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Volunteer reports on year of 'war on poverty'

Miami grad worked with students to highlight problems.

AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer Jessica Reading concluded her term at Miami University Hamilton with a discussion of her experiences and efforts in poverty alleviation in Hamilton with a presentation at MUH Downtown on Tuesday, June 8.

Staff photo by Nick Daggy AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer Jessica Reading concluded her term at Miami University Hamilton with a discussion of her experiences and efforts in poverty alleviation in Hamilton with a presentation at MUH Downtown on Tuesday, June 8.

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By Richard O Jones, Staff Writer 10:59 PM Tuesday, June 8, 2010

HAMILTON — She was only there a year, but her immersion into the Miami University Hamilton campus and local service organizations gave Jennifer Reading a sense of place that she felt she missed growing up in San Diego, Calif.

After graduating from Miami University in Oxford, Reading signed up for a year with AmeriCorps VISTA, a program founded by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 to “fight the war on poverty.”

Reading joined through an organization called Ohio/Campus Compact, which this year placed 35 recent college graduates in VISTA volunteer positions. She was placed at Miami University Hamilton in the Office of Civic Engagement to explore ways of alleviating poverty in Hamilton.

“Service was something I wanted to do with my life, so I had to look at what that would mean,” Reading told a crowd of collaborators and community members Tuesday, June 8, at MUH Downtown.

Hamilton was chosen for the project because it has poverty and jobless rates that are much higher than the county and state as a whole.

Her year of service had three goals, she said, including increasing “volunteer-based campus and community programs to improve the capacity to serve surrounding low-income communities” and “campus/community partnerships to expose youth and community to community to college access programs.”

It was the third goal, to “implement programs related to developing civic capacity on campus and in the community,” that resulted in what she considers her biggest success: The creation of a “staycation” for a group of students who eschewed a week on the beach for a “poverty simulation,” to live life like a homeless person in Hamilton.

“This work is really important, and I feel I’ve changed as a result of it and the overall campus community has changes a little bit,” she said.

“We learned that evoking a sense of community was as important as working on poverty issues. If we are going to alleviate poverty, we have to have a sense of belonging to the community.”

During the question and answer session that followed, Reading said that her biggest personal discovery during her year was finding “a sense of hope in the different people I worked with, of really caring about the community and wanting to see it flourish in some way.”

Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2188 or rjones@coxohio.com.

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