High Point University VISTAs work diligently every year to improve the community of High Point through various non profits and local organizations. Pictured above is Amanda Goodwin (far left), Natalee Laasch (second from left), Clarice Sigsworth (second from right) and Victoria Hensley (far right).
Every Monday, they arrive.
They circle around a huge table with the Rev. Mary Beth Foust and review their volunteer work in the city of High Point.
Foust is their campus leader. But really, she’s more like a coach. As assistant director of civic responsibility and social innovation, she helps the AmeriCorps VISTA members at High Point University navigate the highs and lows of improving education and food security in High Point.
That’s no easy task.
So, every Monday, Foust turns a conference room at HPU’s Community Center into a place for a spirit-lifting lesson. She does it in all sorts of ways. On this particular Monday in June, as VISTAs near the end of their year-long work, she gets them to work puzzles.
“The best way to describe your life as a VISTA is you feel like one piece to all these puzzles around you,” Foust says. “That one piece, though, is a part of your life.”
These VISTAs, these HPU graduates, do understand.
They’ve made a difference in High Point.
They’ve also made a difference in themselves.
The Seeds of HPU’s VISTA
The acronym for VISTA — Volunteers in Service to America – says volumes about the soul of its work that began in 1964.
Fast forward to 2013. HPU brought in its first AmeriCorps VISTA.
Back then, the collaborative network known as the N.C. Campus Compact oversaw the VISTAs who served the High Point community. HPU President Dr. Nido Qubein had just come in as the network’s chairman, and he saw a need in a city where he had lived for more than 50 years.
“Our students are exposed to the needs of society,” he says. “They mature as they delve to solve problems and find solutions that help children, feed the hungry, tend to the socio-economically disadvantaged families in our neighborhoods, and uphold the very values we hold dear at HPU.”
Today, with the help of a $300,000 federal grant, HPU has created a VISTA program that’s become one of the largest, single-site VISTA spots in North Carolina.
The university now has nine VISTAs and provides housing for all of them to live on campus. Four work with education; four work with food security; and one works as the supervisor of the team.
They stay for one year. Some stay for two. Foust coaches them. So does the Rev. Dr. Joe Blosser, associate professor of religion and philosophy and Robert G. Culp Jr. director of service learning.
Blosser describes what VISTAs do as “capacity building.” They enhance areas where nonprofits need the most support. So, VISTAs fundraise, research, create email databases and work on communication and marketing.
VISTAs acquire highly marketable skills and discover a network of people they trust. They also find a home. After their work ends, Blosser says at least 40 percent of all VISTAs decide to live and work in High Point.
No matter if they stay or go, they become attached to their alma mater’s home.
“High Point is really a unique place,” Blosser says. “It’s big enough for VISTAs to do big things by raising a decent amount of money and connecting with large businesses and large nonprofits. But it’s small enough that they can develop their own network. They see that their impact can make a difference in the city, not just in their little world.
“It really sets them up for their future.”
VISTA: The Confidence Builder
Blosser’s take is true. Talk to any VISTA. Talk to Amanda Goodwin.
She came to HPU from Columbus, Ohio, and she graduated in 2017 with degrees in biology and Spanish and a minor in women’s and gender studies.
She became a VISTA to continue volunteering in the city, similar to what she did as an undergraduate with HPU’s service fraternity, Alpha Phi Omega.
As a VISTA, she worked with the Greater High Point Food Alliance and did a variety of things around what Goodwin calls “food justice.”
She helped start the city’s Farmer’s Market in the parking lot of the High Point Library. She still remembers the first day.
She’d been there since 7 a.m. Seven hours later, tired and hot, she sat down for the first time. She looked up and saw people dancing the Cha Cha Slide on a little stage.
“I am so glad I made this decision,” she told herself.
That was two years ago. She still feels the same way today.
Goodwin grew up in an extended family of doctors, but she didn’t know if she wanted to follow that career path, and she was nervous about taking the medical school exam.
Her mind changed with her year as a VISTA.
She gained confidence to take the exam. She knew why. As a VISTA, she saw the importance of providing readily accessible healthy food to keep the most vulnerable around her from getting sick.
Goodwin is now entering her third year at Creighton University School of Medicine.
VISTA made that happen.
“More than anything, it will allow me to be a better advocate for my patients,” Goodwin says. “Not just on a one-on-one basis, but I’ll have the confidence to speak out for policy change because of I’ve seen the effect it can have on people’s livelihoods.”
That confidence convinced her to help create a student organization at Creighton she calls Justice in Medicine.
“I wouldn’t have had the confidence of doing that if I wasn’t a VISTA,” she says. “But because of VISTA, I knew how to talk about justice, and I had the knowledge and the skills to make this my own.”
‘Go For What You Want’
To understand the transformative power of VISTA, look no further than Natalee Laasch.
Laasch grew up in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, a comfortable middle-class city of 13,000 where almost everyone is white. She came to HPU to study biology and philosophy, and in her senior year, she took Blosser’s Ethics in Education course.
It was her first service-learning course. Her semester-long assignment? Volunteer at Northwood Elementary.
Northwood looked nothing like her hometown. She was surrounded by children of color and children of immigrants, almost all of whom received a free or reduced lunch.
Laasch tutored these children three times a week. She loved it.
She appreciated what she learned from people who didn’t look like her. Plus, she realized she liked being around children. They made her laugh and helped expand her view of the world.
When the course ended, she wanted to stay at Northwood. She talked to Blosser, became Northwood’s VISTA and embraced Panda pride.
She became, as she says, Northwood’s “Yes Person.” She found volunteers to paint panda paws on the sidewalk to honor the school’s mascot. She also raised $4,000 in donations to create a sensory room for behaviorally challenged students.
Then, every weekday morning, she stood by the front door and greeted students.
“Good morning.”
“How are you?”
“Do you need a hug?”
The pre-K students called her “Miss Eyelash.”
This fall, she’ll attend Colorado State University. She’s been accepted in the school’s competitive master’s program in biomedical science and assisted reproductive technology.
Her work as a VISTA, Laasch says, gave her the courage to apply.
“Mary Beth is always telling us to go for what you want, and that stuck with me,” Laasch says. “I’d been afraid to apply because I had this fear of rejection, whether I was good enough.
“But in the VISTA program, you have people encouraging you all the time, and that gave me a new appreciation in myself and the relationships I have in life.”
VISTA’s Enduring Legacy
While Laash will leave, Clarice Sigsworth will stay.
She’ll be the VISTA leader. She’ll be like Erin Murphy.
Murphy grew up an hour south of HPU in Cornelius, North Carolina, and in 2018, she graduated from HPU with a degree in criminal justice.
Murphy thought she wanted to be a lawyer. After her first VISTA year at Fairview Elementary and her second year as the VISTA leader, Murphy discovered a career she believed could help people even more.
This fall, she will pursue a master’s degree in social work at N.C. State.
VISTA gave Murphy a sense of purpose. VISTA did that for Sigsworth, too.
Sigsworth graduated from HPU in May 2019 with degrees in strategic communication and music performance with a concentration on trombone. After graduation, she worked as a VISTA with D-Up, a nonprofit that teaches children healthier habits.
The healthy habit she chose was teaching elementary school students how to play music. She gave students smaller plastic versions of the flute, saxophone and clarinet. She turned a dance studio near campus into a practice room and helped them feel like a band.
She heard noise. She also heard hope.
She also organized a fundraiser she called “Benefit Bash.” She brought in musicians she knew to play. They were raising money to help D-Up buy a new van and connected the nonprofit with executives from Thomas Built Buses who wanted to help.
In August, Sigsworth will take over as VISTA leader. Ask her why, and she’ll allude to her childhood on a retired dairy farm near Cleveland.
“You need to be rooted in rich soil to grow, and High Point is rich soil,” she says. “There is a spirit of egalitarianism, and I want to get involved with that. I still have some growing to do.”
Jakki Davis and her husband, Corvin, created D-Up to help everyone from kindergarteners to high school juniors get healthier through exercise, education and better eating habits.
For six years, she’s had VISTAs at her side. Like Sigsworth, they create events. They also volunteer as tutors, counselors, coordinators, fundraisers and activity leaders. After they leave, they’re far from done.
Former VISTA members have become donors, volunteers and board members. They all feel invested to help D-Up remain a vibrant part of High Point.
“They all leave a legacy,” Davis says. “Corvin and I accept them as our children, and we give them room to grow and do. That opens their hearts.”
The Power of One
Victoria Hensley, a 2015 HPU graduate, was once a VISTA. And like many VISTAs, she stayed in High Point.
She’s now the executive director of Growing High Point, a nonprofit that turns vacant lots into gardens in low-income neighborhoods to help feed residents and give them extra income.
That job was created for Hensley because of her VISTA work.
Hensley grew up outside San Francisco, but High Point is now her home. She married her college sweetheart, has chaired the Greater High Point Food Alliance and works every day to empower and feed neighborhoods that need help.
“We’re not changing the world,” she says. “But we’re changing White Oak and Pershing Street.”
Hensley sees that happen every week when she delivers vegetables grown in gardens across High Point. She goes door to door, dropping off vegetables to people she knows by first name.
Like Hazel Shakoor.
She’s 76, a former certified nursing assistant, and she has lived on Pershing Street for more than four decades. She’s raised four children in a cozy house where a cascade of hydrangeas frames her front porch. When Hensley knocks, and Shakoor comes right out. Hensley gives Shakoor an array of squash, collards and zucchini, and a conversation begins.
“I look forward to this,” Shakoor says. “It’s good food, you really don’t have to do a lot of washing, and it tastes better than what you get from the store. And Victoria, she’s my friend. I’ll let her come into my house. She’s a trustworthy person.”
“Thank you, Hazel,” Hensley responds.
From her front porch, Shakoor talks about her health, her nine grandkids, her 20 great grandkids and her two great-great grandkids. Then there is her conversation with God. It’s about her two former husbands.
“I told God, ‘No more, God, no more,’” Shakoor says. “‘It’s going to be me and you God the rest of the way.’”
Hensley laughs. Several minutes later, she says good-bye.
“I’ll see you Monday,” Hensley says.
“I’ll look for you,” Shakoor responds.
Hensley knows she will.