Week: 11

For this week's assignment I chose to follow my mentor Rachel. Rachel is the event planner at Future for Kids (FfK) amongst many other contributions she makes. The events at FfK vary monthly depending on the time of year and the type of fundraiser that is being put into place. Right now Rachel is focusing most all of her time on the Summer sports camp. Part of this event is a one-day camp held at the beginning of summer where hundreds of kids can participate in multiple sporting events and training stations with the accompaniment of free amenities and free food. The other part if the program is a six-week class that will be held twice a week for about an hour teaching the kids about fitness and healthy eating. Here are some of the things that Rachel has to contrive:
*creating flyers and announcements to spread the word about the camp
*creating flyers and announcments to help recruit volunteers
*Contacting new and old volunteers to create a staff for the events
*creating a sign-up sheet for the kids that will attend, including logisitcs such as dates, times, parental permission etc.
* Finding groups to partner with to help raise funds for the camp
*Creating an activity book for the 6-week program that the children will follow to monitor their eating happens and amount of exercise they do weekly
* Developing a cirriculm in which the weekly classes will follow
* Organizing where volunteers will fit best and what their duties will be
* Finding a sponsor to donate food for the one-day sports camp
* partnering with other non-profits ti recruit kids for the camp
* finding a location to have the camp

These are just some of Rachel's duties for the summer sports camp event. As you can see she has a lot to do before the camp begins on June 6th. Along with organizing this event some of Rachel's other duties throughout the year include constantly recruitung new volunteers and keeping past volunteers involved. She is frequently updating the ad that FfK has on the "volunteer match" website. If anyone calls or emails interested in volunteering Rachel gets back to them as immediately as possible. It is important to do this because people often get busty with other things and may lose their urge to volunteer. Once she has a prospect she organizes them into a spreadsheet cataloging all their information and volunteer interests. When Rachel meets with a volunteer she interviews them, finds their interests, does background checks, checks references, and places them. Once they are ready to help she put them through an orientation and introduces them to exactly what they'll be doing. Rachel also does a very similar process with all the interns that join FfK.
So, as you can see this is a very busy time of year for Rachel. Her responsibilites include a long list of things and priorities that have a considerable amount of detail. Shadowing her has taught me alot about non-profit and how there are so many details that you might regularly over-look but can be extremely important for non-profit organizations. This was a very enjoyable experience for me and I have even more respect for the industry than I did before.