Jennifer Schmitt

6 Months Down

Well, this is the half-way mark for my VISTA service, and I guess that it would be a good time to reflect on some of the work that I've done at CCTV. I guess that this is especially important because I'm the first VISTA Volunteer ever at my organization, and a lot of my responsibilities have been "felt out" as I go. It's not uncommon for my supervisor and I to get together, look at my schedule, and then sudenly decide, "hey, that's like capacity building!" This isn't to say that my work plan hasn't been handy, or that my site wasn't prepared. Rather, that this was a first experience for both of myself and my site, and I don't have the benefit of asking, "what did you guys do before?"

In the beginning of my service, I was assigned a lot of production responsibilities. I enjoyed going out and filming community events, which certainly were capacity-building opportunities (networking and serving NPOs who might not ordinarily be involved in CCTV), but I wasn't working much with the membership or getting very involved in the community. I was also assigned the job of working on a CCTV promo video (orientation video), whcih was a good way for me to get familiar with the organization's history.

As time went on, my other responsibilities were just kind of tacked on, but then my role here started to take on more meaning. The first few months were a little frustrating -- even though I really lucked out with a fantastic site, and a cool supervisor -- because I wasn't always sure what I was supposed to do on a day-to-day basis, or how I would fit in at CCTV with the regular staff. This was probably compounded by the fact that I was overly confident about coming to CCTV.

I had researched my site -- maybe the right word is "romanced" -- because CCTV was my first choice organization, and they were not necessarily interested (nor disinterested) in the CTC VISTA program. So, I talked them into it. I'd considered being a VISTA in Seattle, where I'm from, but CCTV is the best public access center in the country, and the experiences I'd have there would be very different from anything I could have done at home. So, I met with CCTV's executive director, after months of emailing, and talked her into taking me on as a volunteer. I thought that all the preparation and preplanning would help me get over organizationational culture shock. But it didn't!

For example, the first two weeks I was at CCTV, it was late summer, and our offices, whose 12 foot high windows look into a lovely, rare patch of urban green, revealed the number of homeless folks living behind our building. During the first couple of staff meetings, the Cantibridgians (as Cambridge residents are called), would sometimes do things that caught our eye. Homeless people live necessarily public lives, and the staff here gave them at least the impression of privacy by ignoring them as they slept, ate and sometimes dressed outside the office windows. However, other things went on that would break down this already thin veneer between us and the park dwellers!

In addition to Cambridge itself, CCTV has a number of colorful people who

Posted by Jennifer Schmitt at April 7, 2005 04:10 PM