Brandeis Creates New AmeriCorps Scholarship!

http://www.pointsoflight.org/blog/brandeis-university-offers-scholarships-americorps

Make a Difference Day

Last Friday and Saturday, we participated in Make a Difference Day, helping Duke University with some of their projects. Here are some photos of the group of us who helped out doing grounds work at Morehead Montessori school in Durham.

Make a Difference Day ideas

  I met with Amelia and her site supervisors at Duke this morning and got some more details about Duke's plans for Make a Difference Day. They are doing some school beautification in Durham on Friday (and need about 60 volunteers) and on Saturday will host a tent in the West Campus quad to plant seeds and decorate clay pots to donate to the cancer ward patients at the Duke Children's Hospital. Saturday's event needs volunteers to help set up and break down the tent (as well as man it during the day) and to pack and deliver the clay pots to the group who will distribute them to the cancer patients. We could participate in either or both of these projects if you are interested. I was thinking we could set up some volunteer shift times on both days so that people can choose which event they would like to help with.
  The planning committee is having another conference call this Friday to discuss ideas, but if you have an idea for a service project that fits within the theme of "neighbors helping neighbors," please post it here. You're also welcome to participate in the conference call (contact me for the number). An AmeriCorps member with the National Aids Fund AmeriCorps/Caring Counts program will also be in on the call. She is part of a five person team that is stationed in the Triangle and would like to collaborate with other AmeriCorps groups. For some more info/ideas about Make a Difference Day, please visit their website.

Updated Google Calendar

I tried to embed the NC LiteracyCorps google calendar in the blog, but could not get it to work (not sure if this is through incompetence on my part or a larger problem). Here is the link to the updated google calendar, including trainings and due dates.

New (old) SCALE website

SCALE has recently updated its website. Click on NC LiteracyCorps to visit our new page. To access forms, evaluations, and other information, click on resources.

Training manuals

For those of you who have not already done so, I encourage you to create a manual for the person who will take over for you once you finish your service. Some of you may have had the advantage of using manuals that were created by previous members. There are a lot of different aspects to the AmeriCorps positions and each site is unique, so I think having a "how to" guide could be extremely helpful.
Some of you have created some excellent volunteer manuals this year and I'd like for us to have a way to share those with each other. I'm open to suggestion, but perhaps converting them into google documents would enable us all to collaborate in a useful way.

National Service Resources

I've just added a widget for the http://nationalserviceresources.org/, which has some really great resources for volunteer and service programs. I encourage all of you to poke around the website and post to the blog about anything interesting/useful you find.

Welcome to the NC LiteracyCorps blog! I'm not sure yet what form this will take, but I hope it will prove an effective communication tool for LiteracyCorps members so that we can share ideas, talk about our successes and challenges, and use each other as resources.