​Hello everyone, this Marc Tyler, currently in my last month of serving as the AmeriCorps VISTA at the Southeast Michigan Community Alliance (SEMCA). This year has flown by and I have been able to learn a lot since my last blog post! SEMCA is the fiduciary and contracting agent for six America Jobs Centers (also known as Michigan Works!) in Monroe County and out-Wayne County (which is Wayne County excluding Detroit). SEMCA has contracted six service centers to provide services and programs for all ages within the scope of SEMCA’s mission and provide services in SEMCA’s region. This year all six Michigan Works! job center contracts ended. SEMCA, in order to contract with organizations and provide services, is required to formally put out a Request for Proposals to let the public bid for our contracts. These contracts are to provide services within our region for the next year with an option of renewal for three more years. During the RFP process, our department had to recreate new contracts with updated terms and conditions for the upcoming year. I was able to learn more about the RFP process and help ensure that proposals were catalogued correctly in our system.

Our youth department has been in transition over the past few months, and will continue to be in transition throughout the summer. We have hired three people to our growing department which speaks to the value of our organization in expanding outreach into the community and providing much needed services to our youth. We are faced with endless opportunities to expand our programs and initiatives, and expand our staffing capacity. 

With these transitions, I’ve been doing more program coordinating. I stepped up to support Jobs for Michigan Graduates (JMG) since the previous coordinator left the position. JMG’s mission is to equip young people with the skills to overcome barriers and win in education, employment, and as citizens. JMG does this by having specialists in schools who focus on students who are falling behind and provides them with opportunities. I helped with the coordination of this program during a hectic time. The great work our previous coordinator had done to build the program from the ground up allowed SEMCA to expand into two additional high schools, Ecorse and Hamtramck. My role has been making sure the other six out-of-school, and three in-school programs were still engaged and supported. Our specialists fill many roles – teacher, guidance counselor, coach, and all-around cheerleader for our youth. I coordinated their summer trainings, seminars, and organized community services opportunities. I was even entrusted to attend the JMG national training in Orlando, Florida this summer! Two of our specialists were selected to give presentations during one of the seminars. I was in constant contact with the statewide team to provide updates about the program and share any news that needed to be disseminated. Having this opportunity to experience this work as a coordinator gave me perspective of how much goes into coordinating a program and supervising others to make sure they are well supported in their individual schools and able to provide services to our regional youth. 

On top of coordinating the JMG program at SEMCA, I’m also heavily involved in with Manufacturing Day. This is a county-wide event put on by SEMCA and the Wayne County Executive's office in collaboration with a number of higher education and business partners that will take place on October 5, 2019. Students will be able to visit manufacturers around the county and learn about the wide array of career opportunities offered, and then visit local colleges to learn about the educational pathways to get to that point. Working with both my supervisor and the Youth Department manager, we have been facilitating a planning committee in preparation for this since May. We have been registered close to 3,700 students and 55 high schools, and we have been able to receive $16,000 in donations. We have been able to beat our initial registration and fundraising goals and hope to provide a great event for the students participating in October. 
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My time serving as VISTA this past year has been filled with a lot of accomplishments and significant professional growth, which I am most thankful for. The opportunities I was able to partake in, and the multitude of different initiatives and professional development opportunities at SEMCA, has been exceptional and I cannot wait to take them with me. 

​Hello everyone! I’m Marc Tyler, first-year Pathways to Employment AmeriCorps VISTA serving with Southeast Michigan Community Alliance (SEMCA) and with Wayne County College Access Network (WCCAN) in Taylor, MI. My mission with WCCAN is to increase college readiness, participation, and completion in Michigan, particularly among low-income students, first-generation college-going students, and students of color. WCCAN’s main work is fostering collaboration with leaders from higher education, business, K-12 education, along with nonprofits and community leaders. This approach lends itself to discussions and planning on how as a community we can create systematic change to help foster a college going culture. This coalition of leaders is committed to helping students overcome the barriers that have been placed in front of them and stop them from succeeding in obtaining some form of post-secondary credential, which is projected to be almost mandatory to have by the year 2025.

During the past six months I have been building on what my predecessor had done to further the mission of SEMCA and WCCAN. I am tasked with a multitude of different projects which give me hands-on experience to grasp the complex workings of what goes into managing a nonprofit. Because of the great foundation I was given, I have been able to expand our social media presence, learn the process of drafting contracts of employment for our youth department to help with the expansion of current programs, and been able to develop new pilot programs for our already busy department. All of these different projects and programs have been a great way to practice and cultivate new skill-sets, like taking on a leadership role, learning how to budget for new programing, and learning how to take risks on new incentives to help further our mission. I am excited to continue the hard work of planning and building projects for the next six months, which will help programs’ capacity to reach more people and close the gap of inequality in the community.
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These six months of serving at my SEMCA and WCCAN have given me insight on how different nonprofits can be from each other. The work being done at SEMCA is a long process in which physical and tangible outcomes may not initially display on a macro level, and also does not give instant gratification or reward. But these lessons continue to remind me the work I am doing is essential for the continued success of the programs and that I am laying down more ground work for the future.