I had given AmeriCorps less than a thought since then-President Clinton signed the National and Community Service Trust Act into law 14 years ago.

It was a good thing, I figured, give kids something to do. Maybe it would really help a few. So the other day, I ran into Allison Riley.

She is 21, a sweet young woman with a ready laugh and high, trilling voice. She was celebrating, she told me, the near-completion of her one-year commitment with AmeriCorps.

We began chatting. "Wow," was all I kept saying. I have to share her story.

She grew up in comfortable circumstances in Canton, Ohio, she said, the youngest of three daughters of an optometrist father and physical therapist mother.

"It was a privileged life," she explained. "I did have to work for things, but I always had what I needed."

In 2004, she graduated high school, and enrolled at Ohio University.

"I thought that was what you were supposed to do when you got out of high school. But I had no idea what I wanted to be. I knew I wanted to work with people, the thing I think I was born to do. What that was exactly, I had no idea."

Then, too, there were her sisters, the oldest, a doctor of audiology, the middle one, a research consultant for NASA, the one she calls "the family brainiac."

"I felt the only role I had left was the partier," Allison Riley said. "It seemed like every other role had been taken."

She began boozing, she recalled, by age 14. She was "testing my boundaries, you know, seven beers and a few shots . . ."

Her parents, frustrated, made good on a threat they had made to her in eighth grade: boarding school. At Oak Hill Academy in Virginia, Allison Riley fell into depression. It was where, bored and feeling out of place, she first discovered drugs.

"It was the first time I ever put anything up my nose. I wanted to run away from my problems," she said. "I didn't feel whole."

She marvels now that she did at all well in school, that she was voted homecoming queen after only a month at the prestigious school.

After years of pleading, her parents allowed her to return to Canton to finish high school with the kids she had grown up with.

"And then I fell in love," Allison Riley said wistfully. He was a childhood sweetheart. While she went to Ohio U., he decided to go to Michigan.

"He was my life," she explained, "and when I broke up with him, I absolutely lost it."

She dropped out, and took a restaurant job.

"I was there a month. My supervisor was a cokehead. We'd go out after work, and, OK, we would party. I would binge, not for an hour, but sometimes for a whole day."

She remembers clearly that October day two years ago. She was watching a baseball playoff game, and was into her 24th hour of snorting what she later learned was bad cocaine.

"I really thought I was dying," Allison Riley recalled. "I called my mom to come get me. I spent three days in the hospital."

Her parents put her into drug counseling. She attended Narcotics Anonymous meetings three times a week. "My body was in complete withdrawal. I spent nearly all of last summer in bed at my parents' home, completely beside myself."

That July, she attended a wedding of her parents' neighbor's children. Both had spent a year in AmeriCorps. And the pastor at the ceremony was a director in the program. She invited Allison Riley to come to Denver.

"I was so scared, but I came. I knew, one way or the other, it was going to be a life-altering decision."

For the past year, she has lived in a house in Capitol Hill with other AmeriCorps workers, working mostly with the poor and the elderly, passing out food and toiletries, raising money to help them pay rent or simply walking the streets and talking with members of both groups.

"And I told everyone in the house my story the first day I got there," Allison Riley said. "I decided to just be me, that I couldn't lie. If I was going to do this, I couldn't try to be someone else."

Next week, her year-long tour over, she will leave the Capitol Hill home and move into an apartment. She will attend her first classes at Metro State on Aug. 20. She will major in social work.

"I learned so much about myself this past year," Allison Riley said. "For the first time, I began thinking beyond myself. I learned what I was called to do, that I have a passion for people and can do this work."

After a year of walking every day among Denver's poor, its addicts and mentally ill, she has, she said, no illusions.

"One of the first things you figure out is that you cannot pull everyone out of (poverty). For the others, if you relate to them as human beings, I've learned you can reach many of them and be a successful part of their lives. But you've got to try.

"If you don't, you won't affect anyone in this world."

I hugged her.

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2763

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