New Frontiers

When I first started working with the volunteer reader program, preschoolers were sort of like zoo animals to me, cute from a distance but terrifying up close. I saw my job as finding enthusiastic trainers to tame them, nothing more. As far as I was concerned, if there were people out there crazy enough to willingly enter the lair, I was more than happy to cheer them on from a safe distance. I had worked with older children before and completely respected the mission of the program, I was just fairly certain that my work with children would remain entirely behind the scenes at least until they begam to develp some semblance of human-like awareness.

To my great chagrin however, a day came when two of my greatest fears came head to head. It was quickly becoming evident that as someone who saw a young child as a distant relative to a leprechaun or a lawn gnome, I had no business telling people how to read to children. I have always been a fanatical perfectionist and taken pride in giving 100% to my work, and now I had to decide what I was more terrified of, a classroom ful of 3-5 year olds, or proclaiming to all of King County that I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. So, as it always does, my obsessive compulsive side won out and I became a volunteer reader [shudder].

Unlike many of our volunteer readers, I can't say that I was especially nervous on my first day of reading. I truly believed that only certain kinds of people have a rapport with small children, and only these people can make a real difference in their lives. What did I have to be nervous about when I expected to be a piece of furnature in the room? As for the children, I imagined them as a single entity that would tear through the school like a tornado, leaving me and my pile of forgotten storybooks in its wake of destruction.

From the second I walked into the classroom for my first weekly hour of reading I knew I was wrong. When I opened the door the whole class came running to greet me. Who was I? Why I was there? Did I know that I had pretty long hair like a mermaid? These weren't zoo animals at all! They were curious, they had personalities and names, and I couldn't read to them fast enough! Even in my first few weeks as a reader the kids associated me with books and knew that if they wanted to have that coveted one-on-one time with me, they would have to bring me a story to read. They only problem with this incredible enthusiasm was the fact that before long I had five or six bringing me books as soon as I arrived. In an effort to restore order and repress the very real zoo animal like qualities that were coming out in the children as they fought over who would read first, the teachers quickly developed a list of names for me to go down each time I read.

As for reading itself, it has been amazing. The children have a real interest in and enthusiasm for reading, and it's been nothing but a joy to help foster that in them. One of my greatest worries was that I would have nothing to talk to the kids about as I read. Again, I completely underestimated them. They love to talk about everything! They have endless questions about what's going on and how the characters are feeling, they love to count things and tell you about animals and colors, and if you ask them if they have a kitty cat at home, you had better be prepared to settle in and listen to a five minute speech about Fluffy and his heroic exploits.

As I always tell our volunteers, the relationships they will build with the children are one of the most important elements of the volunteer reader program. The stories mean more to the kids when they can talk about them with an adult that they know and trust. The children at ReWA have become so comfortable with me, that some of them are even trying their own had at reading aloud. One little boy took this responsibility so seriously that he would snap at me to be patient and listen when I asked too many questions, and even used his teacher's time-tested tricks for keeping restless kids quiet when I tried to talk to him too much about the book.

So that's my story. Not only am I now able to talk to new volunteer readers frankly and honestly about the program and provide them with the kind of support they deserve, but the children I'm working with have taught me that preschoolers are hungry for knowledge, and that the adults in their lives play a huge part in what they learn during those important early years. One of my most memorable moments was when a little girl proclaimed to me "that goose is very foul-tempered!" How else would she have picked up language like that unless an adult had been reading to her? What our readers are doing for these kids is extrememly important, and I am so proud to be a part of it. Besides, my mom now has a hope of getting grandchildren someday, so everybody wins :)

Going the Extra Mile

The school year is coming to a close, and many of our volunteers are packing it in for a few months...or for good. This has been a bit of a sad and frustrating time for me; volunteers that I supported for months and have developed genuine relationships with are suddenly abandoning me. I do understand why they're doing it. Summer is a busy time of year for most people, and when falls comes back around many people are going to be hesitant to recommit to a program that wrecks havoc on a tradiational 9-5 work schedule. The problem that I'm having is in the fact that it seems like my 10 months of hard work are slowly going down the drain. I suppose that I should think about all of this in terms of how many children were read to in the time that these volunteers were able to be in the classroom, but as someone who only gets to see the impact that the program makes from the inside of an office, that can be very difficult.

I would like to share a story that helped to brighten my attitude about my current situation, and has helped me to see the enormous impact that our volunteers have in just a few short months with the children.

Many of our reading sites had a graduation ceremony at the end of the school year, and several of them invited their volunteers to attend. At one of these sites, two women who had been reading for less than six months decided to show up and support the children they had been reading to for an hour each week. When they arrived, they were surprised to see undeniable proof of the impact that they had made in the children's lives. Some of the parents had been unable to attend the ceremony, and these volunteers (who were by now trusted role models in the lives of the children) were able to stand in where they could to ensure that the children with working parents felt loved and included. The site director was so pleased with this turn of events that she let us know what had happened just as soon as she could.

Celebrating Volunteer Readers

This is something that I posted on the United Way of King County's Blog a few days ago. I think it's still relevant for this though, voulnteer recognition is always fun :) If you read RSVP's newsletter, you can get a better idea of what we actually did for this volunteer. In addition to the party, the volunteer got a poster, flowers, and was able to donate a book to each child in the class on behalf of the UWKC.

In March of 2010 the Volunteer Reader Program celebrated a remarkable milestone: three years of spreading the love of literay to King County Preschoolers! Even more remarkable is the fact that several of our volunteers have been with us since the beginning. We got the opportunity to attend a celebration in honor of one of these volunteers back in May. Not only were site staff, volunteer reader staff, and the children on hand to thank this dedicated volunteer, but RSVP was also in attendance to recognize all of her hard work. RSVP is a program that encourages people 55 and older to volunteer in the community. They offer numerous benefits to seniors that want to get involved with local businesses and nonprofits, and they work hard to ensure that everyone that signs up with them is matched with a project that meets his or her needs and interests. Without the help of the people at RSVP who sent this devoted reader our way, this celebration would never have taken place. You can read more about our RSVP volunteer and the celebration in honor of her three years of service in RSVP's summer 2010 newsletter: http://www.solidground.org/GetInvolved/Volunteer/RSVP/Documents/EIASummer2010.pdf.

A Successful Conference

Hello there, I'm a new voice on here. My name is Megan and I started my VISTA term with the Volunteer Administrators Network and Seattle Works in April. I was thrown into planning a conference on volunteer management immediately. Luckily for me, Bevin Wong (another VISTA at Seattle Works and contributor to this blog) had been working on the project and laid very good tracks for me to follow. The conference happened on June 8, so I didn't have time to blog about the planning process. But now that it's over and I have feedback results, I'm going to give you a recap!

The conference was for VAN, which is a network and resource for volunteer managers. We hosted 85 managers and 14 speakers. The theme of the conference was "Invest in Ourselves" because often volunteer managers are under-valued (and under-paid, under-resourced and any other under- you can think of) when really, they enable organizations to expand their efforts and continue running. So we wanted to give the people who came tools to both increase their productivity and make them feel good about themselves.

Things I never thought about when planning a conference:
-You have to get petty cash for a raffle. Huh.
-Nametags need to be alphebetized otherwise they're impossible to find at registration!
-Speakers are actually pretty willing to present for you, for free, if you ask them.

The good news is that once things are set up for success, the day of the conference goes smoothly! And people had a good time (in the feedback survey, the conference was rated about 3.5/5 in all categories!) which is all anyone can really hope for.

Also, I'd love it if you checked out the VAN website!

Megan Ingram
Professional Development Coordinator
Seattle Works/Volunteer Adminstrators Network

The Launch of HandsOn Leadership

After many hours spent developing curriculum-Seattle Works is kicking off a brand new leadership training program next Tuesday, designed to equip individuals with the knowledge and tools to be an effective volunteer project manager.

We've designed the training to cover the best practices in volunteer engagement and how to develop volunteer projects, while growing one's understanding of their own leadership capacity.

Why Project Management Training?

1. We've been hearing from our long-term volunteers that they are looking for the next step -- more in-depth/complex projects, and the opportunity to work more closely with the nonprofits they are serving. They want to apply your skills, education and knowledge to enhance the capacity of under-resourced organizations.

2. Nonprofits need help engaging volunteers in new ways. Working with volunteers is awesome. It's also a lot of work. In a financial climate where nonprofits are doing even more with less, developing trained volunteer leaders to partner with them expands their opportunity to effectively engage with volunteer teams. Skilled volunteer managers are a valuable resource.

The Course HandsOn Leadership combines a training course with practical application.
HandsOn Leadership coursework focuses on:- Project Management 101- Leadership- Community engagement- Done-in-a-day project development- Personal reflection
Following the course, participants will form leadership teams develop a large scale project (30-50 volunteers).

It is exciting to finally see all of our hard work together. I'm also excited to see the projects our participants develop.

For more info on HandsOn Leadership, feel free to contact me or check out our website: http://www.seattleworks.org/AboutUs/index.php/handsonleadership.html

let the good times roll...

Organizing at the local food bank warehouse.

Picking litter from the streets of Port Townsend.

And coming soon in the summer of 2010, Jefferson County Youth Corps students will be gardening, assisting on a local farm, volunteering for the Northwest Kiwanis Camp, helping out in soup kitchens and cleaning up local beaches and parks. A few of the latter are verbal commitments for now, but when these 17 year-olds see the value of a project and are given an opportunity to hang out with friends, their follow through has stood. And their positivity has been contagious.

How exactly does a service project become fun? I don't know the answer to this one. But I keep telling the Youth Corps students, "come to meetings and we will brainstorm, take care of business and it will be fun. If you come to this project we can lend a needed hand and we can have fun". Maybe it's just a little beginner's enthusiasm, but so far... it has been fun.

The challenge will be maintaining this positivity as the program expands. The students involved in the Youth Corps are all familiar with each other. I want to reach out to anyone and everyone attending high school in East Jefferson County: the atypical volunteers, the typical "achievers", those who aren't involved in athletics or school clubs, guys, girls, freshmen and seniors. How do we keep the fun alive as the student base becomes more diverse? When it is more than friends? This would probably be easier to answer if I had an answer to the first question. How was it fun to begin with?

I guess I believe there is no ceiling for the fun and meaning in life's activities. Especially when the impact is visible. And especially with a few helping hands. Let's see how things roll on...

- Lee Routledge

I'm learning all kinds of wonderful things as a VISTA. Here are a few:

-There's no end to the good you can do when you are connected to the right individuals in a community.
-Follow every lead, and take every opportunity to help.
-Money runs everything (the title of "grantee" should come with a set of handcuffs and a box of kleenex).
-Traffic police have never heard of VISTA, and don't care how little money you make.
-If you want to play in the snow during the summer, you've got to walk an awfully long way up some awfully steep hills.
-LASER = Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.
-Post-participation, praise your productivity-prone volunteers verbally, vociferously, vehemently, and vocalize their value before they bounce back to business as usual.
-Coolness comes in strange packages.
-No matter how bad things get, at the end of the day, the only person who can lick your wounds is you.

I'll update if I learn more.

Chase

A ray of sunshine

Greetings all!

I'm not going to lie... I've been feeling a tad discouraged lately. It seems that every direction I turn, I'm confronted with hurt and sadness. Maybe this is because I'm now in the position to see pain in it's full light? I'm not sure, but nonetheless when I receive e-mails such as the following from students, it brightens my day (and makes a permanent spot for itself on my bulletin board). Read with caution:


"Hello! Thank you so much for the alert: I will convey it to my parents! After the inevitable season of mourning they are bound to engage in, I'm sure they will settle upon leaving my little brother at home with as much ease as a walrus settling upon an ice drift in the Arctic- assuming they do so with considerable ease, and assuming there are walruses in the Arctic, as well as ice drifts. I joke! This is no problem at all, in fact! Anyway, thank you for very much for letting me know, and I do look forward to meeting you as well! Many thanks!"
(Sent from a Varsity Letter in Community Service Award Winner)

Makes me laugh everytime. :) I share this because even through all the suffering that is happening in our world, there are people (such as the student above) that want to make it a better place. And as ridiculously cheesy as this sounds, it keeps me motivated. Hopefully you find a tinge of motivation there as well, and if not, at least a good laugh. That's all for now.

Paz,

Vanessa

Dig It

A typical volunteer is not a 21 year old, male, seasonal fisherman. Last month, I received a call from a young man who wanted to get involved in his community before he left for Alaska. The following week he started reading with elementary students who needed a little extra help. This summer he is going to play sports with at risk youth for 4 hours a week. He told me enthusiastically, “I really dig it.”

Before my VISTA term I did not understand the importance of volunteering in a community. I did not know that the American Red Cross is composed of 96% volunteers. I did not realize that volunteers complete the majority of maintenance on the Olympic Discovery Trail. I did not know that Port Angeles volunteers feed over 150 citizens every Friday evening. I did not appreciate the relationships forged between volunteers and children in need. I did not understand the demand for volunteers in the nonprofit world. I did not fully understand the change that can be created by volunteers.

President Obama’s noted in his Inaugural Address, “we need a new era of responsibility—a recognition of the part of every American that we have duties to ourselves, our Nation, and the world. These are duties that we do not grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly, firm in knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit than giving our all to a difficult task.” Volunteers really can shape a better tomorrow.

My question is, how can I recruit more atypical volunteers? How do I communicate that volunteering really can be fun? I know they would "dig it" if I could hook them up with the right opportunity.

Be Kind. Work Hard. Give Back. Get Things Done.

Taylor Schraudner
North Olympic Volunteer Center-Youth Coordinator

Human Race

The biggest thing I have been working on the past few weeks is the Human Race. It is an annual fundraiser for the Whatcom Volunteer Center. I was given some logistical jobs including figuring out how many balloons we needed and where they should go. It was a really fun event. We had a couple hundred people show up for the 5k run/walk and 10k run. I ended up working the finish line, pulling tags of the winning racers. It was nice to have a break from the usual office work and to get out in the amazing sunshine even if I got really burnt.

Rebecca, who has been training me will be leaving in a few weeks. Then I will be all on my own. It is pretty daunting taking over the furniture bank but I can do it. Right now we need to focus on getting donations. Our need for furniture is really high but our donations are trickling out. I'm not sure if that is because it is the summer or what is going on. I tried to reach out to the college population for donations. We asked students at Western to donate their furniture to our program instead of throwing it on the streets but that was ineffective. I'm not sure where to go next. I still am meeting with neighborhood associations to talk about the furniture bank and try to recruit volunteers and donations.

Overall, things are going well. Working hard to live off of this VISTA budget but making the most of it.

Lisa

Whatcom Volunteer Center

House 2 Home Network

Life After AmeriCorps

How strange it will be for me to not be an AmeriCorps VISTA anymore.

It has truly been such a substantial part of my life for nearly two years now that I am confident the transition will be palpable. Wherever I go from here, literally and figuratively, the impact that this extraordinary organization has had on me will not easily fade.

Numerous lessons come to mind, when reviewing all the vast experiences I have been so privileged to be a part of, and take with me for the rest of my life. My hope is to pass these on in every instance I have the opportunity. In this way, my time as a VISTA will live on and the legacy of eliminating poverty will become more of a reality.

Between. This adjective is where and how I feel. Although this balancing act has always been present in my position, it has lately been more pronounced. I feel like even though recommendation letters have been very forthcoming, actual job opportunities have not been so quick to materialize. Please let me be able to continue this service in a different capacity, BUT be able to take care of myself and those I love at the same time. Is this to much to ask?

A Day of Caring

Music filled the room. If melodies are the language of compassion and understanding, then literally we had “A Day of Caring,” like no other. The students at VSAA were well prepared and so this was one of those rare occasions where all I had to do was enjoy. After a little trouble with the directions that the students were given, we arrived at Colombia House, a lovely retirement center in the heart of Downtown Vancouver. They practiced in the backroom for a while as the clients filtered in.

Names reasserted their relevance through the mouths of there students, representing their school, community and future. There were at least four Beatles songs sung, a Frank Sinatra classic on trumpet, a soulful rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, as well as current hits like Love Song and even some original tunes.

I met a gentleman named Will, who told me he had come to every VSAA Performance there since ti began, five years ago. Every students gets this chance to participate in this day to give back to their community. The panorama of instruments and talents reminded me of the school’s mission. There were twenty projects offered for the students to chose from, half of which I am happy to say I helped put together. Afterward, I followed up with the organizations to see how everything went for each agency.

Furthermore, the students and clients thanked me for being there. Gratitude and success seem to go hand in hand!