Service Year Alliance Celebrates the Retirement of Mary Ellen Isaacs of AmeriCorps Central Texas
Service Year Alliance is proud to celebrate the incredible Mary Ellen Isaacs, the brainchild of AmeriCorps Central Texas, the Service Year Alliance Central Texas Impact Community. For the last twenty years, Mary Ellen has been serving as the Executive Director of Literacy First, setting early elementary students up for success. With her retirement this month, we reached out to AmeriCorps programs in Austin to get a better sense of the impact she’s made and how she made this nationally-recognized model come to life.
In 2015, Mary Ellen reached out to other AmeriCorps grantees in Austin hoping that deeper collaboration would help them better support current members and expand their reach to more local talent. It all started with the idea that when AmeriCorps staff come together and explore what is possible, there will be better outcomes across corps members, staff, and the community. Mary Ellen was the catalyst and the sustained energy behind the collective work. She has continued to be instrumental in supporting the now ten programs, from seeking funding for the collaborative, leading strategic planning to support the work over time, and solving national service’s most significant barriers.