Update on Volunteer Development Discussions at Dec 09 National Hosting Meeting
From AFSWiki
On Sunday, December 6, the bulk of the agenda at the hosting meeting was dedicated to determining how volunteer development, and the Volunteer Development Department, could best support AFS-USA’s hosting efforts in 2010.
The group began by doing an exercise, where the following challenges were named as the most critical to our success in hosting in 2010:
- Recruiting and integrating more volunteers to do host family recruitment
- Improving school relations
- Host family recruitment training for local hosting volunteers
- Need for better local team/chapter development
- PR / Marketing
After identifying these challenges, volunteers in attendance were given the opportunity to work in small groups, in order to further define the challenges and to begin to develop strategies and actions that would address the challenges. Strategies that were identified as the ones most critical to ensuring our success during the 2010 hosting season included:
- Development and implementation of a host family recruitment “tool kit” for local volunteers
- Ensuring that local hosting volunteers are trained, so that they are able effectively recruit host families in their communities
- Development of marketing tools, aimed at convincing schools of the benefits of hosting AFS students
- Creation of a “tool kit” for volunteers, to help them more effectively identify, integrate, and develop new volunteers
- Creation of two new local volunteer positions – one to focus on local PR/Marketing and one to focus on local school relationships.
- Cultivate relationships with current and recent host families, in order to get them to become hosting volunteers
After the conclusion of the meeting, members of the hosting and volunteer development staffs remained in San Antonio, to meet all day Monday and begin to discuss how to move forward with implementing as many of the strategies as we can in the coming year. We have begun work on identifying what should be in a host family recruitment “tool kit” for local volunteers and how to ensure local hosting volunteers receive training in the coming months. More information will be shared as the work of the Hosting staff, the National Hosting Advisory Group, the Volunteer Development staff, and the National Volunteer Development Advisory Group, continues in the next couple of months.
