Sitka Schools AmeriCorps

AmeriCorps engages more than 80,000 Americans in intensive service each year at 21,600 unique sites including nonprofits, schools, public agencies, and community and faith-based groups across the country. Since the program’s founding in 1994, more than 1 million AmeriCorps members have contributed more than 1.4 billion hours in service across America while tackling pressing problems and mobilizing more than 2.3 million volunteers for the organizations they serve. Read More

• About Us
  Sitka AmeriCorps Program (SAP) supports 20-23 AmeriCorps members serving at 18 partner host-sites who will are responsible for closing gaps of service in our rural, transient, and isolated community of Sitka, Alaska where qualified volunteers are scarce.
• Our Impact
  SAP members will provide academic coaching at all grade levels throughout the Sitka School District (SSD), life skills coaching to at-risk teenagers with Youth Advocate Services (YAS), protection and promotion of traditional Alaska Native subsistence lifestyle and resources through the Sitka Tribe of Alaska (STA), arts enrichment and healthy futures opportunities through service with the Greater Sitka Arts Council (GSAC), adult academic coaching at the University of Alaska Southeast (UAS), volunteer recruitment and respite/end-of-life training with Brave Heart Volunteers (BHV), recovery and intervention programming with Sitka Counseling and Prevention Services (SCAPS), support and empowerment for vulnerable women and children with Sitkans Against Family Violence(SAFV), healthy, family- friendly wellness program design with Hames Wellness Center, strengthen SSD education on Alaska Native history and ethnography with the Friends of Sheldon Jackson Museum (FOSJM), and salmon hatchery/marine science outreach with the Sitka Sound Science Center (SSSC) and environmental stewardship with the Sitka Conservation Society (SCS). SAP member service at Mount Edgecumbe High School (MEHS) deserves special mention; as a state funded boarding school, MEHS serves Alaska Native students from throughout Alaska, some from very remote and tiny traditional villages. SAP members at MEHS provide mentorship and academic coaching and support for this special population. In addition to this multi-focused approach, SAP members attend disaster training offered by Serve Alaska (SA). The course trains SAP members to liaise between government agencies and local volunteer groups and to act as a local reception center in the event of a disaster.
  Over the course of one year, SAP members will provide the catalyst for leveraging an additional 400 community volunteers who, because of the member’s service, will engage in non-profit volunteering and build capacity for host-site partners.