ISSUE
15: November 11, 2008
For
the Hungry: Sustainable Event Supplements VISTA Project
Build
Your Capacity & Sustainability: A VISTA Campus Review
Ensuring
Sustainability: 250 Projects at a Time
Food
Stamps are “SNAP”
And
the winner of this issue’s free VISTA hoodie is…
For
the Hungry: Sustainable Event Supplements VISTA Project
The
Destiny Foundation of Central Florida was founded in 2001 as a long-term
food subsidy program and has expanded into food security, workforce
development, and health education to break the cycle of poverty.
VISTAs
Tony Higdon and Melissa Carson are
working to make the Destiny Foundation’s Thanksgiving Drive
larger and more sustainable.
For the
past seven years, the organization has spearheaded a community-wide
food drive for Thanksgiving. Through careful preparation and learning
from their successes and mistakes, the Destiny Foundation has made
the annual food drive the centerpiece of their outreach events.
The Thanksgiving Drive is one piece of the Destiny Foundation’s
VISTA project and individual VISTA assignments, which include VISTA
positions focused on volunteer programs, evaluation, media, development,
programming and outreach—but the Drive supplements every area
of work. It increases awareness, which builds the donor and volunteer
base throughout the year and helps to bring new clients into its programs.
With more resources and volunteers, the Destiny Foundation is able
to expand its programming in food security, workforce development,
health education and other social services—thus working to break
the long-term cycle of poverty through resources, education and support.
VISTA Tony Higdon and the organization’s president and founder,
Scott George, took time out of their Thanksgiving drive preparations
to give insight into what makes their food drive so successful:
| Viewfinder: |
How
does the Thanksgiving drive fit into the Destiny Foundation’s
mission?
|
| Tony:
|
The
Food Drive has become such a tradition in the Orlando area that
schools and agencies that participate and individuals who benefit
from the meals begin to anticipate the event months in advance.
With the number of individuals we serve increasing and funding
for services like ours declining, it is more important now than
ever to be able to offer nourishment to those in our community
who may otherwise not have much for a traditional Thanksgiving
meal.
|
| Scott:
|
We all
rally when it comes to Thanksgiving because it’s about
food, and our core mission is to help with food. It exposes
us to potential corporate and individual donors and volunteer
groups. It opens up a lot of opportunities that last throughout
the year. It’s great for Thanksgiving and is much, much
needed, but it also gives people a window into our organization
to help out during the year.
|
| Viewfinder: |
How
does the Thanksgiving drive fit into the larger VISTA project?
|
| Scott:
|
It’s
a wonderful way for our VISTAs to connect with public schools,
churches, and organizations throughout Central Florida. In this
economic crisis, many people are in need. For the VISTAs, it connects
them with people who are in need.
|
| Viewfinder: |
Tony,
describe your involvement with this year’s event.
|
| Tony:
|
My assignment
in this project is to oversee the planning, preparation and on-site
registration for this year’s Thanksgiving meals. Melissa
Carson, our Research Analyst VISTA, manages our internal client
pre-registration, staffs registration tables with volunteers,
and assists in maintaining the integrity of our membership data
by making sure that each client who registered had a valid membership
ID. I’ve been able to use data from previous years and improve
on processes that have allowed us to increase our goal from last
year’s 5,000 meals to 10,000 this year.
|
| Viewfinder: |
What
are the VISTAs doing to make this event and this year’s
growth sustainable?
|
| Tony:
|
Recordkeeping,
logging donations, and creating booklets for processing meals
all add to the sustainability of this event. We have partnered
with local organizations to coordinate manuals, fliers, diagrams,
and planning schedules to assist future planning committees so
that no re-creation of tools should be necessary.
|
For more information about the Destiny Foundation of Central Florida
or its Thanksgiving Food Drive, visit http://www.battlepoverty.org/.
Five Tips for Making Events or Drives Sustainable
- Create manuals, guides and other materials to guide staff and
volunteers through the planning and implementation process. These
will be used in future years.
- Recruit and train a group of volunteers to run every aspect of
the event and/or drive. Once VISTAs are no longer at the organization,
the event will continue through volunteer leadership.
- Partner with other organizations, businesses, schools, etc. Remember
to recognize and send “Thank You’s” to all partners
when the event is over. Fond memories will make them want to participate
in the future.
- Articulate how the event or drive fits into the overall mission
of the organization. This is useful in recruiting volunteers, interacting
with the media and ensuring that the event stays focused.
- Evaluate the event or drive and document successes and areas for
improvement for next year’s staff and volunteers to reference.
Think
about who will be doing this next year. In all likelihood, it will
be someone other than you, so be sure what you are doing can be replicated!
Also, think about ways that your efforts in event planning can boost
your VISTA assignment and increase overall capacity in the organization’s
fight against poverty.
For more information, visit the event
planning section on the VISTA Campus.
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Build
Your Capacity & Sustainability:
A VISTA Campus Review
By Laura Herberg
VISTA, Step by Step
Charleston, WV
Understanding what capacity building and sustainability
mean is one thing—actually ensuring them in your work is another.
The VISTA Campus has designed a tutorial that will help you to understand
what successful capacity building and sustainably look like and to
help you start to consider this in terms of your own VISTA assignment.
The tutorial, takes you through three scenarios where you learn about
how different VISTAs have their assignments completed. After reading
each of these scenarios, you are asked to assess whether or not the
VISTA was successful at building capacity. There are multiple choice
questions and longer, personal responses.
You type your personal responses in a text box, and press “submit”
when you’re finished, as if you’re about to post something
on someone’s Facebook wall, which makes me think a little harder
about what I was saying (no one wants to post something dumb on someone’s
wall). Once you press “submit”, however, the only consequence
is that you’re able to compare your own answer to the tutorial’s
answer.
After going through this with all three scenarios, you should have
a better grasp on some specifics of what kinds of things work and
do not work, and make capacity building what you may actually try
to do.
You also are asked to take what you’ve learned about capacity
building and apply it to your own VISTA position by writing about
it in a feature of the VISTA Campus, called the journal.
If you do this every time you complete a VISTA campus tutorial you
will not only be able to refer back to your thoughts on capacity building
(because this online journal saves all your responses), but on many
other topics as well.
Since VISTAs are people who have voluntarily decided to serve a year
of their time at home to better their country while gaining invaluable
job skills, I can't imagine any of you not wanting to take advantage
of this resource to hone your VISTA skills, and in turn make a more
lasting difference in other people’s lives.
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Ensuring
Sustainability: 250 Projects at a Time
When
your VISTA Service ends, how will you know if your efforts will be
sustained? For that matter, how does VISTA know if the program as
a whole is living up to its purpose of building sustainable anti-poverty
programs?
Some things, like
the number of volunteers recruited or the amount of dollars raised
are easy to measure. However, standard measurements in professional
research fail to gauge sustainability.
For that reason, VISTA has contracted with Westat, a private survey
and analysis firm, to measure just how successful we have been. Westat
has selected 250 currently-active projects and 250 projects that have
been closed for at least two years for the study. Over the course
of the next several months, they will review applications and progress
reports from the project sponsors, interview project and State Office
staff, and analyze the results. Their work will determine if the efforts
of VISTAs at these projects have been or are likely to be sustained,
how VISTA has contributed to that sustainability, and what VISTA can
do to ensure that we continue to be an effective resource.
The study is scheduled to be complete late next spring. We hope that
it will lead to new approaches that VISTA can undertake to ensure
that we continue to be an invaluable resource in the fight against
poverty.
Please stay tuned to the Viewfinder for the study results next year.
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Food
Stamps are “SNAP”
The Food Stamp
Program (FSP) is our nation’s first line of defense against
hunger. Each month, FSP helps 28 million low-income people put healthy
food on the table. As of October 1, 2008, the new name for the federal
Food Stamp Program is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
(SNAP).
While SNAP is the federal name for the program, State programs may
have different names. The new name reflects the changes the USDA made
to meet the needs of our clients, including a focus on nutrition.
Program improvements include an increase in the minimum benefit (from
$10 to $14) and an increase in the standard deduction per household
(from $134 to $144 in FY 2009). The standard deduction is a fixed
dollar amount that is subtracted from a household’s income before
SNAP benefits are determined. On average, the standard deduction allows
for an increase in SNAP benefits per household.
Other program improvements include the elimination of the cap on dependent
care deduction (includes child care and elder care) and the exclusion
of education and retirement accounts from countable resources. Through
nutrition education partners, SNAP helps clients learn to make healthy
eating and active lifestyle choices.
For more information about SNAP or one of the USDA’s Food and
Nutrition Services fifteen programs, please visit http://www.fns.usda.gov.
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And
the winner of this issue’s free VISTA hoodie is…
Derick
Bishop
VISTA Leader
Volunteer Center of Southern Arizona
Derick, e-mail VISTAOutreach@cns.gov
with your address and shirt size, and we’ll send you a VISTA
hoodie!
VISTAs and alumni, keep posting “V is for” photos and
stories to enter the contest. You only have to post once to be eligible
for every issue. For more information, visit the VISTA
Campus.
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Frequently Asked Questions:
Q: What is the Viewfinder?
A: VISTA means view-looking out on a broad expanse. The viewfinder, a toy that all generations of VISTAs recognize, was a kind of binocular that focused on points of interest, highlights, and snapshots in living color. The VISTA Viewfinder surveys in the landscape and zeroes in on service.
Q. Why the Viewfinder?
A. Here’s your direct link to connecting with other VISTAs, learning what they are doing, and helping to spread the message of VISTA and national service!
Q. How can I contribute?
A.
Have a story to tell? Submission ideas? Contact vistaoutreach@cns.gov.
Use the Viewfinder to highlight your VISTA service and share your
experiences with others across the country!
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