Hello!!

Welcome to the 2001-2002 Community HealthCorps Team at Sea Mar Community Health Centers. I'm excited to have you on board. It's been an intense recruitment process and I can hardly believe what a fabulously diverse and dynamic group we've gathered together. I hope you're as excited as I am about the learning and challenges that await you.

This letter is meant to give you the best introduction possible to Sea Mar, AmeriCorps, and Seattle in general. In the coming year you will experience many highs and lows: incredible work, personal challenges, the flare of Seattle, and the majestic beauty of the Pacific Northwest. It should be lots of work and lots of fun. It's my job to support you through the experience that awaits you, to facilitate your work with ideas, guidance, resources, and training, and basically ease your transition into the professional world of community health. It's also my job to help you navigate the Sea Mar system, which can be both wonderful and frustrating.

Here are some tips to prepare you:

• Patience and flexibility are the key! We hope to have a work space for everyone, but you never know. Be prepared for some initial transience.
• Sea Mar's technology infrastructure leaves something to be desired. A community health center can often be as under-resourced as the community it serves. Few people have internet or email access, so you won't have the net at your fingertips. One member does bring his laptop with him to work to solve that problem, and it worked out well. His solution is not the only one, but demonstrates one way to work with the system.
• Creative problem solving!! Whether you confront strained internet access, lack of funds, or difficulty reaching out to a the community, your ability to independently and creatively solve problems is critical.
• Dress Code: While Seattle on the whole is pretty casual (you can wear jeans and a T-shirt to the best restaurants in town), Sea Mar is a little more conservative. No tennis shoes or blue jeans at work, and no funky colored hair or wild visible piercings.
• Sea Mar is an 8am - 5pm kind of place. Your supervisors will appreciate promptness.
• Finally, in your service assignment and your life in Seattle, sense of humor is fundamental. You're here to learn, so have compassion for your own mistakes.

These are just a few hints to orient you and guide you when challenges arise. We can add to the list through the year.

Your official start date is Monday, September 10, 2001. Orientation will begin at 9am on this day at Sea Mar in Seattle. You'll receive an orientation schedule in the mail in August, but plan on a week of orientation activities, 9-5 each day.

I look forward to meeting you in September. If you have questions between now and then, please direct them to Wellesley Chapman, or to me after August 6.

Regards,

Liz Gruenfeld

AmeriCorps Coordinator

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