VISTA Life

Facing barriers in transportation

By Catherine Dahlberg

If you are like me, someone not born and raised in Minnesota, then you may understand why I call it a barrier getting around in the Twin Cities.

I moved to the Twin Cities in 2015, without any knowledge of the roads around. In February, 2016, I took public transport to a training. I got lost on U of M campus. It took me almost a whole hour navigating the area before arriving at the transfer stop, only to find out that I had missed the last bus serving that station. Then I had to take an alternative route to the training. I was late for that, of course. The whole experience was terrible for me.

To describe that experience in full, I wrote this blog in an imaginative TV setting:

An education on health equity and transit

By Jocelyn Leung, Community Engagement Program Associate, Nexus Community Partners

I joined AmeriCorps VISTA during a real turning point in my life. I had been in 3 graduate programs for the past 6 years. One of them I had the foresight to leave when I knew it wasn’t right; another I stayed for too long.  Making the transition from a perpetual student to a member of the workforce was hard, and my confidence was low after months of unsuccessful job-searching. I’m very grateful to now be serving at Nexus Community Partners as the Community Engagement Program Associate through VISTA.

The goal of ‘making poverty history’ can be daunting and abstract, but the work I share with community based organizations in making sure that community members have a say in how the light rail can help them lead healthier and better lives is very real and moving. These voices come from communities of color, immigrants and refugees, migrants, people living with disabilities, low-income communities, and other transit dependent populations. It’s our responsibility to make sure their voices change policies and light rail development throughout a long-term public works project. 

The importance of being flexible

By Michael Prideaux, Nonprofit Outreach Specialist, Nonprofits Assistance Fund

For many, the combination of graduate school deadlines, year-end reports, finals, and more brings about a feeling of being simultaneously forward and backward looking. And with this comes the need to be flexible when outcomes are not as planned. 

I remember in high school we had to attend a “career day” with a person from a temp firm telling us how to get entry level positions. While none of the actual content of the workshop was impactful, one thing the presenter said definitely resonates with me. She had mentioned how she has worked at least six other jobs in her relatively young adulthood and said she foresaw many more. This uncertainty in the eyes of a high school senior is terrifying, but I am learning more and more that to stay together mentally, emotionally, and even in your career, you have to embrace unpredictability.