Foster Grandparent Program

I'm in Atlanta for the National Conference on Volunteering and Service. I'm sitting here in the Georgia World Congress right next to Centennial Olympic Park and several things have jumped out at me already during this first day. 1) Atlanta is a cooler city than I realized, 2) the Corporation for National & Community Service knows how to put on a heckuva conference and 3) there's nothing "old" about the Senior Corps. I was skeptical about coming here since I'm filling in for Ann Gilchrist, our Foster Grandparent Program Director, but I have been seriously impressed. The hall is filled with the rhythms of a local volunteer bongo drum corp and we're getting ready to hear from Neil Bush, Congressman John Lewis, the director of the Peace Corps and more. I'll let you know how it goes later. Our Foster Grandparents Program is one of three Senior Corp programs sponsored by the Corporation for National and Community Service. The others are RSVP and the Senior Companion Program. Did you know there are nearly 30,000 FGP volunteers?! They served over 25 million hours of volunteer time and more than a quarter million children across the country. (Take note of the CNCS and Senior Corps websites for some of their technical aspects. They're full of widgets, RSS, and feed to social networking sites. I'm going to sneak in to a session about the use of these tools tomorrow morning. Expect to see me experimenting with this blog and the ShowMeAction website with these tools.)