Site Recruitment Success!!

Yesterday I understood the impact that site recruitment can have. Even three or four successful visits out of 12 can make a recruitment feel successful. We performed a site visit in Middletown and my favorite visit was definitely the Life Skills center. The principal and the family advocate immediately jumped on board. We were even able to show them how to use the quick check and the question answer format of the OBB website. Our green VISTA polos were even noticed. The family advocate said, "When you two first walked in, I thought you two were from the girl scouts!" For future site recruitments it might behoove us to bring cookies.

Smart $!

This past Friday was my first resource fair! Even though Alex and I had major issues with her computer and couldn't perform quick checks, I would say it was definitely a success! We still gave them quick check cards and gave directions about how to do a quick check online. We talked to many people who had never previously heard of the Benefit Bank and were very glad that they found about it. They picked up brochures for their elderly parents and children. Many people shared their personal stories with us; for instance, one woman told us that she has lost her job and has to take care of her family, and her mother, who is retired, is having trouble paying for food. She wants to help her mother, but is unable to. She was very relieved when she learned about the potential benefits available for her mother. Talking to people and learning about the personal story is the part that I enjoyed the most. It is amazing how open people are to sharing their situation.

Site Recruitment

Site recruitment is much more exhausting than I thought it would be. There are many impediments in a seemingly simple task. First, it was difficult to find non-existing sites: we looked up the address of a location on its website and drove there to find that the building was a residence. The next challenge we faced when we did located a site was to see if it was open and if there were people present who it would be beneficial for us to talk to. This experience was helpful in understanding the persistence needed to recruit benefit bank sites.
Today, I called people who attended the Health Path event and who are interested in becoming a benefit bank site. It felt so great when I talked with someone who was interested in becoming a benefit bank site!

Observing training and OBB/Health Path Event

The end of last week was eventful.
Last Wednesday, I had the opportunity to observe Meredith giving a training at the Great Oaks campus. I was amazed at how quickly the time passed. Luckily almost everyone was engaged in the material and computer literate. I was surprised that I had never thought of some of the questions people asked. From this experience, I realized that I will not have the answer to all of people's questions, even if I know the training manual cover to cover. I learned to learned how to create a light atmosphere and learned to improvise without wasting the volunteers' time. For instance, our computers were not working in the beginning; thus, Meredith discussed the benefits first and then worked on the Alice Nelson scenario all at once after the computers were fixed.
On Thursday, I went to Troy for a OBB/Health Path event. There was a great turnout! The information presented was essentially the same material from our training guides about the OBB. There was not much information presented about Health Path and I didn't get to learn much about this organization. The amount of people who attended that were interested in coming a Benefit Bank site was astounding. The people were looking forward getting their organizations involved and becoming benefit counselors. I'm glad that I went for this reason!