Resource Review: What Did I Sign Up For?

As summer winds down it's a perfect opportunity to do some practical training for your youth mentors and/or volunteers. A great resource that I found to do this is a program called "What Did I Sign Up For?" By Chris Folmsbee. To help you better understand the program I've highlighted the pros and cons that this program has to offer.

Pros

It’s Systematic - What I mean by that is that it deals with training in a very logical step-by-step way. It sets the foundation for learning and gives some practical and programming ideas that can be easily employed by any size youth or young adult program.

It's Interactive - This program is DVD based with the author actually leading the sessions. Each session is not too long and can easily be incorporated into a regular volunteer meeting throughout the year.

It's Makes the Training Relevant to your Situation - a lot of training programs that I have reviewed and used don't take into consideration that every church is different. This one does. And if I might add, does it quite well. It allows you to take the concepts that are thought and helps you process what you're learning and what it will look like in your particular context.

Cons

It's Too Long - if I have one complaint about this program is that it is way too long. Unless you were doing this as a retreat, it will take you nearly half the year to go through this program. You can take bits and pieces of the program but to get the full impact of what it has to teach you really need to do the whole program. However, the 20 sessions that it requires I believe is too long for most volunteers.

Conclusion

I would definitely recommend this program even though it’s long in length. The principles it teaches and the way it helps you relate it back to your specific situation is great. There is another bonus as well, it's not that expensive. So if you're looking for instances way to train your nervous volunteers and/or mentors I would highly recommend this program. If your church is within the Susquehanna Conference of the United Methodist Church, you can borrow the program from our resource center Discovery Place (discovery-place.org)