Sustainability 101

By Maggie Hollingsworth, VIP Fellow at Fresno State Career Services

As a college campus resource, Career Services finished strong; a happy ending to a productive school year. More students have made contact with us to improve their earning potential this year then they have in the past several years, and they know about us thanks to the help of our volunteers, the Career Ambassador Team. The 21st century economic depression, which was due (mainly) to increased energy costs and irresponsible mortgage lending practices, affected the entire nation, and with unemployment rampant, college students felt the brunt of it. Career Ambassadors helped students learn resilience through our mission, “to improve [students’] self-knowledge, career-literacy, job-search preparation, and expanded opportunities to connect to employers”.

Talking to students about how and why they should utilize our services was easy; developing the program was the challenge. And now, the challenge is to sustain the program that I’ve built with the help of Career Services staff, and the feedback of the Career Ambassadors. The process of program sustainability is this:

• Making sure the position description is right;
• Coming up with a recruitment strategy, screening process, and orientation timeline that can be used annually;
• Communicating frequently with the staff member who will soon be managing the program, and adapting it as necessary;
• Finalizing all of the volunteer materials, and organizing it in a hard and digital copy;
• Reviewing volunteer records; confirm they are complete;

The last thing I would recommend to guarantee that the organization's Volunteer Coordinator, and the (returning or new) volunteers can get along without you, is to integrate them as soon as possible, and research an online interface for them to communicate all aspects of the program (calendar, discussion board, to retrieve program forms, etc.) in a simple and organized way. For Fresno State, it’s Orgsync, and it’s amazing.