Posts by Paul Costello1
Today the AmeriCorps Team at Project Change are being trained to live and work more mindfully. Their teacher Gregory Robison, is an expert, having run the John Main Center at Georgetown University for the last few years.
AmeriCorps members are dealing with high risk and high need populations of young people, and every friday, when we meet for training, we share some of the challenges each member faces. Kids who are angry and distracted, kids who are battling the odds at home, and can’t really focus on school. When an AmeriCorps member seeks to make an impact on the troubled lives of young people, the risk is that Troubles spread like an infection to upset everybody. Members take the stress of their work home, and lose sleep worrying about that kid who get into a fight and was suspended, or concerned about that secret that that teen shared with her and not sure who else to share it with. Stress is part of the job description even if its not written in the formal contract. So there has to be ways that members can deal with it and be creative about how they care for themselves.
The old story of being a helper used to stress heroic self sacrifice, and that if one were to wear oneself out for others, that this was noble. Nowadays, we tend to see this old story as dysfunctional and misguided. What good are we to anyone in need if we are not meeting our own human needs? So the training today is meant to introduce and re-enforce some of the practices members can be encouraged to use and to teach others. Living mindfully means we don’t lose what is on offer in this moment, and refusing to allow the worries of the past or the fears of the future degrade the texture of everyday experience.
sive. But there is more. Another critical self learning tool focuses on VERSATILITY – the ability to meet what Harvard Professor Ron Heifetz calls Adaptive Challenges. Versatility, they say, is the best predictor of success and the key to interpersonal effectiveness.
This Friday, Project Change hosts the Supervisors of our 7 Partner Sites to come and share their experiences and learn more about AmeriCorps and the importance of the role that they play. Since many of them are graduates of Project Change itself, the meeting is also a sort of Alumni gathering too. We will share best practices and explore ways that the Supervisor Team can be the team that stands behind the Team.
got off to a great start, with four Friday meetings during the month of September to get everyone into the AmeriCorps groove. The highlight was our trip to Camp Letts, on a beautiful day where the team braved the dreaded zip wire in the morning and lazily canoed the river in the afternoon, and concluded with a camp fire and stories. Thanks to our guides Meredith and Richelle and a big shout out to the Supervisors and staff from our partner sites who joined us in a fun day.
aster Coach Lynne Feingold introducing the formal practice of Peer to Peer Group Coaching. The team have already started this activitity with the Bells and Whistles check-in time that starts every meeting. If a member has a challenge and they want more feedback, they request time from the group to have a conversation. During that time, the group acts as a coaching team, and asks questions to unfold the situation, then deeper questions to expose the assumptions behind the dilemma, and then to help the person come up with a positive plan of action that they are willing to hold themselves accountable for at the next meeting.
l practice that grew out of last years team, and something that members enjoyed and learned to practice as a life skill that could be applied to other areas of their work.