Over the past five years, the Tulane University Center for Public Service(CPS) has utilized AmeriCorps*VISTA members to aid Tulane students, faculty, and staff as they assist community partners with capacity building within local non-profits.  In late 2005, CPS developed an AmeriCorps*VISTA program model that deploys VISTA members as liaisons between the university and community organizations.  Each VISTA member works with one organization in the New Orleans area to support the development of sustained partnerships and facilitate the work of students and faculty in the community.  This project, created in conjunction with the implementation of a unique academically-based public service graduation requirement at Tulane allows more than 1000 service learning and student volunteers to work effectively with community partners every semester.

During their year of service VISTA members work at their assigned agency four days per week and meet on Fridays at Tulane for training, reporting, and other duties.  The training and support from Tulane allows them to better serve the partner agencies and to further their personal and professional development.  Additionally, VISTA members organize the activities of Tulane service learning students and public service interns placed at their partner sites.  The infrastructure and capacity created by Tulane's VISTA program allows organizations to utilize the services provided by public service students and the university more effectively and creatively.  VISTA members work with Tulane and the partner agencies to create volunteer job descriptions, prepare training sessions and orientations, organize public service students in activities designed to reduce poverty, enhance civic engagement, and encourage economic sustainability.     

Recently Tulane worked to expand this model to other universities and currently assists the University of Minnesota and Virginia Tech in their efforts to build sustainable campus-community partnerships through the use of AmeriCorps*VISTA resources.  These institutions are building on the established success of Tulane’s model while revising it to fit their own communities.

The following are two examples of successful VISTA member initiatives within our program.  At The Green Project, a local organization reducing the urban waste stream, VISTA member Nick Roosevelt redesigned the paint recycling program and during ten months recycled more than5000 gallonsof paint and increased paint retail sales to more than $37,000. The amount of recycled paint is enough to paint the roof of the Louisiana Superdome at least three times.  Another VISTA member, Robert Fogarty, worked with the Volunteers in Government program at New Orleans City Hall.  During the 2009 Hurricane Gustav evacuation, Robert used more than 400 volunteers to augment city and state employees to assist in the evacuation of 19,000 residents lacking access to private transportation.  Following that Robert founded Evacuteer.org, an organization created to train a group of volunteers who help New Orleans’ most vulnerable citizens during future disaster evacuations. 

The Tulane VISTA program not only supports high impact community organizations through AmeriCorps, it also provides the community access to a renewable resource of university volunteers and intellectual capital, as well as providing an empowering opportunity for extremely qualified VISTA members to create innovate solutions to poverty-related and community issues.