Review this scenario to see how one supervisor coaches a VISTA in her assignment. There are three interactions for you to explore. At the end of each interaction, you will be prompted to make a decision about a coaching challenge.
The interactions takes place at the Butte County Bread Basket, a nonprofit food bank serving a rural, low-income county in Northern California. The VISTA is to design marketing plans for recruiting volunteers. Volunteers are needed to drive food donations to shut-ins and isolated families. The VISTA is also supposed to solicit donations of fresh food from local farms.
Arlene, a first-year VISTA, is a local recruit with organizational skills from her work as an administrative assistant and part-time school secretary. She is socially connected, knows almost everyone in town and is related to quite a few. She was also a volunteer at the Butte County Bread Basket before her year of service.
Katherine, the supervisor, is a fifty-something marketing director for the Butte County Bread Basket. She left a career in public relations and moved to Butte County five years ago when her husband accepted a job in the area. This is her first year as a VISTA supervisor.
Background: Arlene sees her VISTA service as a way help her friends and community. Katherine sees the value of Arlene's "social capital" and hopes to use it to build networks in the community that she has a harder time doing as an outsider. However, while Arlene dutifully completes all work assigned, she does not take the initiative in identifying and taking on tasks that will help move her project forward and she spends a lot of time in the food bank. As a result, Katherine has to be a little more hands-on in supervising Arlene than she thought she would need to be.
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