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By Dinah Monahan
 A young wife prepared to cook her first roast. Her husband, watching her, inquired why she had cut off the end before she put the roast into the pan. "I'm not sure," said the wife. "My mom always did it that way."
She called her mother and asked her. Her mom replied, "I cut off the end of the roast because I never had a pan big enough."
Sometimes we do a thing a particular way just because that is the way we have always seen it done. We don't understand why the old method was used, but we perpetuate it without question.
Consider the way we train volunteers in our pregnancy care centers. The standard model is to have a few days of intense training scheduled every few months. While this may work well for city centers, it can be impractical for rural ones.
First, a small volunteer base requires that vacant positions be filled immediately. Second, in a small center, training becomes one more thing the overworked director has to do. What's more, whether in a rural or urban setting, asking volunteers to wait a few months for a training session may be too long. It is likely that they will lose interest or commit their time elsewhere. And finally, intense training force-feeds volunteers with an overwhelming amount of information all at once.
We started out training the way everyone did, but we developed a method that is much better suited for us in our rural center. We have developed a self-paced training program. A volunteer starts training the day she comes in. She goes through the material at her own pace, and she continually "shadows" an experienced volunteer. By observing the experienced volunteer, she quickly sees what she is learning put into action. Because the trainee does much of the training during her regular shift, the training doesn't require time outside of office hours for her or the trainer.
We have also developed several levels of training. There are many women who would love to teach parenting but are intimidated by crisis pregnancy counseling. With our program, a volunteer can complete Level I training and quickly start seeing parenting clients. She may continue with Level II training to learn how to give pregnancy tests and to do crisis pregnancy counseling. Level III teaches life issues counseling, which enables the volunteer to take a client through Shame-Free Parenting.
Our self-paced and multi-level training methods have saved us countless hours of staff time and enabled us to bring volunteers swiftly up to speed. Perhaps these methods will help you in your rural center.
Note: For a tape of the seminar, A Whole New Way of Training, delivered by Dinah at Heartbeat International, contact Loving and Caring at 717-293-3230.
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dinah Monahan is the Heartbeat International Consultant for Rural and Small Centers and the founder and Executive Director of Women's Choice Pregnancy Clinic and Hope House Maternity Home. |
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