Written by Thomas Story, City Year Boston Project Leader serving on the Comcast Team. City Year Boston Alumni Spotlights featured on the last Friday of the month.

I quickly came to a conclusion when I sat down to write this blog post: 700 words is simply not enough to describe ’91-’92 alum Alison Coleman-Hardy’s City Year experience. First, she did not limit herself to 700 words. Second, her experience is so radically different from any City Year experience today. Alison’s time at City Year and her post-corps life has been anything but typical.

Alison never spent much of her life in one place, but she did manage to stay in Marblehead, Massachusetts, through high school. She showed promise as the top student in her class, but decided to bypass the typical route of leaving straight for college.

“My senior year of high school, I had decided—although I had applied to a bunch of colleges—that I wanted to take a year off. And nobody was doing that! In fact, it was so unusual, that there was an article written about me in my local paper.” It was called “Top Student Puts College on Hold.” As the co-chair of the volunteer organization at her high school and the founder of many clubs, Alison was looking for something different. And she found it.

“We read about City Year in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine,” she said. The year was 1991—before “Americorps” had even touched anyone’s lips and when Bill Clinton was still Governor of Arkansas. So she applied, along with her best friend from South Carolina. They both were accepted, and became two of 100 City Year Boston corps members at the time.

“I remember being thrilled that I got in because, from the article, the intention was to have a very diverse group of young people,” she said, clearly still excited by the idea. Among Alison’s teammates was a young man from Boston with unstable housing, two reformed gang members, a teenage mother, many bilingual teammates, a “sophisticated guy” from Cambridge, and another from rural western Massachusetts. College graduates, however, were few and far between. Most corps members were high school graduates or pursuing their GEDs, and anyone who had been to college had either dropped out to pursue other options or simply needed time off. While Alison admits her diverse team could be a challenge, it was also one of the most rewarding parts of her year.

“For me, [City Year] was about the team experience, the intentional diversity of the team experience. It was hard. We were trying to do good service and we were trying to just get along and figure out who we were—it was such a micro-chasm, it was crazy.”

Yet Alison and her teammates did transcend their differences in background, culture, and even language, and performed powerful service together. She served on the Reebok team and spent the first half of her year on physical service projects in Roxbury and the second half working for a neighborhood housing corporation in Chelsea, surveying boarded up properties in an effort to re-invest the community in them.

Having just graduated high school, Alison could only describe her corps year as “life-changing.” “I learned a ton about serving,” she said. “I learned a lot about leadership and teamwork, and we did so many trainings, and I met so many inspirational people like Charlie [Rose].”

After completing her City Year, Alison was so transformed by the service she did, that she decided to study social work. She earned her bachelor’s degree in human development at Wheelock College and then her master’s in social work at Salem State College. Alison continues to be a champion of City Year and never remains a stranger to the organization.

“As I have tracked City Year over the last 20 years,” she says (shyly adding, “and it’s been 20 years”) “so much of it is the same, and a lot of things are different.”

Though City Year is no longer focused on physical service and corps members do not share the same experiences Alison did (I left out many of the juicy details, but feel free to inquire), from my own experience, I would still only choose one way to describe City Year: life-changing.