Meet Our Marketing VISTA! - Aaron Halls
Aaron is our AmeriCorps Marketing VISTA! Through his service year with us he’s been able to work on a variety of marketing materials, including social media, that help showcase the Semester in the City experience!
Read about his service year below! If you’re a professional hoping to develop their marketing skills and create marketing materials that help support college students we’re looking for a Marketing VISTA for the 2021-2022 service year; you can find out more and apply via our careers page here!
Serving as a Campus Compact AmeriCorps Marketing Member has been an incredible experience this past year! Before my time with College for Social Innovation I had a previous AmeriCorps VISTA year under my belt serving at Greater Portland Health, a medical-based non-profit in Portland, Maine, as a Marketing Communications Assistant.
Through that experience I developed a love for marketing and communications, particularly in the non-profit sphere; it felt great to use skills such as developing social media to graphics and flyers in ways that could benefit my community. When I had the opportunity to continue that experience with the College for Social Innovation the decision was effortless.
One of the great elements of being an AmeriCorps member is you get to help build capacity at the organization you serve at; this means you get to work on and develop projects where the end products of your hard efforts will continue to develop with future AmeriCorps members or staff members. With this it’s been great to work on internal marketing projects that will make future efforts for CFSI and the SITC program easier; this includes assisting low-income students as well as students from underrepresented backgrounds.
I’ve also been so appreciative to be able to develop my Marketing skills with Molly, CFSI’s incredible Manager of Marketing and Communications, my fellow AmeriCorps members, and the inspiring full CFSI staff. As the AmeriCorps Marketing Member it’s also been a fun experience to be given creative marketing projects to help showcase Semester in the City perspectives of Student Fellows. Working with Tom, our amazing CFSI ambassador, we were able to put together a CFSI talk show on Instagram Live; this has helped me better understand the multifaceted ways you can utilize social media to tell stories.
Another great element of the AmeriCorps experience is the various elements of support you have throughout your year! I started my AmeriCorps year in August, and moved from my home state of Maine to Boston. Knowing I was going to work in a virtual environment and be living in a place I was unfamiliar certainly was nerve wracking, but the CFSI staff has been so supportive each and every step of the way and made me feel so welcome. In addition, you also have regular meetings with other AmeriCorps members making for an additional community you can check in with!
All in all, if you’re someone who wants to help make a difference in the lives of students and wants to develop your marketing and communications skills, you should consider applying for our 2021-2022 Marketing VISTA position!
You can learn more about this job opportunity, and our wide array of other job positions here: https://collegeforsocialinnovation.org/careers