Reading to Little Kids!

I hope I'm posting this in the right place, I'm new to this blogging thing. I'm absolutely loving my experience as a VISTA with the United Way of King County. They are constantly going out of their way to make sure that I learn everything there is to know about non-profit work, regardless of whether it is directly related to my job.

I work as the volunteer recruiter for the volunteer reader program, but really I do anything and everything they need. I learned so much in the first few weeks alone that I thought my head was going to explode. I know I'm a nerd, but one of my favorite things that I've learned so far is how to do a mail merge through Microsoft Word. Talk about reaching a lot of volunteers all at once! That's what I spend a good chunk of my time doing, communicating with volunteers. Mostly through email, but I do get the pleasure to talk with them on the phone or meet with them face to face from time to time.

We have about 100 volunteers right now, and it's my responsibility to recruit more. The best ways to do this are over the internet. The United Way's volunteer solutions program is super effective, as is craigslist. I've also been playing with facebook and twitter, which are good for keeping up with volunteers that I'm already working with, but not so good for recruitment. My biggest challenge is how to recruit older people who might not use this sort of media. I've tried to partner with senior centers, but to no avail.

My favorite activity related to my job so far has been our mass volunteer orientation and training sessions. I also like to visit our reading sites. Meeting the people that keep the program going really gets me excited about what I'm doing. I'll also be starting to read to little kids myself in a month or so, and I'm super excited about that as well. I really want to know what the experience I'm pushing so hard is like, and I want to build better relationships with our volunteers and sites.