VISTA position in San Francisco

The AmeriCorps Program at City College of San Francisco is looking for a
VISTA to begin their year of service with the program ASAP.  Our program
focuses on
providing students at City College of San Francisco, the largest community
college in the nation, with the opportunity to both learn about teaching
and serve their communities.  These two goals are accomplished by placing
the Members with children in grades pre-k through third grade as
literacy
tutors, while the volunteers also take child development classes at City
College. They
serve their communities in 15 San Francisco Unified School District
elementary schools and City College child development centers.  

Two thirds
of our 50 volunteers are single student parents on welfare, and are using
this opportunity to
gain work experience and skills to help them get jobs in the field of
child development or elementary education. Our group, which
includes mostly women, range in age from 20 to 45.  Most are single
mothers, some are grandmothers, all are wonderful, and their ethnicity
and race are diverse..

General VISTA Job Description
1.  Develop an Advisory Board composed of welfare recipients, mentor
teachers (our Member's supervisors) and social workers.  This group's
function is to serve as the voice of the community being served, and to
give the volunteers a vehicle through which to voice concerns about
anything ranging from an inadequate housing situation their living with, 
to suggestions for changing the weekly training we provide them.

2.  Help the students who need it to access City College's and the San
Francisco community's health and human services resources.  For many of
our volunteers the VISTA becomes a trusted and relied-upon resource
because of the consistent and frequent contact they end up having with him
or her during our Friday group training sessions.  

3.  Recruit volunteers to serve in the San Francisco Unified School
District as literacy tutors (these would be non-AmeriCorps volunteers).

4.  Get donations in the form of books to be given to the schools or
general community we serve, and services, as in the way of in-kind support
from service providers.

5.  Coordinate community service projects with the AmeriCorps volunteers
and the San Francisco community.  This activity will not only meet
community needs, but also help to establish cohesion amongst the
volunteers.

Our staff is composed on one coordinator, one program assistant, one
general counselor who works both for City College and AmeriCorps, and one
supervisor.  The latter two have over 30 years of combined experience
working with City College and the San Francisco community.  The
coordinator was the program's VISTA, and the assistant served as a VISTA
as well (on another program) in 1979-80.  We all work well
together, and have the experience and resources to support a VISTA.

If you have questions or are interested in applying call Christine Gauthier,
program coordinator, at 415-920-2393 between 8 and 5 M-F.  In the event
that you can't get through or the voice mailbox is full call our
program assistant, Arnie Warshaw, at 415-920-2394.  

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Christine Gauthier
AmeriCorps Program Coordinator
P.O. Box 7850
San Francisco, CA 94120
(415) 920-2393-Phone
(415) 749-7478-Fax
e-mail:  cgauthie@ccsf.cc.ca.us