Outreach & Volunteer Coordinator
Organization:
Latinitas VISTA Name:
Claudia Escobar Lopez
Program Start:
9/2009
Program End:
9/2010
Project Description:
As part of the CTC VISTA Project, Latinitas would recruit a VISTA member to serve as an Outreach & Volunteer Coordinator. This position would assist with:
Primary Goals:
-organizing an advisory board that will develop a comprehensive curriculum guide with a series of media-based, enrichment activities for girls.
-coordinating a volunteer leadership team that will assist with future club leader recruitment, trainings and management
-developing training procedures and volunteer manuals to empower volunteer club leaders to guide girl empowerment activities
Secondary Goals
-creating a marketing plan to outline strategies for effectively recruiting volunteers, identifying strategic community partners and sponsors and beginning the initial phase of volunteer recruitment.
Throughout the project, the VISTA member will work directly with an advisory board and volunteers to develop a curriculum guides, club leader training manual, volunteer procedures and volunteer recruitment marketing plan. These tangible products will enable Latinitas to replicate our media-based, culturally-relevant, bilingual, girl enrichment programs into additional communities. Latinos make up about 15 percent of the U.S. population and are the largest and fastest growing population. Despite the growth and size of this population, very few programs exist nationally that focus specifically on this population. The tools developed in this project may serve as a model framework and curriculum to share with the field of Latina-focused girl empowerment programs nationally.
Project Outcome:
Claudia has organized recruitment efforts, orientation sessions and meetings to help build our advisory board. She has been instrumental in developing and documenting the procedures for effective volunteer training and management. She has developed an orientation and training module which we will utilize in preparing future volunteer club leaders for their role in leading multimedia clubs for girls. In addition, she has developed a comprehensive volunteer leader manual which clearly outlines the role, responsibilities, procedures and policies in the management of volunteer led clubs. The manual includes club leader job descriptions, club meeting outlines, attendance policies, dress code, code of behavior, classroom management tips, mentoring tips, recruitment tips, Internet safety guidelines, material checklists, equipment checkout procedures, attendance sheets, volunteer hour logs, club member evaluations, club fact sheets and other valuable tips on managing a media club for girls. Furthermore, our VISTA member has worked collaboratively with a team of volunteers to develop a new Club Leader Curriculum Guide building on our library of club lesson plans. Thanks to support from our VISTA Member, we now have over 100 multimedia lesson plans developed that we can implement in our multimedia clubs. These lessons are focused on teaching young Latinas in grades 4-8 about how they can use media as a tool for creative self-expression. These lessons are bilingual and bi-cultural and focused on writing, art, photography, audio production, film making, desktop publishing and web design. Our VISTA has also initiated a pilot test program training 4 volunteers to lead volunteer media clubs. She has recruited the volunteer club leaders, implemented and tested a club leader training session and provided technical support to our club leaders. The volunteer training module and curriculum guide has proven to work successfully with this group and our VISTA member is helping us lay the foundation to implement this program on a larger scale in the future.
Since our VISTA member is perfectly fluent in Spanish and English, she was able to assist us in translating numerous documents in our volunteer training manual as well as other materials for the public. We work with a largely Spanish-speaking population of recent immigrants, so her assistance in creating bilingual materials was a great asset in preparing all the needed documents for our volunteers to go out into the community to serve Spanish-speaking girls and families. In addition, our VISTA member developed a volunteer recognition procedures to assist in our volunteer retention efforts including creating volunteer certificates and awards, organizing volunteer appreciation events and developing a system for recognizing volunteers in our newsletter and special events.