Meet Jackie Bishop, AmeriCorps VISTA Worker

October 4, 2011

I met Jackie Bishop while on assignment for Manchester Patch at the farmers market on the campus of Manchester Community College where she is one of the market managers. When Jackie told me who she worked for, Ronald Reagan’s quote about “a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth” came to mind. I had not heard any mention of VISTA – short for Volunteers in Service to America – since the days of LBJ’s “Great Society” programs of the 1960s and I also hadn’t heard much about AmeriCorps since Bill Clinton’s State of the Union Speech in the 1990s. I was surprised that the program still existed and I asked Jackie to talk about her work here in Manchester.