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| This is Metropolitan United Methodist, the church where I’m living this summer. It is gorgeous, inside and out. |
“I’m pregaming for a midlife crisis” is what I tell people when I explain my interest in service work. “I’m worried that I’ll turn 40 and realize that I haven’t done anything meaningful in my life, and that it’s all been about making money, and I’ll hate myself.”
I figure that if I devote some of my time now to helping other people and making the world a marginally better place, I won’t hate myself later on. Right now, this means that I’m spending the summer at Motown Mission, working as a PR intern. I’m also taking a PR class online, and I’m excited to find ways that I can apply what I’ve learned in class to the work we’re doing in Detroit.
Hopefully, I’ll have the chance to do some development strategizing and grant writing. I’ve been thinking more and more lately that I might want to go into nonprofit work, so those are important skills for me to learn.
Motown Mission is a non-profit that brings groups of youth into Detroit for a week of service work, partnering with different organizations around the city that are focused on economic disaster recovery. The work that our youth vollenteers do is cleaning, greening, and demolition.
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| This is the sanctuary. Like the rest of the church, it is beautiful and gigantic. |
I’m hoping that working at Motown Mission this summer will give me a better understanding of myself and the way I can make my skills useful to the world.
Almost a month ago, I found out that I was accepted into Teach For America. I didn’t expect to get in, because they accept around 10% of applicants, and a lot of people from prestigous schools apply – they always publicize the number of people who apply from Ivy Leagues, so I assumed that my state-school-attending-self wouldn’t measure up. I’ve thought about being a teacher occasionally over the years, so I filled out half an application in January or Feburary, and then a recruiter texted me, asking me to finish filling it out, so I did. I had a phone interview, an online activity, sent all my transcripts, and then a virtual interview where I taught a five-minute lesson. And then, on the day after my birthday, I got in.
I was in the Herald office when the email arrived on my phone. It didn’t say that I’d gotten in, just that I should check the TFA website to find out. I went into my office, trying to log in and failing, the first time. Then, when I found out, I screamed. I walked into the main office, leaning against the door, and told Jax and Glen. I hadn’t even clicked to the next page to find out which corps I was assigned to. I picked the “send me anywhere” option, because I didn’t have any idea where I wanted to go. I’ve lived in Michigan for my whole life, and while I’ve visited other places, there was never one that stuck out to me as somewhere I would dream of living. I wanted to go somewhere new, but I didn’t know what that new place looked like.
After ten minutes of freaking out about the fact that I got in, I clicked through to a second page on the TFA website and found out that I was in the Mississippi corps.
I’ve never been to Mississippi, but I want to learn more about it – what it’s like, how it’s different from Michigan, and what challenges educators face there. I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on about Mississippi, about TFA itself, and how everything all fits together in the larger issue of educational inequity. I still haven’t decided if I want to go or not, but I have until October to make that decision. In the meantime, I have a whole lot of research and soul-searching to do.