The Help-Files: The Truth Is Here
Vol02: Iss02 – Core Team Orientation Focus Course
By now most everyone connected with Serve the City knows about our Focus Interest Course for potential City Leaders, hosted on servethecity.academy! But you may be surprised to learn that there is another course provided for you to train others who may not want or need to go through an entire 8-week course!
Presenting the Core Team Orientation Course on Focus. This course contains some of the most basic and necessary content that is presented in the Interest Course on a shorter timeline, and in a way that can be moderated by City Leaders. It can also be used as a course for major partners to learn about STC in a deeper way.
What is taught in the course? The CTO Course is comprised of two of the main modules in the Interest course:
- Distinctives of Serve the City: History, Vision, Values, Tensions…
- Serve the City Structure and Practice: Core Teams, Partnerships, Event/Projects, Global Connections…
There are a total of 12 lessons, featuring both text and video. Each lesson ends with 1-3 discussion questions that can be used to debrief the content.
How can I use the course? As you might imagine, this course is designed mostly to be used with Core Teams in a number of flexible ways:
- In a group or one-on-one. A City Leader can go through the material with a whole Core Team together, or can use the material to orient a new Core Team member who has joined.
- In the case of a team going through it together, they can use the discussion questions to debrief the content and apply it to their context.
- In the case of an individual, they can send/discuss their answers to the questions with a mentor (City Leader or another Core Team member).
- In 2-3 weeks or over 12 weeks. If a City Leader is trying to get started with a new team, they may want to cover the material in a short time. But in an established STC program, the team could do one lesson a week as a review.
- In-person, online, or hybrid.
- In-person: For an established team, they might choose to use the videos to do one lesson at their weekly meetings and discuss it using the questions
- Online: Teams or individuals might do the lessons online and discuss using a forum they create.
- Hybrid: New teams might meet to start, then do each online module individually, getting together after each one to discuss the answers they have recorded.
More detailed descriptions of each of these can be found in the Core Team Orientation Course Handbook.
Who can use the course? We have made the course available to anyone, so you can recommend it to whomever you choose, sending an email to us at registration@servethecity.academy when you do this. Besides Core Team members, you may find that it is useful:
- For key partners who are working extensively with you—whether Serving Partners like a police force, or Volunteer Partners like a school. You may recommend that your liaison go through the whole course and debrief it with you.
- For new board members who need to understand the organisation.
You may find others who can use it as well… let us know
We hope that this tool will help you in many and various ways to train those most important in building your volunteer community!
