to me now, with all of the new knowledge and experience I’ve gained during my time here. I think that now, service to me means first and foremost putting others first. Service shouldn’t just be about showing up and doing what I feel is important, or only paying attention to what I think the biggest issues are, but rather doing my best to help in any way that is required of me, no matter how seemingly insignificant the issue might look to me. My role in service should always be to the community I’m serving first, and whatever issues that are brought to me to assist with that they feel are important should always be treated as worth my time and attention.
Overall, my view of service has shifted from being something that means that I always need to be doing the most important, impactful things that I possibly can, to being about doing what’s needed of me at that specific moment, whether that thing is a large scale project, or just giving someone who needs it some simple advice. I believe this shift has greatly improved my ability to truly serve, as I now give everything I can into whatever I’m doing at the moment, and this has allowed me to more closely embody what I feel the core purpose of service and AmeriCorps are. There will obviously always be a place for large, extremely impactful projects in service, but the reality is that isn’t what the majority of service is likely to look like, and that isn’t a bad thing. Just because you aren’t involved in something groundbreaking or large scale doesn’t mean you aren’t doing your part to serve your community, and I’m glad that I’ve been able to learn this lesson and move forward in my service with the knowledge that no matter if I’m doing something large or small, as long
as I always do it with a community first mindset, it matters.