WriterCoach Connection

Finding volunteers in Richmond

The annual Masquers Playhouse benefit garage sale in Pt. Richmond, a community-wide confluence on Memorial Day, was a good opportunity for us to recruit coaches for our program this fall at Richmond High.

(L. to r.) WCC Longfellow site coordinator Annie Stine, CAFL board member and Richmond volunteer coordinator Shelli Fried, and coach and CAFL board member Kent Wright are on the scene to tell the WCC story.

Shelli Fried is indefatiguable, spreading the word about coaching to come at Richmond High.

The banner tells the story, and Annie Stine adds a personal exclamation point.

Sold!

Yes - I WILL be a writer coach!

Many thanks to the WCC volunteers who joined Shelli and your correspondent at the WCC Memorial Day booth in Pt. Richmond : Lisa Awrey, Mary Lee Cole, Marty Makower, Annie Stine, and Kent Wright. 

Bob Menzimer

April showers bring...a new WCC newsletter

WriterCoach Connection is full of good news these days—our expansion to Richmond, our upcoming events, and our ever-growing opportunities to coach. We want to share all that news with you!

The first enewsletter has just been sent to all our WCC fans. We plan to send it four to six times a year: just enough to keep you on top of the most interesting WCC news without cluttering your inbox. We hope you'll continue to stay subscribed even if you're no longer a coach—so that you can stay tapped into your community and the program that you've helped to grow!  

If you'd like to be on our mailing list but didn't get the newsletter, view the newsletter, and please sign up so that you receive the next one. 

Christine McGuinness 

Salesforce bolsters WriterCoach Connection data management

We're delighted to have been granted free access to the database program designed by Salesforce, widely used in both the nonprofit and for-profit communities for customer relationship management (CRM). 

The formibable Saleforce program enables sophisticated sales tracking, forecasting abilities, point-and-click customization, real-time analytics, instant collaboration, and other features. Donation of the software to Community Alliance for Learning will enable us at last to create a robust and flexible database for managing our rapidly expanding WriterCoach Connection volunteer and donor data.

Thank you, Salesforce!

Bob Menzimer

At Mills College: more WriterCoach Connection volunteer recruiting

Oakland Volunteer Coordinator Karen Larson and her redoubtable band of volunteer recruiters were at it for the second time in three days on Monday, March 12, setting up shop at the Mills College Internship Fair. She and WCC volunteers Nick Keefe, Anne Steinberg, and Kent Wright attracted 15 signups from undergraduate and graduate students interested in WCC for this fall. Valuable outreach!

Here are Anne and Nick, ready for business:

 

Bob Menzimer

Lots of WriterCoach Connection action at the Oakland Volunteer Fair

On Saturday, March 10, WCC Oakland Volunteer Coordinator Karen Larson and a cadre of WCC compatriots set up shop behind the WriterCoach Connection table at the annual Oakland Volunteer Fair, at City Hall. The air filled with conversation about writing support as volunteers checked out how to sign up for coach training and how to help the program in a variety of other ways.

Many thanks to Karen and to her loyal associates Mary Ann Benson, Ellen Shaffer, and Ken Yee for helping to spread the word!

Here's Karen in action, a blur of enthusiasm, as usual:

Photo by Mary Ann Benson

Bob Menzimer

New volunteers pour into WriterCoach Connection

Since August, more than 200 community volunteers have completed our coach training and have joined more than 200 returning coaches as our work in East Bay classrooms picks up steam for the 2011-12 school year.

This year, those 450+ coaches will work with more than 1,600 students at a dozen schools in the Oakland, Berkeley, Albany, and West Country school districts. We've more than doubled our number of school sites in the past two years, with expansion of WCC planned this spring at Oakland School for the Arts and at Portola Middle School in El Cerrito.

We'll be training more volunteers in January and February, so check our website for details!

 

Bob Menzimer

 

Lining up for writer-coach training

We train community volunteers as writer coaches only twice a year, and now is one of those times!

At the Oakland Volunteer Fair on Sept. 10, eight people expressed interest in becoming coaches. The next day at the Solano Stroll, a whopping 44 people affixed a John Hancock to our volunteer signup sheet. Here are some interested parties, fully engaged in conversation about writer coaching at our Stroll booth with Community Alliance for Learning (CAFL) board member Amy Resner (foreground) and CAFL Associate Director Lynn Mueller (back). 

Training sessions fill the calendar in September and October, on various days, afternoon or evening. To volunteer as a coach, start by registering for training on our website. Before you know it, you'll be sitting side-by-side in a classroom at the school site you choose, helping guide students to clear writing and effective critical thinking.

Many thanks to the coaching veterans who helped Oakland Volunteer Coordinator Karen Larson engage coach prospects at the Oakland Volunteer Fair on Sept. 10. Those coaches are Ruby Bernstein, Sidney Glass, Pete Holland, and Iris Winogrond. And thanks also to these generous souls who helped Volunteer Manager Lynn Mueller at our Solano Stroll booth the next day: Caitlin Carnes, Denis Clifford, Maureen Dixon, Todd Groves, Sahib-Amar Khalsa, Katie Koelle, Karen Larson, Amy Resner, Annie Stine, and Jayne Walker.

We're about to launch our eleventh year of writing support in East Bay schools, and we're really excited!

 

Bob Menzimer

 

Volunteer training, and coaching, in high gear

With fall training sessions already completed or under way in Berkeley, El Cerrito, and Oakland, WCC volunteer coordinator Lynn Mueller and coach trainers Marilyn Alberts, Kathleen Hallam, Karen Larson, Laura Marlin, and Jayne Walker are a blur of motion. The flood of volunteers is so strong that Lynn has had to schedule at least one extra training session to meet the demand.

And the new coaches are arriving none too soon--in El Cerrito, Marilyn led a group of volunteers across the training finish line on Thursday evening of last week and the next morning, the coaches were sitting down with students for the first-ever WCC writing conferences at ECHS. El Cerrito community organizer Todd Groves, who powered the push to bring WCC to ECHS, was beaming, and he deserved every high five he got.

This year's expansion to three new school sites marks the most extensive program growth in the history of WCC. Meantime, we're planning how to reach the eight Oakland schools, so far, that are standing in line, waiting for writer coaches for next year.       

An exciting time for all of us!

Bob Menzimer                                                                                    

Heeding the volunteer call

Responding in a big way to President-Elect Obama's call to community service, residents of Albany and surrounding communities poured through the doors of the Albany Community Center on Monday, Jan. 19, the eve of the presidential inauguration, for Albany's Commit to Serve Expo. Albany Middle School WCC Site Co-coordinator Karen Larson (right, below) arranged for a WriterCoach Connection table, where she, her site coordination partner Nancy Whitney (left, below), and CAFL Executive Director Bob Menzimer greeted a steady stream of people interested in focusing their community service efforts on writer coaching. A dozen people put pen or pencil to the WCC sign-up sheet!