1. Find members to be a part of the Executive Team
   • These people should be passionate about volunteering.
   • Your role as being part of the executive team is to nurture and teach the volunteers to grow in leadership so that they may one day join the executive team, or start another youth conferences or join the adult conference.
2. Plan
   • Where will meetings be held ? In which ways (soup kitchen, food banks, SSVP stores, senior homes, etc.) can the youth volunteer ? How will you deliver information ? What type of volunteers are you trying to focus on (high school, college, university)? What day of the week and time will you have events ? (keep in mind youth are usually in school during the day so an afternoon or evening volunteer location will be preferable.)
3. Get in touch with “sites” : see Guidelines on Sites
   • Call sites (locations the group want to volunteer in) and let them know that you have a volunteer group that would like to help out weekly/monthly. Get information from these sites - maximum number of volunteers, times your group can volunteer, etc. Also give them all the information you can about your volunteer group - make them aware that SSVP is a lay-Catholic organization who needs to have opening and closing prayer so if the site requires to have a separate room for you to do this request it from them.
4. Devise a system to exchange ideas and promote your conference
   • People will have to know what the conference is doing in order to join and get reminders on events, so whether it be through email or Facebook or both there needs to be a way to communicate with ALL members.
5. Start visiting schools to promote your group : see Guideline on School / Parish Recruitment
6. Plan a volunteer day : see Training Manual
   • where all volunteers come together to get to know one another, build teamwork and where the executive can explain what is expected of them and go over volunteer guidelines.
7. Plan for the future of the Conference
   • Figure out when and where to hold monthly meetings for the executive team - it could be online, or at your church or in your schools.
   • Figure out how to make your conference self-sustaining
   • at the beginning you can ask your adult conference for support but we want each youth conference to eventually be able to depend on themselves. So either through fundraising, donations or through cookie sales we would like you to develop a way to get money into your conference for future works. Be creative and FUN!

Society of Saint Vincent de Paul was originally formed by young people and now it is an international organization!
If they can do it - we can do it !

YOU NOW HAVE ALL THE INFORMATION YOU NEED TO GET STARTED !

© 2018