Volpe Journal Spring 98
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Volpe Volunteers Structure a TEAM Effort to Help Cambridge Residents
For the past five years, a substantial number of workers at the Volpe Centerboth federal employees and on-site contractor personnelhave volunteered their time and effort to help the children and adults in their community. The TEAM (Tutoring, Edu-cation, and Mentoring) Effort has provided volunteer teachers and mentors for elementary and high school students, adults learning English as a second language, and new employees at the Volpe Center. The results have been positive for the volunteers, the adults and children they have helped, and the Center itself, as well as the larger community. The TEAM Effort is headed by Lynn Murray, the Center's Chief of Communications and Technology Outreach. (View Photo: Members of the TEAM Effort.)
People who have never been to Cambridge, MA, are likely to visualize it as it is depicted in movies, with well-dressed, middle-class white Americans strolling in Harvard Yard between well-tended, ivy-covered buildings and majestic trees. The reality of Cambridge, the home of the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, includes not only Harvard, MIT, and quiet, affluent neighborhoods, but also a large, low-income minority community that is infused with a steady stream of immigrants arriving from all over the world. In any one year, teachers at Cambridge Rindge & Latin, the city's only high school, might be instructing students who are native speakers of more than 50 different languages. In Cambridge, the economic and ethnic melting pot is not an abstract concept; it is a daily reality. Like the immigrants who preceded them during the 390 years since the first colonists arrived from Europe, these new arrivals are here because they aspire to a better life than the one they left behind. The great majority of them are highly motivated to study and work hard to achieve their dreams.
In the spring of 1992, five years before the current national emphasis on volunteerism made it fashionable, a group of federal employees and contractor personnel working at Volpe decided to devote some time and effort to contributing to their community. Center Director Dr. Richard R. John and his management team reacted positively, promising their support while making it clear that volunteering was an individual responsibility. Community service efforts could draw on the Center's resources, but Volpe volunteers had to invest their own time in the effort.
Lynn Murray, who was then executive assistant to Dr. John, arranged for the group to meet with two existing community-service organizations, Cambridge Community Services and Cambridge School Volunteers, as well as with representatives from several Cambridge businesses that had school-volunteer programs. Based on the first-hand accounts of experienced individuals from these active volunteer groups, along with their knowledge of their own capabilities and the demands on their time, the Center group members structured a program that they called the Volpe TEAM Effort. The Volpe TEAM Effort was officially launched at the Center in October 1992, with Cambridge's mayor and assistant superintendent of schools both present.
(View Figure 1: Children from nearby schools visiting the Center on the occasion of the Department of Transportation's 30th anniversary celebration last spring.)
FOUR ALTERNATIVES AVAILABLE
To attract as many participants as possible, the Volpe TEAM Effort was structured to encompass four different programs likely to appeal to a variety of potential volunteers:
Members of a two- or three-person team of volunteers meet one morning each week at 7:45 A.M. to teach a one-hour lesson to groups of six or eight students. The courses originally extended for half a school year but were restructured to last only eight weeks in either the spring or the fall, with the winter portion dropped because of weather-related difficulties.
The courses cover not only subjects in which the volunteers have professional interest, such as computer science and career opportunities in technology or transportation, but also their avocations, including dance, jazz music, ethnic cooking, art and spatial concepts, creative writing, astronomy, sports science, stocks and bonds, and the design and flight testing of paper airplanes. Last year, the Center's human factors group even presented the seventh graders with a course in psychology.
The volunteers go to the school twice each week to meet with their students during 35-minute study periods. In addition to assisting their students with math, science, history, and other academic subjects, they also help them with the English language, and they act as role models for students who might not have suitable adults performing that function. To help the students learn responsibility, each student/mentor pair signs a contract that obligates them both to attend every session, to arrive on time, and to notify the other in advance if one will be late or unavailable to meet as scheduled.
At the time the TEAM Effort was deciding on its volunteering options, the Community Learning Center in Cambridge had a two-year waiting list of adults who wanted to attend ESL classes. Moreover, the Learning Center had never trained volunteers to instruct ESL. Now adults from Russia, China, Japan, India, Vietnam, Cape Verde, Eretria, El Salvador, Haiti, Brazil, and other countries come to the Volpe Center to receive ESL instruction from Center volunteers.
Although as many as 45 students are in the program at any one time, individual classes, which meet two nights per week, are kept small. The ESL instructors make a point of teaching more than the language; they also teach basic skills that help their students obtain jobs and become integrated into American society. The students, although they need help with English, are often professionals in their countries of origin and sometimes are fluent in several other languages. Nonetheless, because they do not speak English adequately, without the ESL program, they might be limited to low-paying service-sector or manual-labor jobs.
The program has proven so successful that the Community Learning Center has since contacted other businesses in an effort to locate additional volunteer trainers. Already, two ESL teachers at the Volpe Center are not Volpe workers but people who live or work nearby.
In addition to trainees, mentored employees include public school students whose Volpe Center jobs are enabling them to remain in rather than drop out of school. Volpe volunteers not only act as workplace mentors but also encourage the employees to establish career goals and to obtain the education they need to achieve these goals.
KEEPING PARTICIPATION HIGH
Each fall, the TEAM Effort kicks off with a welcoming party providing coffee and doughnuts, pizza, or other light refreshments both to previous volunteers and prospective recruits. Everyone attending has the opportunity to hear the current status of each of the four options, to meet people who have been active in each, and to learn what they can expect if they choose to contribute their time and efforts. Throughout the year, an oversight group meets regularly to review progress and discuss issues that have arisen. These meetings are part of the effort to keep the program fresh in the eyes of actual and potential volunteers, while simultaneously institutionalizing it so that the wheel is not constantly being reinvented. Finally, at the end of each school year, the oversight group sponsors a "volunteer appreciation" event, such as a cookout or ice-cream social, for those who have contributed their efforts.
The Volpe Center work force includes about 550 federal employees and 500 to 600 onsite contractors. At any one time, approximately 5 percent of these individuals50 to 60 volunteersare participating in one of the programs. This is an excellent rate, considering the extensive travel schedules of many Volpe employees. Of course, the TEAM options were designed with travel schedules and similar demands in mind. Most responsibilities are shared, so a volunteer who must be away when he or she is scheduled for volunteer duties can be assured that another team member will be available to take over those duties.
Volunteering is not a continuous, long-term commitment. Some volunteers work for a time, then take some time off before returning to the program. For example, some may volunteer only to teach a fall semester at the elementary school, then take the spring semester off, and decide to return again the following fall. Other volunteers change programs; for example, one may finish a year in the high school mentoring program, then decide to become an in-house mentor rather than return to the high school program. The ability to choose and change among four different programs within the TEAM Effort is one of the program's strengths, because it reduces the potential for volunteer "burnout."
In addition to the four formal programs, the TEAM Effort has stressed ways to encourage individual participation in the hope that those who undertake a one-time project will enjoy the psychological rewards and become a regular volunteer. As one Center worker put it, "There's so much negative publicity about teenagers today. It's healthy to meet these kids and see that most of them are not what you might expect. They're worth knowing."
Some of the current and proposed efforts include:
- Participating in the elementary school program by presenting a talk to a class, assisting a teacher with a specific topic, or providing technical assistance in using computers;
- Giving demonstrations of the projects they're working on when the Center hosts field trips for elementary or high school students;
- Hosting students on "job shadowing" days; and
- Suggesting projects for school science fairs and evaluating the students' work.
And management doesn't just encourage employees to volunteer; it sets the example. Several division chiefs are in-house mentors, and one teaches in the adult education program. Dr. John himself initiated a forum that enabled workers from at least 30 Cambridge businesses to hear presentations by volunteers from nine of the local companies that sponsor volunteer programs. This participation at the management level has sent a positive message to both the active volunteers and those who may be thinking of joining the program.
TRAINING THE TRAINERS
The Volpe Center makes every effort to ensure that volunteers get all of the help, encouragement, and recognition they deserve. The TEAM Effort staff regularly hosts meetings with the Cambridge School Volunteers and the Cambridge Community Services to exchange information that could make the programs run more smoothly and the volunteers' tasks easier.
Volunteers are not "thrown to the lions" unprepared. For all educational programselementary school, high school, and adult ESL learningvolunteers are given the knowledge they need to teach effectively. For example, the orientation programs conducted in the spring and fall for elementary school volunteers include not just training in communications skills but also a profile of the student body, information about the developmental issues of adolescence and the adolescent mindset, guidelines for preparing lesson plans, and a discussion of "do's and dont's" provided by experienced teachers and volunteers. Volunteer high school mentors receive similar training. The ESL tutors, who are not required to be proficient in any foreign language, are given an eight-hour training course to prepare them to work with the adults who attend the classes.
The Cambridge School Volunteers and Cambridge Community Services have been invaluable in providing structure and training for the TEAM Effort volunteers. Without the procedural guidance provided by these organizations, it is likely that the effort would have failed not for lack of willingness but because of inexperience in the tasks that the volunteers undertook.
(View Figure 2: At an ESC class in a computer lab, Volpe volunteers encourage skill development while teaching language proficiency.)
CHALLENGES OF THE HIGH SCHOOL PROGRAM
Not every aspect of a successful program flourishes equally. The high school mentoring program has been the most challenging of the four efforts in terms of recruiting volunteers, and one major reason is the definition of mentoring as a one-on-one effort. With most Volpe employees having substantial professional responsibilities, including, in many cases, a requirement for frequent travel, many are unable to make the commitment to meeting with their students twice each week. The other programs, which are team responsibilities, are more adapted to this workplace reality. To ease this problem, the program has been modified to allow several variations:
- Some volunteers staff a drop-in learning center, rather than serve as mentors to individual students.
- Some mentors are assigned in pairs; the second mentor is available to serve when the primary mentor is unavailable.
- An option is now available to tutor one longer session each week, rather than shorter sessions twice per week.
The high school's location creates another difficulty. Although the adult education program and the in-house mentoring are conducted within the Volpe Center, and the elementary school is only a five-minute walk away, the high school is more than a mile away, in an area where parking is essentially impossible. To overcome this difficulty, the school is considering an option that will bring students to the Volpe Center for tutoring rather than requiring the tutor to travel to the school.
The time of day assigned for tutoring has been another problem. The volunteers either must meet their students early in the morning (a time not conducive for learning for many high school students) or make special arrangements to use flexible time for early afternoon meetings. The logistics of working at the high school went against the program, as did the experience of some volunteers who made a special effort to be there at the designated time, only to find that their assigned student did not show up. Some volunteers felt that they were expected to be excessively tolerant of juvenile behavior.
Finally, of course, adults have a certain uneasiness when facing older teenagers. Most volunteers felt more at ease dealing with elementary school students, employees at the Volpe Center, or adults who were taking self-improvement classes at their own initiative. To overcome this reluctance, training given to volunteers for the high school program emphasized the need to see beyond stereotyping based on age and cultural background.
MEASURING SUCCESS
In programs where volunteers supplement the work of regular teachers, it is impossible to allocate some percentage of improvements in grades to the efforts of the volunteer. Similarly, an in-house mentor is not likely to claim that he was the reason for an employee's decision to return to school or to seek a promotion to a position with more responsibility. Most volunteers get their satisfaction from the sense that they have helped someone to improve his or her life, and they are not really concerned with measurements or statistics.
(Read Sidebar: "The TEAM Effort Becomes Part of a 'National League'")
By its very nature, the TEAM Effort does not need to justify itself in terms of return on investment. Students' showing their volunteer tutors test papers with good grades and thanking them for help in getting that gradethat is all the justification Volpe volunteers need.
Although the schools reported that the tutored students showed academic improvement, the students themselves were often looking for something other than a better test score. One high school student commented on his experience with a Volpe tutor by saying, "My tutor listens to me and helps me with anything I ask. Anything!" Obviously, this personal interest was a very high priority for that student.
Another immeasurable benefit students gain is exposure to a wide variety of occupations that otherwise might be unknown to them. Who will ever know that a student made an occupational choice only because someone in that field set an example the student wanted to emulate?
Still, subtle success measures were noted. For example, the staff teachers at the elementary school noted that attendance was higher on the days that mini-courses were held, and students seemed to dress better. They also reported that students made a point of showing their teachers the items they made during the mini-courses: photos, paper airplanes, a barometer. The students talked with pride about the people they knew "in that tall building" near the school.
Surprisingly, the program proved to benefit another groupthe teachers in the host schools. The program boosts their morale by giving outside professionals first-hand exposure to the real world of public school teaching. It brings something new and different into the teachers' daily routines, exposing them to people and ideas they normally would not contact. Not incidentally, the program gives teachers class preparation time that might otherwise be unavailable because they would be monitoring study halls or working individually with students who are instead with their mentors.
But program success relates not just to the recipients, but also to the givers. The comments of the volunteers are one of the best recommendations for the TEAM Effort:
- "The students are terrific; I learned a lot from them. It was a great experience."
- "Me, a teacher? I was a little nervous at first, but now I know that I can teach and have fun with the students. I actually know things that they want to learn about. That's the best part of the whole thing, learning that about myself."
- "You get a lot more than you give, even when you volunteer. What can I say? Life isn't fair."
Finally, the TEAM Effort has transformed the Volpe Center's local image. Once largely unknown in Cambridge, even though it ranked as one of the city's dozen or so largest employers, the Center is now widely regarded as one of the city's most valued corporate citizens. Volunteering has proven to be a winner for everyone involved.
(View Figure 3: The Volpe Center in-house mentoring program promotes the furtherance of educational and career goals.)
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