I am very pleased to let you all know that the Customer Experience Department is making a positive change in the way that we interact with volunteers and field staff. After gathering feedback from volunteers and staff at the NVA, organizing individual meetings, and conducting in depth team review of the 2016-2017 year in Sending, we have decided to assign Study Abroad Specialists by Senior TDS Team moving forward. This means that each Area Team will have one Study Abroad Specialist assigned to the core applicants from their team, and that the Sending volunteers and field staff will have one point of contact in the Customer Experience Department.

We appreciate your patience as we work to roll out these assignments over the coming weeks. We currently have four full time Study Abroad Specialist staff members who have been assigned new Senior TDS Teams. They will be spending the rest of the week reaching out to TDS and volunteers in their teams. We are in the process of hiring three new Study Abroad Specialists to replace those that are leaving AFS-USA and they will be assigned the remaining Senior TDS Teams. We plan to have the full list of assignments to you, and updated in Global Link and Help and Learning, as soon as possible!

We hope that this will be a welcome change to our processes, increasing collaboration and reigniting Sending in all of our teams across the country! If you have any comments or questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at cSchneider@afsusa.org.