ECA Sponsored Programs Workshop Overview

From AFSWiki

This year, there were more than 240 participants at the annual ECA Sponsored Programs Workshop in Alexandria, VA - Celebrating Global Families. The workshop brought together AFS volunteers and staff from across the country; both national staff and local coordinators from among the four US placement organizations collaborating to host YES participants (ACES; AIFS Foundation’s AYA program; CIEE and PAX); representatives of the organizations we collaborate with in NSLIY, American Councils for International Education; and our AFS partners from around the world, representing a broad array of long-standing AFS network partner organizations, such as Germany, Malaysia, Turkey, Ghana, Thailand, Egypt Indonesia and South Africa, to collaborations revitalized or born of the YES funding opportunity such as in India, the Philippines, Kenya, Saudi Arabia and Mozambique; as well as ten host families representing each of the placement organizations. All together, these participants represented 34 states and 14 countries.

For its success, the workshop relied upon cooperation and collaboration among nearly every department within AFS-USA and represents a unique opportunity within AFS-USA for such collaboration, cross-fertilization and exposure among staff and volunteer colleagues within the greater field of youth exchange organizations and intercultural education in the US and is the largest gathering of AFS network partners in the US each year, providing US-based AFS staff and volunteers with a rare opportunity for direct connections with colleagues from around the AFS network.

The workshop focuses on raising the awareness between our international partners staff and volunteers in attendance and our US based staff and volunteers of the cultures and unique circumstances in each of the countries YES, FLEX and CB students are coming from and to which CB, YES and NSLIY students are being sent. The outbound focus began in some ways last year, but was highlighted and successfully fully integrated as a distinct track this year, adding a new dimension to the workshop.

Three additional elements, funded through the sponsored programs, contributed to the fact that this year’s workshop was significantly larger and more complex than previous workshops and in many ways more enriching and exciting than ever.

• • Training of Trainers workshop for 23 YES alumni and US CB and NSLIY alumni. Led by Nancy Levine, Sponsored Programs Project Manager, in collaboration with the Organizational Development and Learning Specialists’ Team, the TOT workshop has been successfully replicated for the fourth time and has become an ongoing feature of the sponsored programs menu of follow on activities for returnees.
  • Hosting Orientation Workgroups (HOW) convened to bring to completion a project to build, through the efforts of three binational workgroups, a host family orientation handbook that is culture-specific for Thailand, Egypt and Turkey. The overall project was led by Robin Weber, Manager of Intercultural Education and Quality and US volunteers, Lynn Whetstone, Mary Kay Robinson and Al Russell led each of the workgroups with counterparts from each country. The project provides both enhanced materials for host family orientation and significant intercultural learning opportunities for volunteers.
  • Host Family Video contest was organized in collaboration with the Marketing and Communications team, and provided a mechanism for both gathering some very good materials for use in hosting promotion and for selecting ten host families to be feted during the workshop, highlighting and celebrating host families as a central point of the workshop. The Marketing and Communications section elaborates on this project.

Each year, visits to Capitol Hill by the workshop participants create an opportunity to raise awareness on the Hill of the ECA-sponsored programs and to request support for continued funding. Other issues raised by participants included concern over possible new rules in the J-visa program that might negatively affect the participation of host families in our programs. More than fifty visits were made to the offices of Senators and Representatives. One focus of the Sponsored Programs Advisory Group, which had its first informal meeting during the workshop, will be to analyze feedback of the participants in the advocacy visits (gathered through the workshop evaluations), to formulate an intentional advocacy strategy.