CapFed Best News: AmeriCorps Kansas members serve 50,000 hours and counting during coronavirus pandemic

Though Topeka native Kelly Leatherman is no stranger to the capital city, she has viewed the area through a special lens in recent months.

Leatherman was one of 177 AmeriCorps Kansas members who contributed more than 50,000 hours of service through the state’s program so far during the coronavirus pandemic.

“In the communities where our AmeriCorps programs are based, they were really helping to ensure that the community had their basic needs met,” said Jessica Noble, executive director of the Kansas Volunteer Commission.

Leatherman began her service last year during a part-time term with AmeriCorps Kansas that lasted from January to July of 2019. But she determined a part-time term wasn’t enough.

“I extended that to do a full term from July of 2019 to July of 2020,” she said — not expecting at the time that she would be fulfilling her AmeriCorps Kansas membership during a global pandemic.

Leatherman worked at Harvesters Community Food Network's Topeka location, 215 S.E. Quincy St., where she focused on addressing food insecurity and delivering sustainably sourced food to community members.

“It just really spoke to me,” Leatherman said. “That was definitely what I was looking forward to during my year of service, being able to understand food insecurity in my community through the lens of the work that Harvesters does.”

She served with Harvesters’ community engagement department to coordinate volunteer opportunities and community food drives, and she also spent some time distributing food and assembling food commodity boxes.

Leatherman said Harvesters, like many nonprofits, had to get “flexible and resilient” when it came to delivering services during the pandemic.

And AmeriCorps members had to adjust, too.

“The mission of just hands-on-the-ground, dedicated, yearlong volunteer work speaks to (AmeriCorps members),” Leatherman said. “People’s first assumptions aren’t usually, ‘Well, I’ll do that through the computer.’ ”

Leatherman said some of her efforts to support Harvesters and its food bank went online. But she felt fortunate to still have some direct contact with community members through in-person projects that couldn’t be adapted.

Still, she said, “everything had to be done with extra safety precautions.”

One such in-person project Leatherman was still able to complete was a mural painting in East Topeka. The mural project was a collaboration between AmeriCorps Kansas and the Gil Carter Initiative, a Topeka-based nonprofit located at 2600 S.E. 23rd St., near Highland Park High School.

During her full-time term, Leatherman was nominated for AmeriCorps Kansas’ LeaderCorps program, which allows selected individuals to complete a special project with support from the Kansas Volunteer Commission.

“I decided, with the other Harvesters AmeriCorps members, that we should do an AmeriCorps mural,” Leatherman said. “I think it’s a really great, collaborative project with multiple people and multiple perspectives and talents.”

She ended up applying for a grant from the volunteer commission to purchase materials for the project, but she wanted the mural to reflect and be driven by Topekans.

“In order to sort of respect the local community and also understand what the community wants from this project — because I would never want to assume I know what’s best for a Topeka neighborhood or a Topeka space — I decided to partner up with (the Gil Carter Initiative),” Leatherman said.

The leader of that nonprofit, Erma Forbes, had envisioned multiple murals decorating the exterior walls of the building her organization occupies.

“I helped her get started by doing the first wall with her,” Leatherman said. “She provided the wall. I provided paint. And we worked together to come up with a design.”

The design features both the AmeriCorps and Gil Carter Initiative logos, an image of the Kansas Statehouse with sunflowers at its base and the phrase “Stronger Together.” Leatherman said they also employed the talents of local artist George Mayfield to bring the mural to life.

“AmeriCorps’ mission is to get things done for the community and meet the community where it’s at,” Leatherman said. “That was my biggest hope for (this project) — just to make sure that we contribute to the community, certainly, but at the same time, do it in a way the community wants.”

Noble, with the volunteer commission, said the AmeriCorps Kansas partnership with Harvesters was one of six AmeriCorps programs that have been operational in Kansas since March.

She said members engaged the communities in which they were based in a number of ways, including through food distribution, educational programs and community response, such as sewing face masks or answering calls to the United Way’s 2-1-1 resource line.

“And because many of our programs are youth-based,” Noble said, “they were making sure that life looked as normal as possible for our young people and that they were able to still maintain those close personal relationships and connections with caring adults, even through a virtual space.”

According to Leatherman, the work she and others have done through AmeriCorps Kansas is crucial. Though she recognizes no one person can tackle the systemic issues, such as food insecurity, that she and her colleagues seek to address, Leatherman said she feels grateful to have been on the front lines doing her part to work toward a brighter future.

“Being able to sustain my volunteerism through COVID definitely was a privilege,” she said. “I feel extremely lucky to have gone through that, not only with Harvesters ... but also to create community with Erma and create community during a time when we all feel sort of alone.”