VISTA Handbook and Learning about Beehive Design Collective Americorp

Today I read through the entire VISTA member handbook so that I could become more familiar with the policies and procedures of the Americorp VISTA program. It was informative. I also made a call to the Beehive Design Collective and spoke with my friend Emma Bee about the Americorp program that they have running. Here are the notes from my conversation with Emma.

Beehive Design
Emily Simmons is the contact person for this position but she was unavailable so I spoke with Emma instead who was familiar with the program.

Americorps program

Not through Americorp directly—Some community organizing program in Portland, Maine

4 years ago they had a guy who wanted to help a volunteer in order to pay his student loans
The guy found out about Americorp and wrote a position. Had to complete 1700 hours of service in the year. Got a living stipend, loan deferment, and education award, health care. The guy had to bail because he had private loans instead of federal government loans.

Beehive Design Collective didn’t have to put any money up front to get this position. They had to figure out the check thing for the stipend.

The person is given the living stipend which is paid by the sponsoring organization, but they worked behind the scenes which made the group pay the check to the Beehive Design Collective which they sent back to the corporation to cover their portion of the stipend. They kept this part of the program going for 2 years.
They no longer use that program.

They are now using the Education award only program— Americorp volunteers don’t get health care, or living stipend, but still get the $5,000 education award. They have had these positions for two years now. They can choose their number of people to be in the program. There is one person in the program right now. Volunteers have to log their hours every week, and there must be a quarterly review from the supervisor, and an Americorp member summary.

Food at the Beehive Design Collective--
The Bees have figured that people can pay $3 a day for 3 meals to cover the cost of eating. Food is purchased collectively and meals are cooked collectively as well with different volunteers taking turns cooking and cleaning up.
The $3 a day doesn’t apply to full time Bees. $3 a day only applies to shorter term volunteers.

Possible model applications for future UMD Americorp positions--
1) We should get future UMD Americorp volunteers to sign up for food stamps before signing up for Americorp or before recieving any money from Americorp if at all possible.
2) We need to look into how to get Americorp positions, if any agency is willing to fund our work, and how much money we will have to put down to pay for the positions if any.
3) I think it would be preferable to have the Americorp volunteers recieve the health care, education stipend, and buy their food with food stamps and recycle the stipend back to the corporation.