TWO KINDS OF VOLUNTEERS FOR A NEW ROUND OF READING FRESHLY
Following the success of our member benefit "Reading Freshly," where members took a year to read and discuss Focusing together, we are now seeking a new team to begin afresh in 2024-2025!
Participants appreciated these enriching and valuable monthly gatherings. The organizers tell us that it was enjoyable to lead this friendly group, and not very time consuming. They'd be happy to share with a new team what they feel made it successful.
Reading Facilitators: We need a team of people who will share responsibility for:
- convening the meetings
- reading (or inviting others to read) specific sections
- keeping the time
- keeping the whole project under review (including getting feedback from participants and others who may be interested in participating), and
- coordinating monthly with the TIFI office
Let us know if you'd like to be added to the team.
The 2023-2024 met on the first Tuesday of each month from 2pm – 3:30pm New York time (afternoon in the Americas, evenings in Europe/Africa, wee hours in Asia/Oceania). Please note that if you form part of a new team, you could choose to change the time and day of the week. The idea of a team is that you would not have to attend each session, though you’d be welcome to. You must be a member of TIFI to fulfill this role.
Zoom volunteers: We can always use volunteers to help with the Zoom functionality such as opening the room and managing breakout rooms. The Zoom volunteer is welcome to participate in the conversation, but is not responsible for leading the discussion.
Note that this reading group is in English. If you'd like to offer a similar group to our members who speak your language, please let us know.
To indicate interest in volunteering as part of the Reading Facilitators team or the Zoom volunteers team for Reading Freshly, please email us at [email protected]
ZOOM HOST FOR ONLINE CONFERENCES AND CLASSES
Volunteers are part of TIFI's Zoom Team supporting presenters and participants by managing Zoom functions and helping to hold the virtual space. This includes starting/pausing cloud recording, managing designated Zoom meeting settings, creating breakout rooms, screensharing, and other tasks. Volunteers begin with a low level of responsibility (letting participants in from the waiting room, adding exercise instructions in chat), which can grow depending on your comfort and the needs of the team. We appreciate having volunteers in all timezones.
Our Zoom Host volunteers provide a vital service. They often express to us that they enjoy being part of a team and getting to know many of the "movers and shakers" of the Focusing world.
If interested, please complete this brief survey https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/BT7FJV5
NEWS FEED INTERVIEWERS AND ARTICLE WRITERS
For our In Focus News Feed, we enjoy offering a variety of articles on topics relevant to Focusing, Thinking at the Edge and Gendlin’s philosophy. In particular, we love including interviews of people in our felt sensing community. We frequently have people whom we’d like to have interviewed, but we don’t always have volunteers available to conduct the interview and write a great article about it. (Making the interview available as a video is also possible, as long as it’s accompanied by an article). This is an enriching way to get to know others and to contribute to TIFI’s work. We could use interviewers/article writers who speak a variety of languages, as the interviewees speak a variety of languages. (We would then offer the article in the original language and also find someone to translate it for us.)
If you are interested in receiving assignments to conduct interviews and write up an article based on that interview, or if you have other contributions you’d like to make to the News Feed please write to us at [email protected].
Also, if you have an idea for an article, or something that you’ve already written which you think would interest others, we’d love that, too!
VOLUNTEER TO HELP COMPILE OUR ONLINE SURVEY RESULT
We create surveys for all of our courses, but we aren’t always able to spend the time compiling them in a way that is useful to our staff and volunteers and for our long-term records.Your job would be to compile and summarize results, and to report them to us monthly at our staff meetings (Mondays at noon New York time).
QUALIFICATIONS
- Comfort working with Survey Monkey online (we can show it to you if you haven't used it before)
- Since some of the survey results might be of a sensitive nature, ability to maintain confidentiality
- Ability to identify what is important and how best to communicate that
- Reliability
- Ability to attend staff meetings approximately monthly
AS OUR THANKS
You'll be signed up for all of TIFI's online courses! You are not required to attend them.
To indicate interest, please write to [email protected]
GO THROUGH OUR DISCUSSION LIST ARCHIVES
We are consolidating our discussion lists and eliminating ones that are outdated and/or get very little traffic.
We have archives of these lists, and we could use some people to take portions of the archived materials, look through them thoroughly and let us know what information in them is worth preserving.
You’ll be given a link to the various threads that were on that list at that time, and you’ll see all of the various emails which went back and forth. You’ll create a Word document where you cut and paste pieces of the discussion which we’d want preserved for our historical record. We’ll have a conversation with you in advance about what kinds of things we’d want to preserve, but we’ll also depend very much on your judgement.
To indicate interest, please write to [email protected]
BACK-UP MODERATOR FOR THE FOCUSING DISCUSSION LIST
We are seeking someone to be a back-up for our moderator for the Focusing Discussion e-mail list. The list is open to anyone in the world to ask questions or make comments. In order to keep it a friendly and inviting space, the moderator simply checks all messages coming in. If a message is inappropriate, the moderator writes to the individual to explain why, and invites them to re-word their message. This is a rare occurrence. This must be done each day, to ensure that messages don’t wait more than 24 hours to go through. We have one moderator, but we need one or two others to share the load. This is an ongoing volunteer role. We ask for a minimum one year commitment, beginning as soon as possible. Estimated time per month: about 4-6 hours.
WATCH FULL VIDEOS
We are very close to launching a site for renting Focusing-related videos. We could use a small team of volunteers who will watch full videos (usually one to two hours in length) to check for watchability, and to check whether the presenter makes reference to any materials which need to be included with the video. This should be a fun assignment if you have time to watch carefully and take detailed notes, so that we can release the videos on our platform with assurance that those renting them will have a great experience. We ask for a commitment to watch at least 3 videos. This is a short-term commitment, ending when we have the videos ready to go within the next few months. Estimated time commitment: 12-15 hours or more, depending on how many videos you watch.
Present a Focusing Highlight
For certified members of TIFI, this is a chance to support the Institute while also sharing your work with a wider audience. Having our support team working with you also makes it a great opportunity to try new ideas or ways of presenting. Read more here.
For any of these opportunities, please email contact: [email protected]