With spring upon us, please keep in mind that the U.S. Department of State requires host families to be contacted at least once in person during the spring semester prior to the student’s departure. Liaisons, if you have not contacted your assigned host family in person since January 1, we ask that you do so as soon as possible. Please also continue to contact your students and host families on a monthly basis and record these contacts as soon as possible thereafter.

If you’ve made contacts throughout the cycle that you haven’t recorded yet, now is the perfect time to do so (see below). Although we are approaching the last few months of program, it’s as important as ever to keep up those conversations with your participants and help them finish their program on a strong note. This is also a great time of year to discuss different aspects of American culture that are coming up such as spring break, April Fool’s Day, baseball season, etc. What goals for their program do they still want to accomplish? Are there any activities they want to try that they haven’t gotten around to yet?

As volunteers, your individual actions and performance have an impact on your entire team. At next month’s AFS Volunteer Summit: National Volunteer Assembly, we’ll be handing out Area Team Health Charts that will include each team’s compliance performance for the entire cycle. By making sure you have all your required contacts and visits completed and recorded in a timely manner, you’ll be doing your part to ensure your team’s numbers are as high as possible. Risk Management, Compliance and Quality Assurance staff will be pulling this data on Wednesday, April 11th, so we ask you to please take some time in the next few weeks to ensure all your contacts and visits are completed and recorded by that date. Please reach out to your TDS if you have any questions!