The following is a transcription of The Art of Volunteering Episode 8: Courtney Amberg, New York Junior League.
Stormy Bell (00:00): Welcome today’s episode of The Art of Volunteering. I’m your host Stormy Bell. Let’s journey to New York City to learn about how when one woman joins a team of 2000 volunteers, impact is made in mighty and diverse ways. Thank you Courtney Amberg, for joining us today.
Courtney Amberg (00:18): Thank you for having me.
Stormy Bell (00:21): I’m so excited. Courtney has been volunteering with the New York Junior League since 2017. Her focus has always been on the community side, working with young children ensuring their love of theater. In addition to the New York Junior League, Courtney also enjoys volunteering with City Meals on Wheels, delivering meals to homebound New Yorkers. When she’s not volunteering, Courtney works in the fashion industry as a merchandising strategist at the Doneger Group in New York City. When I was researching the New York Junior League, I learned about this rich history of the organization. Starting in the Lower East Side, they were working with immigrants in 1901, so 120 years, and it continues today. They’re meeting the needs of the international newcomers both women and children. Courtney, how did you learn about this amazing organization?
Courtney Amberg (01:16): You know, what’s so interesting is it’s actually worldwide. It’s not just only in the US, it’s also international so it’s something that I’ve always known about where I grew up in Fairfield. They have their own Fairfield junior league, but when I moved to New York City I had a lot of free time and I wanted to get involved and my mom was like, oh, why don’t you do the junior league? It’s this nationally known organization that you can volunteer with. The junior league in New York is the first one and then it expanded, but it’s a widely known organization that gives back to the community. It was a great place for me to fill up that free time that I had.
Stormy Bell (01:59): That’s awesome. Can you share about the mission of the Junior League?
Courtney Amberg (02:04): Yeah. What I love about the mission is it’s all about giving back to the community. The Junior League is really focused on making sure wherever they have a junior league, that they are providing the community with the tools, educating, [and] anything that that community needs. They are there and they are in the trenches giving back. So while it is a woman’s organization, it’s not just about giving back to women, it’s not just about giving back to children. They do have programs where men are involved in that as well, but it’s mainly an organization made up of women who give back to the community.
Stormy Bell (02:44): Awesome. How does the mission of the Junior League align with your core values?
Courtney Amberg (02:57): So for me, and kind of going back to [when] I had this free time, I didn’t know what to do, I grew up always having a mother that volunteered and she was like, go volunteer, go use your free time, go get back to your community. For me the Junior League, seeing that they’re very much involved in giving back to the community, that’s something that is a core value to me, something that I wanted to do. I love that I can go work with children, be in a theater program with them, something that I’ve always loved and get that out through volunteering with them. I think what’s so wonderful too, is just there’s other community partners within the Junior League. I don’t have to just focus on theater. I can go work at a soup kitchen. I can go volunteer through the New York Junior League whether it’s with the homeless and helping them get jobs, or there’s even more intense programs where you’re on call for domestic violence, or you’re helping in the hospital with anyone that has ever had a disease. There’s just so many ways to help. It’s just so wonderful that if you have that free time and you want to give back that there is a way that you can give back in so many ways through the New York Junior League.
Stormy Bell (04:20): I was reading again like approximately 80 community partners.
Courtney Amberg (04:24): Yeah. We have a lot.
Stormy Bell (04:26): Like that’s phenomenal! You go into so many different areas. I was just blown away by that.
Courtney Amberg (04:32): Yeah it’s amazing.
Stormy Bell (04:35): Alright. Describe your focus area. You are the chair of the Beacon 2 Broadway committee. Describe that to us.
Courtney Amberg (04:45): I am chair of Beacon 2 Broadway and Beacon 2 Broadway is a community organization within the New York Junior League and what we do is we volunteer at an elementary school on the Upper East Side, and we have a theater program for these kids. We do everything from putting on a show. We teach them all about Broadway. We teach them about theater. Ultimately at the end of the year, we put on that show. I take them to Broadway shows throughout the year. We do field trips. We are with them through the entire school year and the only time we ever have a break is when there’s a school closing, like a spring break, all of that. Otherwise we’re with them every Wednesday from 06:30 until 08:00 PM at night, practicing to put on a show.
Courtney Amberg (05:36): We actually just had our show two weeks ago. We did a variety show called I Love New York and it was absolutely incredible. We had two big dance numbers. We had two acting scenes, we had kids singing. Typically in the past we’ve done Aladdin, we’ve done The Lion King and whatnot but this year we decided to do a variety show just because with the pandemic half the time was on zoom half the time was in person. It’s all theater based and it’s incredible and it’s how I get my love of theater out.
Stormy Bell (06:12): That’s awesome. Now I read correctly, you pull in from nine elementary and middle schools. Is that right? How many schools do you pull in from?
Courtney Amberg (06:22): We have nine students in total, but they come from various middle and elementary schools because they’re fourth through seventh grade. It is various schools. It’s not just a school that we have the program at, but they somehow all know each other. Not just because [of] our program, but because of other programs they’ve done, which is really cool.
Stormy Bell (06:47): Oh, that’s awesome. I like that. You described a little bit about what you do, but can you describe what, what does one afternoon look like? You open the doors at six o’clock?
Courtney Amberg (07:01): Yeah.
Stormy Bell (07:02): Just take us through a normal meeting.
Courtney Amberg (07:05): The kids come in and we feed them dinner. Feeding the kids is very important. We provide them dinner every single week. We went through a lot of food insecurity during COVID and it’s important for us to continue to provide them a meal. After they finish eating, we start and we do a warmup from stretching to vocal exercises. Then we dive right into the programming. We’re performing a show so we break up the group. We have half the kids if you’re working on this scene for Marvel, you go to practice the Marvel scene. If you’re singing the Schuyler sister song, you come practice the Schuyler sister song. Then we all get back together for a water break and then we break the kids up again. Some kids go practice the subway scene, which is a script that they were working on.
Courtney Amberg (07:58): Some kids go practice a magic scene and then again, we come back together. We have this very scheduled because we finish with our dance number and we practiced the dance. Which I will say the dance numbers when we were in our rehearsals, those were probably the biggest things that we kept having to rehearse. I give the kids a lot of prop for remembering those dances. Come back together, do those dances. Now one thing which kind of fell off, but what we would try to do is have five minutes before we ended completely. So at 7: 55, we get in a big circle and do accentuate the positive and talk about a positive from the day. That was my favorite part. It was always great because the kids would always compliment one another. Unfortunately as we got closer to the show, we didn’t have time to do that anymore.
Stormy Bell (08:58): I do understand that. What’s your most favorite part of working with the students?
Courtney Amberg (09:06): I just, I love being around the kids. They all have this fun personality and you know, they’re young. They’re not adults yet. They don’t have, they have opinions, but they don’t have these worldly opinions, they’re kids. They say stuff and you just start laughing and they’re just so sweet and so kind. Tthe reason I go every week is to be around those children. They are the sweetest kids. Whether it’s we give them dinner or we are so excited and tell them, we’re so proud of them, their faces, they light up. They’re so excited and they’re so happy to see us every time. That is what brings me back every week.
Stormy Bell (09:55): I like that. Kind of going back to the COVID.
Courtney Amberg (10:00): Yeah.
Stormy Bell (10:02): You mentioned that the first two years you [were] on Zoom. Completely on Zoom. How did you keep everyone engaged?
Courtney Amberg (10:09): That was really hard. Not just even the kids, but the volunteers too. It was a struggle. So at that point I had a team and it was myself and another woman and we really struggled. How do we keep our volunteers engaged and how do we keep the kids engaged? We would do a lot of breakout rooms and tell the volunteers, ‘okay, what are you interested in theater wise?’ Whether it was singing, acting, dancing, we would do these breakout rooms where that volunteer would be in charge of the lesson for that week and we would give them a few kids and they would do something with the kids. We ended up having volunteers choreograph entire dances on Zoom, which I give them a lot of props for figuring that out.
Courtney Amberg (11:02): I was part of it, but I was also kind of standing in the back because I was coordinating all this stuff. We were able to keep the kids engaged because through the volunteers being really engaged in it, we found a lot of content to keep the kids involved and happy. We also were able to do kind of like a Zoom field trip. We did two and we hired this woman that’s a former actress from Broadway and she did this whole wonderful performance. That was like an exciting thing that the kids always had to look forward to. We had the cast of Hamilton come on one time and sing a bunch of songs. So we always made sure we had these fun activities for them to look forward to when we weren’t doing our programming but with the programming, we tried to keep it very fun, very light to keep them very involved in it. It’s so easy for a kid to just be like, stop video, mute myself and not come back on. We had a great group of students. We were very lucky.
Stormy Bell (12:07): That’s awesome. You also mentioned that you served them a meal. How did you handle that during COVID? Since food insecurity was such a concern during that time.
Courtney Amberg (12:16): Yeah, so our community partner had brought it up to us that food insecurity was becoming a big issue and my co-chair and I went to the Junior League and said like, look, this is a huge problem within our community and we need to do our part. We had a large budget and they were like, whatever you need to do to feed those families, go ahead, use your budget, spend it how you wanna spend it. We started sending the kids a seamless meal every week that we had our lesson planning. We would email the parents and say, what does your child want? We didn’t want them to go over a certain amount of dollars, but basically they had free range to get whatever they want. The families were so thankful for that because even if they weren’t struggling with food insecurity, the parents didn’t have to make them dinner that night and it was very helpful.
Stormy Bell (13:13): That’s awesome. You saw the direct impact of that support in those lives. Let’s see. Now you mentioned this person before, but tell me about the woman who modeled the act of serving to you.
Courtney Amberg (13:32): Yeah, my mom she’s a huge volunteer herself. She volunteers in our hometown Fairfield with Bridgeport Hospital, which is now part of Yale New Haven, and she just does incredible things for them. Growing up I’ve always watched her, whether it’s putting on events or throwing parties to raise money. One thing I will say, she’d always taught me: It’s not all about the party. It’s not all about attending it and spending the money. What a lot of organizations need is people actually in the trenches volunteering. So every year she would put together this wheelchair race and it was incredible. She could barely get volunteers to do it and she would be doing a lot of it on her own. She had some great donors for it, but she would give these kids who are confined to wheelchairs, a relay race, and then trophies and feed them lunch. It was like one big party. I would go every year with her and I’d help her out. Just seeing her doing that, she has the biggest heart ever. It made me be like, well I have free time. I need to volunteer. My mom always says to me, ‘I was never volunteering at your age. It wasn’t until I was older.’ She’s like, ‘so I am so happy to see what you’re doing and that I have influenced that.’
Stormy Bell (14:55): That’s awesome. Give a shout out to your mom. What’s her name?
Courtney Amberg (14:58): Her name is Shaun. She’s incredible.
Stormy Bell (15:01): Well, thank you Shaun, for modeling this. Now I would like you to share some stories from your volunteer journey. Just a favorite story.
Courtney Amberg (15:13): I think my favorite stories [was] when I was first volunteering with the New York Junior League and a parent came up to us and said, ‘thank you so much for everything you do. You keep my kids off the streets. So they’re not doing drugs.’ That has always made the biggest impact on me. That’s why I volunteer in the community. That’s why I choose to volunteer with kids because knowing that I can do the littlest part to keep these kids off, you know, not getting into bad things and keeping them engaged and in a healthy and happy lifestyle means the world. It was hearing that. I never even thought I was making that type of impact.
Stormy Bell (15:58): You know, it’s the simple acts of kindness that make the biggest impact. Sometimes we never know how far reaching that is. Then every once in a while, like this parent mentioning to you, you catch a glimpse yeah. Of the why, the big why, that we do this.
Courtney Amberg (16:13): Exactly a hundred percent.
Stormy Bell (16:17): Now I have a fun question for you. Tell me about a blooper, something that didn’t go right. Then tell me what you learned from it.
Courtney Amberg (16:29): I mean, a lot of stuff didn’t go right this year. Not to be a Debbie Downer but volunteer retention has been very hard for me where I had a lot of volunteers not showing up and half the time it was just me and maybe one other volunteer running the program with the kids. So that was definitely something that I was not prepared for. So that’s a little Debbie Downer but a fun thing that I was not prepared for was just, I had a boy in the program and he was the only boy. There were no other [boys] and it was really hard to get him to do stuff. Honestly I was kind of gonna give him a pass and be like, you don’t have to be in this show. Whatever you wanna do, you don’t have to dance. I was so proud of him. He actually, in our show, did all the dance numbers and danced. He used to be, you know, never involved in it. He would always be sitting, watching instead, like wanted nothing to do with it. I was always trying to hype him up, keep him happy and I was so impressed at the show he was in it. Did it amazing, looked incredible, and danced. I was like, wow, you actually listened.
Stormy Bell (17:48): Well, that’s awesome. Okay. We’re at the time of the episode where I let you have the floor. I want you to love on the New York Junior League and just tell me why people should check out their own local chapter. Just love on them.
Courtney Amberg (18:06): The junior league in general does amazing things for their community. I experience it personally within the New York Junior League where I get back to my community in ways that I never realize I actually could. I also have gotten involved with City Meals on Wheels, and that was through the New York Junior League. The New York Junior League, not only do they have their own programs, but they get very involved with other organizations like City Meals on Wheels. I started volunteering at a soup kitchen because of the New York Junior League. They’re very big supporters of just the community in general. If there’s another organization in the community that’s doing great things, they wanna support them and they want to bring volunteers into it. Just in general, what they do for their community is absolutely incredible. Going back to the mission statement, making sure that they make the community a better place and they’re there to help and support.
Stormy Bell (19:07): Amazing, amazing work. Courtney, thank you for being our guest today. Our listeners have totally enjoyed hearing about all the great things that you’re doing, but before you go, there’s something happening in the next week or so. An award that I heard of.
Courtney Amberg (19:26): So I am being honored with the New York Junior League Women to Watch award. What’s so exciting about that is actually it’s a big deal. You do have to be nominated for it. You get this award app if you’re within five years of service within the New York Junior League. So I’ll be getting it at the end of June. There’s only three actual awards that you can get within the New York Junior League. Provisional on the Move. So provisionals are one you’re kind of in your training program for the New York Junior League. Women to Watch when it’s five years or less of service and then Outstanding Volunteer once you’ve hit 10 years or more of service. Yeah, so I’m getting Women to Watch this year. Last year I actually won Committee of the Year, which is a big deal. It feels so great to be honored and acknowledged by the Junior League for what I’m doing for them. To be honest, I love what I volunteer doing with them and I don’t really need to be honored because I love what I do, but it’s just a great feeling.
Stormy Bell (20:35): Well, congratulations on that award!
Courtney Amberg (20:38): Thank you so much.
Stormy Bell (20:40): Well with that, thank you for joining us for The Art of Volunteering and look forward to seeing you next time. Have a great day.
Show Notes & Links
The New York Junior League – www.nyjl.org
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