At Vermont River Conservancy, we are a small team with a big scope — six full-time employees protecting, restoring, and connecting rivers for people and wildlife across the entire state of Vermont. On a staff that small, with a mission that big, we can’t emphasize enough how much it has meant to us to bring an AmeriCorps member onto our team for the last two years. Isla and her predecessor Addie have greatly expanded our ability to serve Vermont communities – and have been sources of brightness, insight, and motivation to all of us. Now, we are deeply saddened to share that we have lost Isla as a team member due to the sudden, early termination of AmeriCorps contracts across Vermont and nationwide.
VHCB AmeriCorps member Isla Lyons surveys a beaver wetland after helping to install a beaver-inspired flow device that will restore natural floodplain wetland conditions in a neighboring town.
AmeriCorps is the federal agency for national service and volunteerism. The agency issues grants in each state to create positions for over 200,000 Americans per year to serve with local organizations – including Vermont River Conservancy. These positions cover six key impact areas – economic opportunity, education, environmental stewardship, disaster response, healthy futures, and veterans and military families – improving lives and communities through their service.
Here’s what an AmeriCorps member in action has looked like at VRC:
Isla has led field trips, tabled at farmers markets, and organized fun hands-on workshops to connect kids
With AmeriCorps member Isla on our team, we were able to bring Vermont students to their local rivers to learn and play.
and grown-ups with Vermont’s rivers. With her knowledge of streams and the critters that live in them, she once inspired students so much that they serenaded her with the Vermont state song.
Isla used her ArcGIS skills to map environmental and community data, helping us understand where in Vermont our flood resilience work can have an outsized impact on communities. She’s produced countless blogs, social media posts, newsletters, and event sign-up pages, helping us spread the word about the importance of rivers and floodplains for a healthy and resilient future.
Unstoppable with a shovel or a mallet, Isla has been a vital part of our stewardship efforts in southern Vermont, planting trees, adding boundary stakes to protect river buffers from the wayward mower, and rallying volunteers for river clean-ups and planting days. She has also conducted site monitoring visits, allowing us to protect more acres knowing that we can follow through on our commitment to monitor and steward each site year after year.
Isla, our VHCB AmeriCorps member, pounds stakes in the ground to protect a new riparian planting area – just one of many stewardship activities she has carried out in her service that was recently cut short.
The very day that Isla’s service was terminated, our whole team felt the burn. We found ourselves having to choose between projects: would Alaya dive into preparations for our upcoming annual financial audit, or finish the e-newsletter that Isla was producing? Would Hayley finish a grant application to fund flood resilience work in Brattleboro, or take over Isla’s activity station at the Herrick’s Cove Wildlife Festival in Bellows Falls? Would Amanda lead a long-awaited volunteer tree planting day up north as planned, or drive south to take care of the site Isla was preparing to plant?
It’s not just that we’re losing Isla and the amazing work that she does to connect people with rivers and to protect and restore riverlands. Organizations across Vermont are losing about 200 hard-working, skilled team members. This translates to community lands going unstewarded, trails going unmaintained, meals going undelivered, children missing out on field trips and hands-on learning, and volunteers being turned away because there is no one to organize their efforts.
Isla and her cohort are losing a lot, too. They’ve been working hard for our communities while receiving only a minimal living allowance and food stamps. At the successful completion of their service, they’ve been counting on an education award that can be used to help pay off student loans or to support their continuing education in the future. But now that their service has been terminated, Isla and her cohort – eight months into their eleven-month contracts – are watching their compensation dry up, and may not receive any of the education awards they were promised. Surely they deserve better.
As part of her AmeriCorps service at VRC, Isla brought river-themed arts and crafts activities to farmers markets and festivals to connect families with their rivers and each other.
At Vermont River Conservancy, we stand in gratitude for, and solidarity with, AmeriCorps members across the state and across the nation whose service has come to a sudden close. Isla and her predecessor Addie have shown us how remarkable these people are and how much better organizations can serve their communities with AmeriCorps members on their teams.
To Isla and her cohort of AmeriCorps members: you are talented, big-hearted people who gave of yourselves and went out on a financial limb to make a meaningful impact on your communities.