Disaster relief services gathered at the Missouri Capitol on Thursday morning to celebrate the 20th birthday of AmeriCorps and commemorate 9/11.
"AmeriCorps is often referred to as the domestic Peace Corps," said Sarah Ehrhard-Reid program officer with the Missouri community service commission, the organization which sponsored the event. "We are the funding agency for 20 programs in this state that provide resources to their communities through AmeriCorps members, which are people that basically give a year of their life to serve to their communities, to make them a better, safer, healthier place to live."
Twenty years ago today, President Bill Clinton officiated at the ceremony, which created AmeriCorps.
At Thursday's event, members of the Red Cross, Salvation Army, the Convoy of Hope and many more joined government agencies like the Department of Mental Health and the State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA) for Missouri to educate people about how they help the community when it's in a pinch.
Before "Happy Birthday" was sang and AmeriCorps broke out the cake, the Southern Baptist Convention Disaster Relief (SBCDR) of Missouri was serving free plates of chicken and cheesy potatoes.
"We are mass care, which means we feed the public when there is a disaster. Today, there was not a disaster, but we were here providing a service for AmeriCorps," said JoAnn Hohs with SBCDR. "We work in conjunction with the Salvation Army and the Red Cross usually. So we prepare the food, and they take it out and serve the people."
The ceremony also had speakers who worked with disaster relief on 9/11, and an alumni of AmeriCorps who addressed some of the new AmeriCorps members.
"I served as an AmeriCorps member for two years," said Jerron Johnson, field program officer and speaker. "This is just an opportunity to kind of motivate them (new members) and speak from my experience ... and just to convince them that service, although it is great and it is idealistic, it is not always easy. But it is always worth it."
Also SEMA was showcasing two of their programs to help disaster areas get "robust" responses from properly vetted health care workers.
"Show Me Response is Missouri's emergency system for advance registration of volunteer health professionals," said Anne Kyle, with SEMA, about one of the programs. She was also providing information about the Medical Reserve Corps, which is composed of health care workers that volunteer to meet public health needs for their communities during disastrous times.
"These systems were called forth in response to both 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina," Kyle said. "Literally thousands of health professionals self-deployed and showed up on scene totally unrequested to help. There was no way to vet their credentials, and there was no way to know if this person really is licensed ... so these systems were developed."