July-August 2016 Administrative Staff report – Program Development & Training Officer

September 1, 2016

As the Commission had no new grantees, I provided full day individualized training for existing and continuing grantees. Trainings consisted of common elements related to current high importance topics to CNCS, results of recent CNCS audit and national findings. These included Displacement, Data Quality and Member Workplans. The rest of the full day training was focused on topics selected by the grantees in order to meet individual program needs. These topics included recruitment strategies, disability awareness, evaluation data collection and others.
Regular Technical Assistance meetings were held as well, with programs sharing best recruitment practices and wrapping up the Evaluation curriculum from Bruner Foundation. Updates included prep for the CNCS audit in July, service Enterprise invitations to host sites, Data Quality standards from CNCS, upcoming eGrants changes and ultimate replacement and Service Year rollout. All TA meetings include program updates and current status reports.

Outreach planning sessions were held for Eastern Maine Development Corporation and for Maine Campus Compact, reviewing program and logic models and suggesting improvements. Multiple outreach and training sessions were held with the Maine Lakes Society, who is interested in submitting an application in support of their LakeSmart initiative.
I also reviewed the released federal NOFA and prepared an application in response to CNCS’s announcement of funding for Commissions to conduct special outreach for applications in certain Public Safety priority areas, in this case developing a Maine Americorps application intended to reduce opioid abuse.
General outreach activities included providing information to various interested parties about the upcoming competition. I also worked with program staff to develop and generic “Serve in Maine” flyer and sent 100 copies to the Baltimore NCCC campus to be distributed at their Life After AmeriCorps event.

Facilitated the three day visit by CNCS staff who conducted a program audit of the Commission’s AmeriCorps programming.

In addition to the outreach on Service Enterprise with subgrantees, I worked with Laurel Koepke of Midcoast Hunger Prevention to form a training cohort. This included outreach to 39 agencies as well as individual meetings with potential participant organizations followed by the hosting of an initial daylong introductory training in Brunswick with representatives of 7 agencies. An additional introductory meeting will be help in September to increase the size of the cohort which will begin training in October.

Continued Technical Assistance concerning Background Checks for National Service programs and Serve America Act participants
Processed background check results as needed

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