Training (June 2-June 6) and more about NSP

Hello Everyone again,

I am currently in Pennsylvania with Jessica staying with a friend of ours from school. For those of you who might know her, we are staying with Katie and her family. They are great and excellent hosts. They have made us feel very comfortable.

But, for those of you itching to know what I have learned about what I am doing from training... So... to start from the beginning, NSP (National Student Partnerships) is a non-profit organization that is run by mostly college students. During the year, it has volunteers from local colleges at the offices. In fact, for the year (Sept. 06- August 07) there were 532 volunteers serving 70,643 hours at the 12 different offices. It was started by two college students (from Yale) 10 years ago actually in New Haven who saw the effects of poverty in the cities and wanted to work towards something to improve life and help community members achieve a life in which they can be self-sustaining. There are 12 different offices (as far west as Chicago, IL) and spread out throughout the North-Eastern part of the country. The farthest south is Richmond, VA and as far north as Boston.

We offer a variety of services. We help clients or community members (words that help us maintain a level of professionalism and true value for those we are helping). Each office has partnering organizations in the community that helps the clients with typically specialized services, which we can refer them to in order to help them find any of the various services: Housing, Employment, SSI, Children Services, Clothing, Food (or Food stamps), transportation, budgeting, immigration, health care, legal services, education, as well as helping them create or perfect resumes, cover letters, etc. I (or we - all of the Summer Directors) will be working one-on-one with clients (either by appointment or walk-ins) to help them with various needs. On the client's first meeting with a NSP volunteer/worker, we will take their information as well as going through the various needs that we might be able to work with them to obtain. We will later put this into an online data base where we can track the interactions and record and successes of various needs for statistical information. It seems to be similar to a Social worker position but is perhaps more personal and allows them to work with us to help their situations. For more statistics, in 2007, NSP served 5,498 clients and had 16,629 client meetings (since they return for multiple meetings), while being able to render 89,470 services.

As it is probably clear, I feel like I have learned a lot about more of the services that we are able to offer, but am not clear exactly how we are going to do everything. :) It looks like it will come with experience and I am definitely excited for that. As that comes, i will be sure to share some stories. For the rest of this, I want to give some highlights of Training:

Tuesday - We got there and had lunch, intros, and then the rest of the day was focused around Diversity training. It was interesting and some good information, but seemed to be somewhat surface level and not really delving into the deeper issues about identity and such, but nonetheless, it was good.

Wed - We simply focused on client services most of the day. We listened to the director of programs for NSP talk about the importance of client meetings and even did some role playing to help us prepare for some interesting situations. It was good experience to help us know what a client meeting might be like and opened my eyes to how professional of a setting NSP is. At first, I was thinking that this might hinder the relationships with clients, but it seems that it gives a healthy environment, especially where clients can learn to appreciate us and themselves. It also helped us see some of the various situations that we might encounter and worked towards preparing ourselves for some of the typical situations.

Thurs - Wasn't as interesting of a day, but worked out some of the logistics. We went over telling people what NSP is and how to communicate it clearly to different audiences. We also worked with our co-summer directors (since there are 2-3 per office) to start some team building and begin getting acquainted with each other, including our strengths, weaknesses, etc. Also, went over some statistics to see all of the influences on effectiveness and efficiency.

The last day, Friday, was probably the best day (not just because it was shorter - 8am-1pm) but also because we were able to act out client situations. We were each given real life situations and told to act them out fully as we were trying to find housing. Some were married, single, with or without disabilities, etc. I was a single, male, with no children and handicapped (which I acted out by moving around with a chair - surprisingly helped me to see the perspective of someone in that situation). We were given 40 minutes to find housing and about half of the participants were able to do so. I found out that for the DC housing assistance program, there are actually (in real life) about 50,000 people on the waiting list for section 8 housing. The waiting list then is about 8-10 YEARS for someone on the list. They of course carried this over into the role play as i was put on the waiting list at somewhere around 18,300 or so. So, only 3-5 years.. :( It was an eye-opener for me to see this. Not only that, but because of my physical disability, i was unable to work and left to live on social security of $500 per month. This seems to be really accurate as getting to know some of the people in Patten Towers in Chattanooga during this last year at school, most of them live on $600 or less a month, paying 1/3 of that for housing. This was just one of the few places that was simulated for places to obtain housing. Others we places only for singles or even single-gendered families where if you are married, it is extremely hard to find housing. It was definitely a powerful way to close down with training (although we did a few things after that...) in opening our eyes to the difficulties of our clients and how we might be able to be understanding in that.

Tomorrow, I leave for New Haven to meet Ron (the person I will be staying with for the summer) and then Jessica will be continuing on to Boston. I am very excited to get started. Be looking forward to reading something of my first day... I believe there might be more reflections and info to come from that day. FEEL FREE TO LEAVE COMMENTS. Hope everyone is doing well.