Youth Leadership at NCVS!

This year at NCVS, session content is organized across a series of issue areas so that attendees can tailor their schedules to meet their learning and networking needs.

Check out all the sessions associated with

Youth Leadership

…

Local Choices, National Voices : Involving youth locally in a national movement

Tuesday, June 7, 2011 8:30 AM – 10:00 AM

Session ID: 5060

Speakers: Cody Ruxton, Lucy Tucker

Twitter Hashtag: #NCVS5060

America’s Promise Alliance has a history of youth engagement and includes “opportunities to help others” as one of its Five Promises that all youth deserve. Learn how engagement has evolved to support the Alliance’s GradNation campaign to mobilize America to end the dropout crisis. Explore structures and support needed to build a network of active young leaders and adult allies that feel tied to a national effort. Learn strategies for empowering youth as decision-makers and tailoring opportunities to engage more youth voice. Hear from a high school student inspired to take action through service and become a community leader.

Youth Champions of Service

Tuesday, June 7, 2011 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM

Session ID: 5712

Twitter Hashtag: #NCVS5712

Become a Youth Champion of Service! In this special session for youth age 13-16, participants will hear inspirational stories from youth service leaders from across the country. Youth will identify the issues that are most important to them and will work in teams to design a winning service game plan that they can bring home to their communities. Kevin Martinez, Senior Director Corporate Outreach at ESPN, will moderate the session.

Rethinking Reflection: Using Creativity to Promote Critical Thinking in Service-Learning Projects

Tuesday, June 7, 2011 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM

Session ID: 5449

Speakers: Janet Fox, Melissa Cater, Lanette Hebert

Twitter Hashtag: #NCVS5449

Mirror…mirror…on the wall…who’s the fairest of them all! Most people involved in service-learning programs are familiar with the term “reflection.” Derived from the Latin word reflectere meaning to “bend back,” reflection makes visible what is apparent to others but a mystery to us! Through discussion, interactive experiences, and think-pair-share techniques, this session will unveil the mystery of reflection by providing a foundation in the C’s of reflection and the ORID model. Through engaging learning activities, participants will learn about creative application of a wide variety of reflection ideas.

Summer of Service: Young People Improving Communities and Building Skills

Tuesday, June 7, 2011 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM

Session ID: 5729

Speakers: Jenn Beard, Jean Manney, Nicole Payne-Jack

Twitter Hashtag: #NCVS5729

How can we address key community issues while building civic and academic skills for our students? If you’re asking about service-learning, we’ve got the answer. Grantees of Learn and Serve America engage middle school students in Summer of Service (SoS) programs that boost their learning and bolster their communities. Innovations in Civic Participation, Operation REACH and Youth Volunteer Corps support environmental and disaster preparedness initiatives at sites across the country. SoS youth participants earn a $500 education award for excellent service. These organizations will discuss ways to engage students and improve communities with a specific emphasis on projects in the Gulf Coast region.

Building a Movement: Empowering Youth from Disadvantaged Circumstances to Change Their World from the Ground Up

Wednesday, June 8, 2011 8:30 AM – 10:00 AM

Session ID: 5424

Speakers: Jim Ziolkowski, Abby Hurst, Junior Del La Cruz, Ron Daldine, Raiya Gaddy

Twitter Hashtag: #NCVS5424

Since 1991, buildOn has mobilized youth in the most challenging high schools and the poorest communities in U.S. to contribute 706,841 hours of service locally and globally through their after-school service-learning programs. In this workshop you will learn best practices to not only reach students from disadvantaged circumstances, but to empower them to make change. You will learn how to build your programs to give these students an expanded sense of possibility and control over their own destiny, regardless of circumstance. Hear directly from students about how transformational service impacts their lives and why they choose to serve.

Let Us Lead! Engaging Youth as Active Leaders in Your Organization

Wednesday, June 8, 2011 8:30 AM – 10:00 AM

Session ID: 5211

Speakers: Rebecca Kraus, Dimitri Rodriguez, Liu Zhen Huang, Rachel Shuster, Victor Cruz

Twitter Hashtag: #NCVS5211

generationOn Youth Leaders and Bank of America Student Leaders™ will present an engaging youth developed and youth led discussion of how young people can be engaged as leaders in youth service programs and organizations. The workshop will highlight how youth can be encouraged to take responsibility for developing service projects, recruiting new students, creating youth led formats for reflection, and sharing the importance of youth leadership with adults in an advisory capacity. Too often, young people are given the illusion that they are leaders and not given enough support, independence and respect to be completely responsible for their service projects.

Meeting Youth Where They Are: Maximizing Youth Engagement In Service

Wednesday, June 8, 2011 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM

Session ID: 5076

Speakers: Michael Wise, Susan Craine

Twitter Hashtag: #NCVS5076

Learn about measuring youth engagement levels and identifying obstacles that prevent youth from fully participating in service. Participants of this workshop will have the opportunity to discuss issues relevant to their specific communities and brainstorm innovative solutions to address constraints.

Youth In Action!: Celebrating and Empowering Youth as Catalysts for Community Transformation

Wednesday, June 8, 2011 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM

Session ID: 5345

Speakers: Erin Lee, Caryn Pernu, Sarah Ullmer

Twitter Hashtag: #NCVS5345

Around the nation, youth are actively contributing to their communities while furthering their own education. Service-learning and other forms of active education give youth the opportunity to engage in work that positively shapes their world, all while enhancing educational outcomes. Are the youth in your community an underutilized resource? Learn how to provide opportunities for youth to lead the way, and how to find resources to support this work.

Get HandsOn for NCVS

by Ken Tran & Ashely Cannady,

Get HandsOn

AmeriCorps Members

Upon joining Points of Light as the AmeriCorps National Direct members serving for the Get HandsOn Campaign, there were a lot of whispers about this great conference that was a pretty big deal around June.

We didn’t think too much of it then, as we were still learning about building an online service leader community and also finding our way around the water cooler.

Fast forward a few months of online capacity building and here we are preparing for what is sure to be a great opportunity for us to engage with leaders in the volunteer service movement.

Yup, we’re heading to National Conference on Volunteering and Service and excited is a bit of an understatement!

Last year, the Get HandsOn Campaign launched in New York at NCVS, generating the initial buzz about our online community and were preparing for the launch of “Tag! You’re It!”.

One year later, with two successful campaigns under our belt, including Follow the Leader, we are going to New Orleans with a lot of great things planned.

We’re determined to get you engaged in service learning bright and early Tuesday and Wednesday morning!

Look out for our “Books & Beignets” sessions intended to create a more intimate setting for conference attendees.

We want to create a space for you to meet and discuss civic engagement and volunteer leadership.

With great authors like David T. Levinson, Betty Stalling, Brian Reich, Jill Friedman Fixler, and Shawn Anderson speaking on their new books, your curiosity on how to create a thriving volunteer effort is sure to be met.

You still have a chance to add these sessions to your conference schedule and we’ll be providing free copies of the author’s books to the first 25 attendees who register for each session.

If you’re not a morning person, come find us all day in the Exhibit Hall sponsoring Mobile Service Projects.

In partnership with Hands On Network, Corporation for National & Community Service, HandsOn New Orleans, FLASH, and NVOAD, we’ll need your help packing 1,500 Emergency Preparedness Kits.

In our booth, you can also learn the importance of creating an emergency disaster response plan with your family/friends.

Our booth will feature a combination of Hurricane Preparedness kits, led by FLASH, and Senior Preparedness Kits, led by the American Red Cross.

Preparing for conference is a very special time for us.

Not only are we excited to meet leaders in the service movement and those passionate in making an impact, but we are solidifying our own presence in volunteerism in the process.

Being part of the Get HandsOn Campaign has been a great learning experience and we are happy to show the product of what we’ve gained, while inspiring others to mobilize their community to doing better volunteer service.

Ashley & Ken currently serve as AmeriCorps National Direct Members on the Get HandsOn Campaign.

You can catch Ashley on the Get HandsOn Facebook page and Ken on twitter @gho_ken.

Conference Planning Wrap Up

By April Welch, The Mental Clutter Coach

Today’s post originally appeared on the VolunteerSpot blog on May 19, 2011.

This is the third post in our series about Conference and Travel Tips. First we covered preparing and packing for your conference , then how to avoid burnout during coference travel. Welcome home!

Now that your conference and travel adventures are done, you’re left looking around at “life as usual” {plus likely a full suticase of dirty clotees and a logo-emblazoned tote bag filled with swag and trinkets!}

Wondering ‘what should I do first?’, is as common as eating breakfast. You know there are things you left in progress {like the project that is due at the end of the month}, you know there are things you should have accomplished before you left {like getting the volunteer list to the event coordinator, oops} and now there are things you feel inspired to bring into the mix {like connecting with a colleague across the country that is running a program similar to one that you’re launching next month}.

Not to worry, I have veteran tips for these things too!

Gentle Re-entry

• You will be met with “catching up”.
• You will be met with some version of chaos.
• You will be met with other people’s deadlines.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I challenge you to consider what your first day back would look like if you gave yourself a ‘buffer’ day? If you’re due to arrive home on a Sunday, don’t open your public door until Tuesday. Allow yourself to get some laundry done, hang out with your family and/or pets, go through your (e)mail. Most importantly, get some much needed sleep or rest by staying off the radar. Consider it a mental health day. I promise, it’s alright.

We’ve built our expectations into a “must be available” lifestyle. When you’ve communicated your absence for a conference and travel time, it makes sense to allow for a little breathing room before jumping back into it all.

Follow up

If you’ve followed the tips in Conference Packing, Planning and other Preparation Tips you are faced with a stack of notes, business cards with notes, and a sense of overwhelm.

Not to worry.

Practice the post conference and travel follow up technique:

• find a clear surface {kitchen tables or beds work great for this}
• dump out all your business cards and notes in one corner
• place each of the items in piles/categories according to a task
  • start with what you know:
    • this business card is someone I want to add to my resources list
    • these notes had great ideas about how I’m going to …
    • this business card is someone I need to email information to
• determine what tasks are ahead of you and schedule the following days with a time to accomplish each of them

Followup tends to be an easily avoidable task after a conference and travel. Fatigue and other responsibilities quickly resume their place while new, conference-inspired ideas or connections fall to the back burner. By setting aside dedicated time to integrate your new learnings with your previous agenda, you’ll look like an effecient pro in no time!

Momentum

Inspiration is born from gathering a group of people in an environment that allows them to mingle, share and build-off each other’s ideas. Harnessing this inspiration and channeling it productively is also known as momentum.

For years, after returning from conference and travel adventures, I’ve felt a sense of hope when I arrive on my doorstep only to realize a few days later that life has returned to normal and my new-found momentum is becoming a distant memory.

So, how do I mantain and fuel momentum?

Preparation.

During that ‘extra’ day post conference and travel, I spend some quiet time in reflection and ask:

• what was my biggest takeaway?
• what was the most surprising thing I learned / experienced?
• who stands out most from the experience?
• what have I been inspired to do?
• how will this new information effect me moving forward?

Once I’ve answered these questions for myself, I determine “what’s next”? And from there, I insert actionalble tasks into my schedule, life and expectations moving forward.

***

I’ve loved sharing my insights about conference and travel tips you can try this year; please let me know if you have additional tips or if you’ve tried any of the suggestions and found an improvement for yourself! I can’t wait to hear your input over on the VolunteerSpot facebook page this week!

Keepin it Tidy,

April

***

April is a Mental Clutter Expert | Mom of 2 boys | Lover of Tutus | Wife to 1 Fireman | Horrible Cook | Loyal Friend | National Public Speaker who gives you permission to be imperfect.

Don’t Just Be Cool, Be ICE COLD at NCVS

Be An Inclusion Pioneer!

This year at NCVS, session content is organized across a series of issue areas so that attendees can tailor their schedules to meet their learning and networking needs.

Check out all of the sessions associated with working with volunteers with disabilities.

Stories from the Field

by Erin Gannon, Training Associate, National Service Inclusion Project

“Before AmeriCorps I was in the background a lot, but now I’m a person who likes to talk, who likes to share my experiences… with this job with AmeriCorps I can’t go back to being in the background.” – Lisa Severino, AmeriCorps Alum

“

Stories from the Field: Members and Volunteers with Disabilities Sharing Their Experiences,

” a session at NCVS will offer participants an opportunity to join a dialogue with AmeriCorps members, volunteers and alumni about their individual service successes and challenges. The stories of volunteers, members and alumni can provide insight into successful approaches to recruiting, selecting, and fully utilizing the gifts of talented community members who are interested in service. When members and volunteers with disabilities share their stories, it becomes clear that people with disabilities volunteer for the same reasons that anyone else does- to give back to communities, improve their surroundings and to be active and engaged in life.

I think one way AmeriCorps helped me was it helped me to become more at ease with myself, to become more at ease with my identity as a person with a disability… throughout my life I guess I always felt like I had to apologize because I was different, because I had a disability I was an inconvenience, and I was a burden. And I think being in AmeriCorps and being around people that saw me for me and I learned from them, I think it made me feel like… for one of the first times in my life that who I was, was okay. – Avery Olmstead, AmeriCorps Alum

Join this session to learn from the stories of volunteers, members and alumni and apply what you have learned to create concrete strategies to meaningfully engage people with disabilities in your service program.

I really believe that people with disabilities should not be excluded from opportunities…. It’s time to show America that America needs us and we need America. – Ted Garland, AmeriCorps Alum

In addition to “Stories from the Field: Members and Volunteers with Disabilities Sharing Their Experiences”, the National Conference on Volunteering and Service provides wide variety of opportunities to learn more about disability inclusion in national and community service. Join in the dialogue about how to engage all Americans, including Americans with disabilities, in service during one of the following sessions:

Monday, June 6

1:00pm “Pioneering Efforts in Developing Inclusion Brokers”

Tuesday, June 7

8:30am “Targeted Recruitment and Retention Strategies for Non-traditional Volunteers and Service Members” 4:00pm “Engaging Veterans with Disabilities and Wounded Warriors in National and Community Service

Wednesday, June 8

7:00am “AmeriCorps Disability Affinity Group” 8:30am “Stories from the Field: Members and Volunteers with Disabilities Sharing their Experiences” 10:30 “Inclusion 101: Creating a Welcoming Service Environment” For more information about including people with disabilities in national service visit the National Service Inclusion Project, “like” us on Facebook and visit our virtual office in Second Life.

Erin Gannon served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in South Africa (2007-2009) and China (2009-2010) where she worked as a trainer and community resource in areas including disability inclusion.

Prior to her Peace Corps service Erin taught in a variety of settings including public schools, experiential education programs and university classrooms. She earned her Masters in Art Education from Kent State University where she studied the intersections between Art Education practice and the disability rights movement. Erin currently volunteers with AIDS Action Committee.