The NH19 Hosting Application Distribution Process is now available in Help & Learning and will go live on Monday, January 14.

Based on feedback from volunteers and staff via the hosting survey that was sent out in the fall of 2018, we have made a few changes this year. Here is a summary of all the changes:

• The countries whose applications will be assigned to gateway regions and made Regionally Available are: Austria, Chile, Denmark, Spain, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, and Thailand.
• Regionally Available students may be Community Placed starting March 5th or 6th (depending on the students’ assigned travel gateway). We are using two different gateways in order to reduce the likelihood of Global Link crashing when teams log on to begin CPing students.
• When Community Placing of students begins, Teams may CP up to 50% of their NH19 hosting goal. Teams must CP any remaining students up to their Hosting goal between June 1st-6th.
• On April 15th, Teams with a YES hosting goal of 1-5 students may CP one YES student. Teams with a YES hosting goal of 6 or more students may CP two YES students.
• When a student is initially released into Regionally Available, they will not be eligible to be Community Placed until 14 days after the application is distributed, so as to give volunteers time to find a family for each student before the students can be CPed.
• There will be an additional wave of student arrivals. A 2nd wave of Core program students will arrive August 28th in addition to the regularly scheduled week of August 7th for 1st arrivals and September 11th for 3rd/ final arrivals. This change was made to ensure that students who did not have a placement in time for 1st arrivals can still begin their program earlier than the 2nd week of September.
• The “Area Team Hold Request Rule” has been removed. Instead, it will be left up to the discretion of the Area Team and TDS with the active Hold whether or not they will give up the student to another Team that requests they do so. If a team does not want to give up their Hold early, then the other teams in the queue will need to wait their turn or select a different student.
• Because we will no longer have the AT Hold Request Rule, Area Team Holds have been shortened so that they expire at 11:45 pm EST on the 2nd day after being accepted, rather than the 3rd. This should allow the Hold queue to be resolved more quickly than in previous years.
• To help ensure that Hold queues move as quickly as possible, people will receive auto emails 10 days after entering a Hold if the Hold is still in queue to confirm if they still want the Hold, or if the family they had in mind is no longer interested and the Hold can be released.

The distribution process is intended to ensure that all teams have the opportunity to place easier-to-place students and that our weakest teams aren’t left to place our hardest-to-place students. If you have questions or suggestions for future changes, please contact your TDS. Thank you!