Molly Godfrey, 2014

"My service so far with City Year Los Angeles has been transformational, impactful, and incredibly rewarding. I dedicate my year of service to gratitude, new beginnings, jumping into the unknown, and to the students of Los Angeles who have so much potential and who are going to change me more than they know."

Why did you join City Year?

I joined City Year because I wanted an opportunity to give back on a much larger scale. The opportunity to take a year off and devote myself to helping others and giving back I thought would be a nice change of pace from the busy life at Bentley and would allow me to evaluate my personal and professional goals while doing good and helping alleviate the educational dropout crisis our country is currently facing.

What do you hope to achieve with your service? Any personal goals?

With this year of service, I hope to develop more as a leader and person and leave my year of service with a better understanding of my purpose and self.

What are you looking forward to most in your upcoming year of service?

I am looking forward to all the different people I am going to meet and working with children, families, and communities and the experiences I will encounter. I can only imagine how much of a life changing experience this will be and am looking forward to the journey that awaits me.

Discuss your experience so far for the following:

Experience in your City Year School:

Service in my school has been amazing. I am in a 5th grade class in a K-12 school. My kids are very eager to learn and like school; however, they are very behind. Some are reading at a kindergarten level and cannot do basic math. It is hard to catch my “focus list” (students that need the most intervention) up to where they need to be but also keep them moving forward with the rest of the class. My teacher has been really supportive and is continually giving me resources and time to work with my focus list students. Running the afterschool program has been a fun experience as well because we get to give students very individualized attention and then play and have some fun with them. We will soon be starting “service learning” lessons with them where we will teach them about important figures in history that showed compassion and made efforts to better the world. Our school was built on the assassination site of Robert F. Kennedy so the school’s big focus is compassion, leadership, and community which are great foundations to build our City Year culture off of. It is also very focused on technology so we are teaching our kids how to code and program websites which is incredible. I am exhausted coming home every night, but I love going to school every day and love my kids so much. They’re changing me so much and helping me see so much perspective in my life. This is going to be an incredible year and I’m excited for what’s to come.

Exploration or travel experience in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is a huge city and there is so much to do, it can be very overwhelming at times because there are so many people and so much traffic everywhere you go. Everyone told me that public transportation in LA would be horrible but it has actually been great. We can get just about anywhere from a bus or the metro subway rail. On the weekends we usually go to the beach at least once or go to a USC football game. We live about 20 minutes from the beaches and down the street from the University of Southern California where there is lots to do. We have done a lot of hiking as well, even to the famous Hollywood sign. There are lots of concerts in the area so we try to go to a lot of those. I’ve been able to visit San Diego for a weekend trip where I went to a music festival and the San Diego zoo. I look forward to exploring more of LA and seeing everything the city has to offer.

Experience with other City Year Corps Members.

My experience with other CMs has been amazing. I live with 13 other CMs so I’ve been able to get close to a large group of people from the onset. Everyone is so diverse and from so many different places. In our house we have someone from Chicago, Arizona, Minnesota, Indiana, New York, New Jersey, San Francisco, LA, Hong Kong, and Seattle. The entire CYLA Corp is super diverse as well with people from even more diverse places. Someone on my team is from Alaska. I have really enjoyed the diversity because everyone has had so many different experiences in their lives and they are able to share it with us, be it their upbringing or college/working experience. We are such great support systems for each other because although we are so different we are so united in our cause and the work we do. Even within the first week we were able to get along and mesh so well because we all came to this program with one goal. I haven’t found any problems getting along with anyone and have made some really amazing friends.

Experience with Leadership Development Days.

I have really enjoyed Community Meetings and Leadership Development days because it has really given me a chance outside of work to reflect on my service week and myself. When I reflect with my team, I feel like I learn so much from them and it makes me think so much about myself and what I may have previously thought or felt. Leadership development days have been helpful because it gets me thinking about life after City Year and where I want to go after City Year or college graduation. It’s hard because I know I’m going back to school to finish my undergraduate degree and they offer so many options for people who don’t know what they want to do so sometimes it’s too much information for where I am in my life, e.g. grad school and job searching but I’m thankful to be exposed to the information which will be helpful down the road. It is great to come together as a Pueblo (group of school teams) to hear what each school is doing and what everyone’s experiences in schools has been because we all learn from each other and often bounce ideas off each other.

Experience/process in securing housing for the year.

I had a really easy housing process because one of the Corp members decided to organize a large house that could room 14 people. We have 6 doubles, 2 singles and one common room so 9 rooms in all in the house. It was easy because I just had to apply through the landlord and was accepted to live in the house. We all get along and it was nice to have 13 other friends going into the program. Sometimes it is difficult living with so many people but luckily we all have pretty different schedules since school started so we’re not always all around. I can’t speak much for the housing process because I didn’t really look into other housing options because this was the easiest and the house was in a great area close to downtown and many of the other towns our schools are in. I know a lot of people struggled to find housing since LA can be so expensive and ended up in bad parts of town because it was cheaper, but luckily I found a good option that has worked out well.