St Mark Community Education Program

St. Mark Community Education Program – Onboarding & Engagement Proposal

Project Overview

Over the length of a 6-week Human Resources Management course (HRM 6005), Creating a High Performing Organization, the student team members examined how they could be applied their learning to St. Mark Community Education ESL and Citizenship programs. Focusing on sustainable human resource management practices, the team assessed best practices related to onboarding and engagement within the ESL and non-profit volunteer management space. Additionally, they conducted interviews and document reviews with St. Mark Community Education to generate an organizational situation analysis. Through a final presentation, the team developed actionable recommendations to be implemented in the near-term.

Project Objectives

To formulate a volunteer management plan applying sustainable Human Resources Management for St. Mark Community Education.
To assess the overall volunteer experience.
To improve the onboarding and engagement components of the volunteer experience within St. Mark Community Education.

Student Reflections

Dr. Patty Goodman, the course instructor, helped us to focus our recommendations on items the St. Mark Community Education leadership would be able to implement in the near term. While doing our best practices and benchmarking analysis, we realized there were some more ambitious projects we could have presented to the leadership. However, there was limited time, money, and people resources to implement these initiatives. We tried to make sure that our recommendations were sustainable for the organization and that they would provide leadership with an immediate return on investment once implemented.

Timeline

March 2020 – May 2021

Team

Dorian Yablin

Tiffany Chin

Sabrina Rossi

Yiye Shen

St. Mark Education Program Project

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Project Sponsor

St. Mark Community Education Program

The St. Mark Community Education Program (SMCEP) provides English classes and support in attaining citizenship to adult immigrants and their families in Dorchester, MA and surrounding towns.

As a non-profit organization, it is overseen by a full-time Executive Director and a Board of Directors and is funded solely by grants and donations. From September to mid-June, SMCEP provides 5 English classes at 3 levels – evenings and weekends to accomodate the schedules of working adults – taught by experienced, professional instructors. We are the only ESOL program in our area to offer Sunday morning classes at 2 levels for students who work six days a week.