Introduction
If you have knowledge, skills, and/or experience that you want to share with other people, you are welcome to facilitate an activity. As long as there are no safety/regulatory issues, you are welcome to choose any activity. For example, you can naturally think of types of classes offered at a typical adult school, e.g., lecture, workshop, group, or on-line. However, you can be more creative.
More Information and Procedure
- Please become familiar with the school. Please read the home page (for the basic information), the about page (regarding the school principles), and the activities page (about the list of activities).
- Since all activities are free, you will not get paid for facilitating an activity at this school. If you need to get paid, this is definitely not a place. In certain cases, though, you will need to ask the participants to pay for materials and some other expenses. In that case, you must clearly state the fact and let the participant completely understand it before starting the activity.
- In some cases, you need to use materials/products which you sell. This is all right as long as facilitating a free activity is your primary motivation and the sale of the product is secondary. If your primary motivation is sale of your product, this school is not the place.
- It is also possible for you to facilitate a free activity in order to promote your commercial practice, as long as the free activity is consistent with the spirit and the practice of the school. In this case, you need to clearly indicate where the free activity ends.
- You will need to arrange time and location for the activity. Currently, our primary locations are the Larence Community Center (LCC, run by HomeFront, map) and meeting rooms at the Mercer County Library System (MCLS). LCC have great resources and their rooms are usually more available than local libraries'. Their agreement form ("LCC USE PERMIT v.2.doc") is available in the subfolder called "tools2" (please note that their room charges are waived for MFS as our activities are free). As for MCLS, here are the links to their policy and the registration form. Depending on your location, you could certainly try other library systems. Other possibilities include
the following:
- Public areas of a library or a cafe for a small group
- Public parks for an outdoor activity
- Your home
- Food court at a shopping mall
- If you use a meeting room at the Mercer County Library System (MCLS) and sell materials to the participants, the sale cannot occur in the room (this is their policy). In such a case, you will need to make an arrangement so that the participants make payment outside the library.
- Regarding the time of activity, we suggest that you schedule an activity at least one month ahead of the time. This way, we can promote the activity through some print media as well as on-line ones. If you are not decided, you can use the time designation: TBA (To Be Announced).
- As for registration, there are a few possibilities. In general, it would be practical for you to use our activity registration form. All the registration submissions are currently sent to the school. However, we can either forward each submission to you or send you the compiled information. Using our registration form, you do not need to disclose your contact information.
- If you would like your participants contact you directly, you can use either your e-mail or a special forwarding e-mail address (e.g., your_name@mfs.insi2.org).
- Unless you have a business phone, it is not recommended that you use your own phone number (due to the possibility of abuse). We try to pick up phone contacts through our school phone number.
- The activity list indicates the status of your activity as below.
- Requested (by a potential participant but no facilitators have been identified)
- Preliminary/Upcoming
- New
- Ongoing
- TBA
- Completed (no immediate plan for the future)
- The school will try hard to promote your activity. We will use both on-line (e.g., craigslist, NJ.com, MercerSpace, US1/PrincetonInfo, centeraljersey.com, Princeton Regional Convention and Visitors Bureau, eventful.com) and print (at local libraries including MCLS) publicity tools.
- Free activity must not be associated with lack of responsibility. Both facilitators and participants are expected to communicate and act responsibly. MFS Standard Mutual Respect Guidelines: Activities may be cancelled in the event beyond the control of the facilitator (e.g., health, weather, accident). Except for emergency, the facilitator is expected to contact all the participants by e-mail or phone in a timely manner. At the same time, if a participant can no longer participate, s/he is expected to contact the facilitator in a timely manner.
- If all of these things are all right with you, please visit the activity proposal form and fill in. Your submission will be reviewed promptly. We will get back to you within a few days.