“I’d spent six months at Hasbro Toys and six months at a packaging corporation. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot and I’m really grateful for those experiences, but it left me a little bit jaded about a career path in corporate America. I wanted to find something more with my life.” 

A semester after returning from co-op, Dan Grinthal craved change. So the Rochester Institute of Technology industrial design major took a year off from classes to join AmeriCorps NCCC. And when disaster hit the state of Louisiana in August 2016, Grinthal and his team were one of the first groups to respond in Baton Rouge. 

“Over the next week or so close to 800 AmeriCorps members showed up. It was a wild time,” Grinthal said. “We were mostly doing warehouse work so we set up and ran a warehouse that distributed supplies that were coming in from all over the world. We also did some mucking and gutting, so it was very stressful but it was a pretty good time too.” 

The warehouse that the team managed was part of an emptied out production complex where movies were shot. Inside, the team organized everything from water bottles to food and building materials. After several months of disaster relief from flooding in Louisiana and Mississippi, Grinthal went on to support communities impacted by a tornado in Albany, Georgia.

“My first eight months or so were almost all disaster relief and there were some pretty intense situations. We lived with very different people in our team and oftentimes roomed with up to 200 people at a time,” he added. “We met a lot of different people in pressurized situations and traveled to places that I really wouldn’t have gone otherwise.” 

As a reward for several months of hard-labor, Grinthal explored another opportunity for his final project. 

“I joined a special team to go into the Red River Gorge in Kentucky. We did trailwork and we hiked into the backcountry wilderness. Sometimes we did 12 miles a day, building trails and cleaning campsites,” he added. “It gave me the opportunity to look back in a very quiet atmosphere on the previous eight months and think about all of the people that I’ve met and perspectives that I’ve gained, and how much we all had changed and grown stronger. I wound up giving a speech at the award ceremony as a result of that reflection time.”

When the service year was complete, Grinthal returned to RIT to finish out his undergraduate program. He said the transition back to courses was difficult considering more natural disasters had hit. 

“I had seen the world, and I had lost a lot of interest in my area of study,” Grinthal recalled. It was hard to focus on school, especially when another disaster had just taken place [Hurricanes Irma, Maria and Harvey]. All of my friends were kind of quitting whatever they were doing to get back out there and do what we knew now: disaster relief.”

Throughout the service year, the Andover, New Jersey native kept a blog to share his adventures with friends and family back home. But what started as a hobby quickly evolved into a passion for a new career. 

“I had realized that writing was a gift that I’d been given and it was a calling so I figured I’d better give this my best shot. I moved back to Rochester and spent five months working on the first draft of the book,” the new author said.

His book, “Where the Stones Touch the Sky,” tells the story of two young adults who set out on an adventure to learn more about America and themselves. The story, now available on Amazon, was inspired by Grinthal’s travels. 

Before finishing the book, Grinthal signed up for another service opportunity— this time with Flower City AmeriCorps. As a volunteer, he supported Rochester Refugee Resettlement, a non-profit manufacturer that employs local refugee women. 

“I was involved in marketing, business planning, graphic design, job training,” he said. “I got to work with some of the refugee women who taught me a lot about life. I also managed 50 properties for their parent organization. They’re mostly a housing property so I did landscaping for them as well. It was a really great blend of learning business skills.” 

Grinthal said this new opportunity also introduced him to a new side of the Flower City.  

“Most of my college career, I didn’t go out and explore Rochester. I only went into the city when I got a job with the Center for Leadership & Civic Engagement my senior year because I led a few service trips,” he said. “But Rochester’s really a great city. I was glad that I did the service year because I understand cities a lot better.”

And like the characters in his story, he too learned something new about himself. 

“One of the biggest lessons that came out of my final service year was the idea that if you really want to help somebody, you should start a business,” Grinthal said. “My ultimate goal is I want to be a writer in the winter time and a landscaper/hardscaper in the warm months.”