CNCS-related Travel Requirements

You need to bear in mind that CNCS has some de facto travel requirements. These aren't specifically stated in your job description and they aren't actually a legal requirement, per se. However, they are pretty much a REAL requirement and we can assure you that it is very important to plan for CNCS-related travel. It's a Big Deal with CNCS Staff as you will undoubtedly soon discover.

You will need to travel to Boise at least once a year. If you can't make the meeting(s) that are planned there, you better have a dang good excuse.

Likewise, CNCS is going to want you to attend the annual National Conference on Volunteering. It's always in late June and it's always in an expensive and distant metropolis. I went to the one in Atlanta. Luckily, I was able to beg out of the one in San Francisco. The 2010 Conference is in New York City, surely one of the cheapest cities on the planet. (HA!) It's going to cost you a fortune to go there, at least an arm and a leg for travel and another arm & a leg for the hotel. Your per diem probably won't even come close to helping you actually eat a real meal. Figure something close to $3000, $2500 if you are lucky.

There's already been a subtle push (early in the current fiscal year) to gear up for going to New York. So, you can expect the heat to increase as you get closer to this date.

The trips to Boise generally aren't worth your time. You basically get to sit and listen to other Senior Corps Directors talk. No one's particularly interested in anything going on in Eastern Idaho. If you bring up anything innovative, it's usually met with a collective silence and blank stares. In my first trip over there, almost no one even bothered to introduce themselves to me.
I felt like the odd orphan at the family reunion.

I was told I absolutely HAD to go to Atlanta in 2008. I came away with some valuable insights but only because I forced myself to learn as much as I could from the vendor displays. None of the sessions were worth the time to attend them and I didn't even get a nano-second's worth of interface with Idaho Senior Corps Directors. It was a very costly event, well over $2000.

Also, I had to go to Los Angeles in January in 2008 to receive VISTA Supervisor Training. This was another truly worthless trip and I caught a terrible case of crud from being in LA. It took weeks to fully recover from that trip.

This post is just a warning--you will get leaned on to travel. Sometimes, the travel dates will not sync with your schedule. If you want to keep in everyone's good graces, you are going to have to agree to travel if and when they tell you to. It's like the old saying, "When somebody asks you to jump, ask them how high?"

This post concludes our series of posts on the Nature of RSVP and CNCS and so forth. We will now move onto dissecting EICAP.