Dear AFS Volunteers,

Happy New Year! We hope that 2018 will bring great things for AFS-USA and for you as an AFS Volunteer.

Many exciting things continue to progress via the Chappaqua Project, which is dedicated to strengthening and improving the volunteer experience at AFS.

In 2017, the Area Team-specific Profile and Planning Site was created, and today we are writing to share that your team’s site has been updated with the most recent statistics and feedback, including data gathered from the Winter 2017 Volunteer Survey. We believe this will be very useful for teams’ 2018 planning and evaluation efforts, and we encourage you to review the information on your own team’s site.

Additionally, to further assist with 2018 planning, the leaders of Team Development and Organizational Development have developed a new, (hopefully) improved, and simple Area Team Planning Template. The template is intended to help volunteer leaders and staff work together to create optimal team strategies for the year ahead.

It is our hope that these two resources – along with the data and information contained within – will spark discussion, debate, inspiration, and collaboration among staff and volunteers, contributing to growth and success (and fun!) in 2018.

Apart from developing these resources, the Organizational Development (OD) staff have been busy working on targeted OD projects with a number of teams. The OD unit also continues to create everyday resources for AFS Volunteers that are available through the Help & Learning module in MyAFS. Stay tuned for exciting news later this month about these training resources, and look out for an announcement about new MyAFS functionality as we continue to expand and improve this platform.

Remember – all Chappaqua-related updates will be posted in MyAFS News and tagged as “Chappaqua Project”.

Thank you,

Tara Hofmann and Mary Porterfield
Co-Chairs, the Chappaqua Project