Sample liaison recruiting letter
From AFSWiki
Subject Line: WANTED: AFS liaisons, and Team members!
To: Bay Area AFS volunteers
Remember when you went abroad (since most of you are returnees), how AFS was more than just some organization that arranged your trip, it was a movement, a living thing that you joined, out to change the world. And it's working, may I add, having seen the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of IRA bombings in Great Britain, the arrival of the Euro and the European Parliament, and so on. Though there's much left to do.
That feeling of belonging, being part of the AFS society, is very important, and easily forgotten in our Internet-enhanced and thoroughly modern Bay Area. It's also a very rewarding feeling.
We in SF try to make it easy to belong and contribute meaningfully as a volunteer without the soul-sucking black hole of responsibility that some volunteer positions entail. The best way we know to do this is to get lots of people to volunteer, and share the responsibilities, as many hands make light work.
We could really use some extra hands right now. So we'd like you to join us. Take a look at this description and see if you can belong as a liaison or as part of the Team for a while:
Want to be a LIAISON?
Here are the open liaison spots:
- Menlo Park - 1 student
- Portola Valley - 1 student
- Los Gatos - 1 student
- San Jose - 1 student
- Orinda - 1 student
- Sonoma - 1-2 students
- San Anselmo - 1 student
Here is a basic summary of liaison duties and responsibilities:
- 1 academic year commitment to a student and his or her host
family and school.
- A Liaison serves as an objective ear to students, their family
and their school by maintaining and documenting regular, monthly contact with all parties.
- A Liaison can help both the student and host family to define
what their expectations are for their AFS experience.
- A Liaison is also a friend who will listen to and offer support
to the student.
CONTACT: (name, phone number, and email of appropriate volunteer inserted here)
Are you organized? Join our team of Hosting Coordinators, either as the coordinator for your area (handling just a few families), or as the area coordinator who will coordinate the local coordinators. (say that five times fast!) This mostly involves working with families who have submitted paperwork, helping them through the process, and matching them up with a student. My understanding is that it's not as much about recruitment as people imagine. We get lots of people signing up from the Internet. And this is a very central position, that gets right to the heart of what AFS does!
CONTACT: (name, phone number, and email of appropriate volunteer inserted here)
Want something lighthearted? Be the Aunt/Uncle Coordinator. Here's what Scott says about it (and he should know, he just left the position to take another on the Team!): "It doesn't take much time to do, but the critical time is now, when the students arrive and we need to match each of them with an Aunt/Uncle volunteer. After the matches are done, it is just a matter of checking in every couple of months with the aunts/uncles to see if they are still making contact with their student, and if something changes, to reassign a new volunteer if the student would like one.
I'll be available to talk with the person who wants to take on coordinating this to pass on the bit of knowledge I inherited from Steve last winter."
CONTACT:
(name, phone number, and email of appropriate volunteer inserted here)
Or, another way to handle it would be to simple be an Aunt/Uncle family yourself.
An aunt/uncle family is someone who keeps contact on a strictly social basis with a hosted student, and does some sort of activity perhaps once per month. The point of this is to give them a chance to get out of the house (to give both the student and the host family a break every now and then), and for the student to have contact with another adult besides the host family and teachers.
This is a different position from the "liaison," who is an authority figure and who has actual responsibility to make sure all is OK and report monthly on the student to AFS. Sometimes, therefore, the AFSer feels more comfortable talking about issues like Mom's curfew rules with the aunt or uncle, just socially and not officially. Then again, sometimes it's just a fun outing--there's no agenda.
CONTACT: (name, phone number, and email of appropriate volunteer inserted here)
