Meeting Update. April 10 08

Shawano Volunteers
Minutes from April 10 2008 meeting.

We had a very good meeting with 14 people attending.
We went around the room with each person introducing themselves and describing their favorite volunteer activity.
Among the topics discussed:
--Debbie white introduced her "Service Learning Program" at NWTC. this is community service work, done for credit, in the area of the students major. For example students in the Health Sciences fields have gone on farm visits with Rhonda Strebel of the Rural Health Initiative. This service learning program could be a source of volunteers for our local projects. (the dental project for second graders?)
--The Junion Achievement program in Shawano under Diane Heikus, has a "Business Challenge" each year. They use volunteers from shawano businesses to advise the students in this competition.
-- The chamber of commerce "Shawano Fly Out" uses lots of volunteers each year.
--Paul Seveska of the Shawano Leader

Then we worked on the definition of the vision for this group: the mission as each person saw it. What should this group do?
We went around the room again with each person stating their ideas.
--Steve Sengstock sees us as the "Shawano Volunteer Connection" providing the opportunity for volunteers and projects to find each other.
--several liked the requests for volunteers done by an email to a large list of interested people.
--another suggested that we should be the "eHarmony of Volunteers"
--Many wanted us to expand our service area beyond Shawano to other towns in our service area.
--Elaine Gast advised against having our group be a "call center" :receiving phone calls and making phone calls to find matches. Have people find what the need on our internet web pages.

Sandi Kane, of Shawano School District Community Education, had done a lot of research into other volunteer groups, focusing on Green Bay. she developed a proposal for us that puts "Shawano Volunteers" under the umbrella of the Community Education. this provides a phone number, and a place to go for handouts, etc.
The web site for volunteering would be incorporated into the Comm. Ed. website. This provides a solution to the problem with the Blog we have now: Many people cannot see the Blog from their work place, because their Company IT Filters block it out.
The method for getting out the information about volunteer needs and soultions would be a website administered by a national volunteer group. We will learn more about this at our next meeting.
There was a very positive reaction to her proposal. It looks very promising and we will continue to work out the details.

next meeting:

Thursday noon May 15, at the Daily Grind.
on the agenda:
Sandi Kane will show us some of the web pages used by other volunteer groups, so we can decide how we want ours to look.

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Published on April 14, 2008 5:10 AM