The FIRST AmeriCorps VISTAs

By Samantha Fleming

FIRST VISTA, Virginia

As ambassadors of FIRST, I’m sure everyone is well aware of what a job it can be to explain our group, our mission, and even our name. AmeriCorps VISTAs take that confusion one step further when we try to explain our specific job and our mission. The VISTA program is a subsidiary of AmeriCorps, a government-funded, volunteer-based organization dedicated to the alleviation of poverty in the United States. You might wonder, along with many others, what that has to do with FIRST or with robots. I questioned that myself at the beginning of my tenure here.

Samantha Fleming

A typical VISTA year will likely be spent among low-income schools, battered women, the homeless, or any other group in need of support. I’ve spent mine among enthusiastic students and their robots. What is so unique about the FIRST-AmeriCorps partnership is the scale and scope of its ability to improve lives. There are countless stories of students without direction who were inspired by FIRST, of students who never saw themselves as college-bound until they spent a year on a team. There’s little doubt of the impact that this program has on the individual. But, in my mind, that’s not what sets it apart from other programs.

Sustainability is such a buzzword these days- but what does it really mean and why does it matter? In a word, sustainability is what drew me to FIRST. While every individual success story is an achievement, more importantly, FIRST is promoting the education of a more competent, globally conscious, and relevant workforce as a whole. In doing this, we are facilitating economic growth on a global scale, which is poverty alleviation at its best! I imagine that the advent of the AmeriCorps program was intended to create the sort of grassroots progress that FIRST is in a unique position to generate.

FIRST-VISTA mission: pictoralized!

There is a high school team here in Richmond, Virginia that succeeded in truly selling me on the program. Team 384, Sparky, from Tucker High School, started a program called the “Lil’ Sparks LEGO Program” in the Fall of 2013. Their intention was to target developing countries that could benefit from the inspiration of their youngest students. Initially, because of the Disaster Blaster theme, this group began a partnership with schools in Haiti. They have gathered LEGOs and school supplies, wrote a STEM curriculum to go along with the materials, and have found resourceful ways of getting this “team in a box” concept to the destination schools across the world. Not only has this project already expanded to Ghana, Uganda, and a school for Syrian refugees, it’s also touched our local community by educating other students about these developing countries and their needs.

As a FIRST VISTA, I have had a hand in helping to encourage an intelligent, responsible, and compassionate group of students, and I feel confident that these students will go on to do great things to create a more prosperous world as a whole. Beyond its effectiveness as a STEM education program and for pioneering new engineering concepts, this program has evolved into a valuable sustainable development initiative, of which I am proud to have been a part.

VISTAs during Fall training (L-R): Ryan Utzman (WV), Samantha, Michael Lyden (WV), and Ryan Tesnow (LA)