At some point during your VISTA year you may asked to take part in or prepare a section for your organization’s strategic planning. You may even be asked to coordinate it as past VISTAs have been. Or your organization may not even have a plan past the next 3 months. This section is an introduction to the concepts and methods of Strategic Planning you may have to use during your service year.

What is Social Entrepreneurship?

At some point during your VISTA year your agency might need to announce itself to new consumers, engage with the community, or attract/retain funders. All of these actions and more might require an event. And you might be called upon to head up such an event. You will need to use event planning techniques for such an occasion.

What is Event Planning?

Why Evaluate?
DASCorps VISTAs build dozens of new programs, systems, strategies, infrastructure, and ways of operating throughout the year, which are meant to last and endure long after their year of service is up. Just as important as planning and building these capacity-building initiatives is to ensure that they are properly evaluated.

At some point during your VISTA year, you might be tasked to create marketing materials for your program or even a marketing plan for the entire agency. In this section, you will learn the steps and ideas inherit in a marketing plan.

What is Marketing?
Marketing is the process of discovering the needs and wants of a prospective customer and satisfying them.

Finding, writing, submitting, and winning a grant is not an easy task. It is time consuming, technical (not in the fun DASCorps sense), and complex. This section will try to break down some basics so you’ll know where to start and then go through the general steps towards receiving a grant.

Volunteers are the backbone to most any nonprofit. VISTAs (who are also a type of volunteer) often have to set-up and develop volunteer recruitment and management programs and systems. Occasionally this is part of a VISTA workplan, but typically VISTAs create volunteer programs because they find that accomplishing their work without additional help would be nearly impossible.

Knowing Where You Want To Go
Here’s the unfortunate thing about Americorps, it’s not a career path. It’s a one year commitment that you can re-up for a few years, but that’s about it. So planning your path is extremely important throughout your VISTA year.

There some who say that this topic should be called ‘conflict resolution’. Others say it ought to be called ‘conflict management’ since conflicts almost never definitively resolve. Whatever you want to call it, you’ll no doubt be in the thick of it throughout your VISTA year.

So you've just received your workplan with all your projects, programs, and goals listed out for you in more-or-less detail. You're walking into the office and getting ready to tackle that first big project... but how do you do that? Where do you start? How will you know what to do and when and by who?!? It's time to Project Manage!

What is Project Management?