NCCC Team Serves as Counselors at Sherman Lakes

By Jonathan Kleyer

A team of 11 AmeriCorps, National Civilian Community Corps members, are working at Sherman Lakes YMCA camp, in Augusta, as one of five major service projects the team is carrying out by August 5th.

Since January 11th, the NCCC team has mostly been performing maintenance to get the camp ready for its spring programming. A change of pace came when the first group of children arrived from February 1st through 3rd, giving them their first opportunity to work as counselors.

“This is probably one of my favorite projects we will do,” commented Jordan Meeks, a team member from Colorado. “We’ve been chopping a lot of wood, and I haven’t minded the maintenance, but I’m excited about being a counselor. I’ve never done that before.”

The Sherman Lake YMCA school program is dedicated to teaching, role-modeling, reinforcing honesty, caring, respect and responsibility. The program is centered on a framework which encourages emotional intelligence and social skills to foster an aptitude and attitude for productivity and accomplishment.

The main goal of the program is to help children discover self-awareness, promote confidence, team work and problem solving skills, which they can employ in the classroom and other areas both presently and in the future.
There is fun hidden in those goals: as counselors, the NCCC team will be facilitating anything from swimming to rock climbing for kids.

“There’s a few things we can’t do, like horseback riding, when there’s snow on the ground, but we try and do everything we can,” Meeks said.
The 11 team members—four boys and seven girls—are Bob Mahrer, Jon Bechler, T.J. Ogunmesun, Jermaine Long, Amber Herbert, Erin Richards, Heather Hardy, Laura Van Dorn, Parker Marting, Jordan Meeks and Rebecca Larson. Herbert is the team’s leader.

Though the team members are from different states, the team itself is based out of AmeriCorps’ North Central Region campus, located in Vinton, Iowa. This region of the nation service program serves Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin.

Young men and women 18 to 24 years old complete 1,700 hours of service over a period of ten months through the NCCC. As a reward for this service, they receive $4,725 to help pay for college or school loans.

Along the way, they also get to develop leadership and team building skills, as well as increased self-confidence and simply gain the satisfaction of knowing that they have made a difference in communities across the country.
According to Meeks, getting started with the program involved a long online application detailing such things as her interests, skills and work experience. From there, interviews are held, more paperwork is filled out and applicants go through a background check.

The team’s first of five service projects had them working with Habitat for Humanity of Mobile County, building homes for low-income families.
They do not know yet what their next project will be once they are finished working at Sherman Lakes.

“We’ll find out what our next project will be one week before we head back to Iowa,” Meeks explained. “We’ll be back on campus three or four days, and then we’ll head out for that one.”

To learn more about AmeriCorps NCCC, a network of national service programs, go online to www.americorps.gov/nccc.