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Team Care Force is a side of ��ɫ��Ƶ that most first-year corps members have little, if any, exposure to over the course of their year of service. If you’re a first-year reading this post, you probably know us as a group of second- and third-year corps members who do a bunch of traveling and aren’t tied to a specific ��ɫ��Ƶ site….and that might be about all you know. My hope in this post is to give readers (whether first-year corps members or anyone else!) greater insight into what Care Force is all about through describing a typical event week. This is what the bulk of time on Team Care Force is focused on: the planning, organization, and execution of physical service events sponsored by ��ɫ��Ƶ’s corporate partners (and completed by volunteers who work for these partners). Over the course of this explanation, I’ll use one of the trips that the 2023-2024 team (Team Care Force 17) went on—working with Truist in Charlotte, NC in October of 2023 at a Salvation Army Boys & Girls Club—as a specific example of what a typical trip might be like.

Every physical service event that we put on requires prep work. Some of this is physical preparation of the event site, which is what the majority of our time on trips is focused on. There is also the preparation of event documents, which takes place in the office (at ��ɫ��Ƶ HQ in Boston) in the weeks prior to an event. These documents include the Run of Show (the schedule for event day), Project Coordinator Guides (which have instructions and guidelines for each of the event’s Project Coordinators), and Event Overviews (one-page descriptions of what the event will be, who we are partnering with for the event, and other pertinent information). There’s also the possibility that a given event will have additional documents or research to be prepared. For our project in Charlotte, our prep work in the office included creating a slide deck of mural options for the Boys & Girls Club and researching where we could rent a yard waste dumpster for event day.

Typically, we spend about three to five nights on the road for an event. Care Force puts us up in a hotel, where we share a room with one other person, either another Team Care Force member or a Care Force Reserve. Care Force Reserves are added to events when we need more hands on deck, and are usually members of other Civic Engagement (CE) teams, ��ɫ��Ƶ Staff, or Team Care Force alumni. It’s not uncommon for trips to involve working on the weekend, especially when travel days are taken into account. Additionally, we’re often given the opportunity to extend our time in a location if we’d like (though we’re responsible for our own lodging and food if it works within our schedule to go early or stay late). Care Force buys our flights, so all we need to worry about is showing up and getting through airport security on time! When we went to Charlotte, we flew out of Boston on a Saturday evening, did prep work on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, and then hosted the volunteer event on Wednesday before flying back on Thursday. We were joined by two Care Force reserves, the members of the Seattle CE team. We even had a bonus person on Sunday, when Team Care Force alum Rachel Rice came out to help us out for the day.

Before event day, we have several days to do physical, on-site preparation. What exactly is involved in this prep is highly dependent on the kind of projects volunteers will be doing on event day. However, some work that comes up frequently includes buying supplies at Home Depot and other stores, taping and tarping areas that will be painted, measuring and cutting any wood that will be used for construction (i.e. picnic tables, bookcases, etc.), sketching mural outlines from a projector, and organizing tools and supplies into bins for the different project groups. In Charlotte, we spent prep days buying lumber and other supplies from Home Depot, cutting wood and pre-building picnic table legs, sketching murals onto bench backs and wood panels, and pressure washing the playground that we would be working in. Additionally, we could not get one of our Care Force Containers of tools for this event, so we ended up renting tools from the Charlotte Tool Bank for the event day. Outside of physical work, we also do the mental work of reviewing the event documents we had prepared and practicing how we will sequence and lead volunteers on event day.

On the day of the event, we can usually expect to be waking up early (around 6:00am – 6:30am) to get to the project site at least two hours in advance of volunteers, to finish up any day-of setup or prep that still needs to be done. Once volunteers arrive, we welcome them at an opening ceremony, where they are given a briefing about the service partner and a general overview of the schedule of the service event. The volunteers are then split up into individual project teams (typically about 18 volunteers) and in a strong circle they are instructed by their Project Coordinator about their group’s specific work. Once the allotted time of service is complete, volunteers typically do a Roses and Thorns debrief with their Project Coordinator.  Then they reconvene for a closing ceremony, where they are thanked for the gift of time and service that they have given! In Charlotte, I was the Project Coordinator for project number three, where I led 20 volunteers in construction of a Gaga Ball pit with the backup task of cleaning up litter from an adjacent wooded area. The event in Charlotte consisted of two separate shifts, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Oftentimes all volunteers will be working at once, but on occasion the service day is divided into shifts. Once volunteers leave on event day, the remainder of the afternoon is spent wrapping up whatever projects still need finishing touches on the service site and general clean up. For this event, we had the added task of cleaning and returning the tools to the Tool Bank at the end of the day. After that, we bid the service site and staff farewell and get ready to fly out, either that evening or most often the next day, back home to Boston (unless we’re flying directly to the next project)!

This has been a very rough overview of what the Team Care Force experience is like surrounding one of our service events. One of my favorite parts of being a Care Force member is the amount of variety this position offers: we’re always going to new places, getting to learn new skills, and leading new projects; no trip is the same as any other! However, my hope is that after having read this post, you have a better idea of what exactly Team Care Force is and what the events we run are like.