For the second consecutive year, Southern Arkansas University will receive a visit from a team of AmeriCorps NCCC (National Civilian Community Corps) workers to the campus. The team’s visit is made possible by an SAU grant.
The eight-member team will arrive on the SAU campus on April 19, and their first official day will begin on Monday, April 21. The students will stay for 12 weeks, leaving on July 13. The team will be comprised of students from around the country.
“We’re excited to have a group of students from AmeriCorps visiting our campus again this year,” said Dr. Donna Allen, vice president of student affairs at SAU. “This is a great opportunity for our campus and for our SAU+AmeriCorps VISTA students. I want to thank Kathy Gean for writing the grant and making this visit possible.”
On this visit, the AmeriCorps team will focus on SAU’s plan to improve and develop the SAU Farmstead project: sanding, priming, and painting the Farm Road fence; repairing the sand volleyball courts; repairing the farmstead road structure; repairing the cattle guards; and clearing and creating farmstead nature walk trails.
Kathy Gean, the director of the SAU+AmeriCorps VISTA program on campus, said the student group is very beneficial to SAU and the community.
“You can really see their footprint after they leave,” said Gean, who wrote the grant for the second consecutive year. “They are an impressive group of young people.”
Gean said SAU tries to make the students feel welcome and part of both the SAU and Magnolia community. “Last year, we tried to include them in training programs with our VISTA students. We tried to do a lot of extras to make them feel welcome and happy.”
In the summer of 2024, SAU hosted a 10-member team that totaled 2,086.98 hours spent working on infrastructure improvement and 524.02 hours on urban and rural development. During that visit, the AmeriCorps students repaired 1,269 feet of fencing, painted 13,478 square feet of campus rooms and hallways, and harvested 546 pounds of food from the Community Garden to help feed students through the Mulerider Market.
AmeriCorps NCCC is a federal service program that engages young adults in intensive, team-based national service to support communities across the country. Teams travel to project sites, providing hands-on assistance in areas such as disaster response, environmental conservation, and infrastructure improvement while developing leadership and teamwork skills.
